Search results for ""author francoise meltzer""
The University of Chicago Press Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945
Esteemed scholar Françoise Meltzer examines images of war ruins in Nazi Germany and the role that images play in how we construct memories of war. The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of ruins force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge? Françoise Meltzer explores these questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization and the representation of catastrophe. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters’ attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother’s photographs taken in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memory.
£25.16
The University of Chicago Press For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity
Why are contemporary secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century? In a book that faces crucial issues in both critical and feminist inquiry, Françoise Meltzer uses the story of Joan as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent. She argues that critics who place excessive emphasis on opposition and difference remain blind to their nostalgia for the pre-Cartesian idea that the body and mind are the same. Engaging a number of theorists, and alternating between Joan's historical and cultural context, Meltzer also explores the ways in which postmodern thinkers question subjectivity. She argues that the way masculine subjects imagine Joan betrays their fear of death and necessitates the role of women as cultural others: enigmatic, mysterious, dark, and impossible. As such, Joan serves as a useful model of the limits and risks of subjectivity. For Meltzer, she is both the first modern and the last medieval figure. From the ecclesial jury that burned her, to the theorists of today who deny their attraction to the supernatural, the philosophical assumptions that inform Joan's story, as Meltzer ultimately shows, have changed very little.
£32.41
The University of Chicago Press Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature
How does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Françoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portrait—the painted portrait, framed—appears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing. Meltzer's readings of textual portraits—in the Gospel writers and Huysmans, Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and Rousseau, Walter Scott and Mme de Lafayette—reveal an interplay of control and subversion: writing attempts to veil the visual and to erase the sensual in favor of "meaning," while portraiture, with its claims to bringing the natural object to "life," resists and eludes such control. Meltzer shows how this tension is indicative of a politics of repression and subversion intrinsic to the very act of representation. Throughout, she raises and illuminates fascinating issues: about the relation of flattery to caricature, the nature of the uncanny, the relation of representation to memory and history, the narcissistic character of representation, and the interdependency of representation and power. Writing, thinking, speaking, dreaming, acting—the extent to which these are all controlled by representation must, Meltzer concludes, become "consciously unconscious." In the textual portrait, she locates the moment when this essential process is both revealed and repressed.
£36.04
The University of Chicago Press Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945
The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of them force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge? Fran oise Meltzer explores those questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization, the representation of catastrophe, and the targeting of civilians in war. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters' attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother's photographs taken in Berlin and other cities in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Ultimately, she concludes that while the viewer cannot help reimaging the devastation through the lenses of history, aestheticization, or voyeurism, these images at least allow us to approach the reality of ruins and grasp the larger issue of targeting civilians in modern warfare for what it is. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memories of war.
£31.00
