Search results for ""author andrew dix""

Beginning film studies offers the ideal introduction to this vibrant subject. Written accessibly and with verve, it ranges across the key topics and manifold approaches to film studies. Andrew Dix has thoroughly updated the first edition, and this new volume includes new case studies, overviews of recent developments in the discipline, and up-to-the-minute suggestions for further reading.The book begins by considering some of film's formal features - mise-en-scène, editing and sound - before moving outwards to narrative, genre, authorship, stardom and ideology. Later chapters on film industries and on film consumption - where and how we watch movies - assess the discipline's recent geographical 'turn'.The book references many film cultures, including Hollywood, Bollywood and contemporary Hong Kong. Case studies cover such topics as sound in The Great Gatsby and narrative in Inception. The superhero movie is studied; so too is Jennifer Lawrence. Beginning film studies is also interactive, with readers enabled throughout to reflect critically upon the field.

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God is dead,' Nietzsche famously declared in The Gay Science; but this book will investigate God's surprising persistence and resurrection in the works of even the most seemingly atheistic of writers, who continue to deploy Judaic and Christian narratives and tropes even as they radically rewrite them in the face of new cultural, political and scientific imperatives. Contributors explore the range, power and implication of Christian and Jewish heresies in canonical Anglo-American writers -- including Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, T S Eliot, John Steinbeck and Jim Crace -- as well as in some less familiar texts: the Mormon Scriptures of Joseph Smith and various Victorian rewritings of the Book of Esther. A polemical essay by Michelene Wandor reflects on conceptions of Jewishness, which she finds in need of heretical renewal. Valentine Cunningham's provocative introduction argues that the acts of literary writing and reading are necessarily heretical. A coda to the book, Between Heresy and Superstition', takes as its motto Thomas Huxley's observation in 1881 that It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.' Contributions offer readers a rare opportunity of witnessing an extended academic exchange -- exploring the process by which former heresies may indeed risk ossification as new kinds of doctrinal conformity. Bryan Cheyette's critique of the Christian Albums' of Bob Dylan is answered by Kevin Mills's essay which uncovers heretical possibility even in this most seemingly orthodox part of Dylan's work. The revitalisation of heresy in literary interpretations, as well as in our religious thinking, forms the guiding objective of this exciting critical book.

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This is a critical introduction to the contemporary American novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism. Adventurous, engaging and politically urgent, contemporary American novels have come to enjoy a particular prestige and, through university courses, film adaptations and cultural controversies, a global circulation. This book provides a critical introduction to novels produced in the United States between 1980 and the present. Compact yet wide-ranging, and written in vivid, accessible prose, it registers the diversity of contemporary American writing and carefully situates this work in historical contexts that include Reaganomics, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 'War on Terror'. Detailed attention is given throughout to how America's current novelists have responded to shifting gender politics, changes in the nation's racial configuration, the increasing dominance of a commodity culture and to adjustments in the United States's place in the world following the end of the Cold War and the increased pace of globalisation. Complete with timelines of historical and literary events, detailed lists of secondary sources both in print and on the web, and suggestions for students' own research projects, this is the ideal resource for anyone beginning study of this vibrant literature. "Texts and Contexts" is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.

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