Post-Mao China produced two parallel discourses on the human subject in the New Era (1976–1989). One was an autonomous, Enlightenment humanist self aimed at replacing the revolutionary paragon that ...had dominated under Mao. The other was a more problematic subject suffering from either a symbolic physical deformity or some kind of spiritual paralysis that undermines its apparent normalcy. How do we explain the stubborn presence, in the literature of the 1980s and 1990s, of this crippled agent who fails to realize the humanist autonomy envisioned by post-Mao theorists? What are the anxieties and tensions embedded in this incongruity and what do they reveal? This illuminating and original critical study of the crippled subject in post-Mao literature offers a detailed textual analysis of the work of five well-known contemporary writers: Han Shaogong, Can Xue, Yu Hua, Mo Yan, and Jia Pingwa. The author investigates not only the literary characters within the texts, but also their creators—real subjects in history, Chinese writers whose own agency was being tested and established in the search for a new subjectivity. She argues that, reenacting the Maoist legacy, the literary search failed to provide a viable model for a postrevolutionary China. In addition, the deficiency and inadequacy of the subject cannot always be contained in the Communist past—a history to be transcended in the design of modernity after Mao. The representation of the problematic subject thus punctured post-Mao optimism and foreshadowed the eventual abandonment of the move to rethink subjectivity in the 1990s. By diving beneath the euphoria of the 1980s and the confusion and frustration of the 1990s, these critical readings offer a unique perspective with which to gauge the complexity of China’s quest for modernity and a fuller understanding of the self’s multifaceted experience in the post-Mao era.
Available in paperback for the first time, this groundbreaking in-depth history of the involvement of African Americans in the early recording industry examines the first three decades of sound ...recording in the United States, charting the surprising roles black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age and the remarkably wide range of black music and culture they preserved._x000B__x000B_Applying more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key black artists who recorded commercially and provides illuminating biographies for some forty of these audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and boxing champion Jack Johnson, as well as a host of lesser-known voices. Many of these pioneers faced a difficult struggle to be heard in an era of rampant discrimination and "the color line," and their stories illuminate the forces--both black and white--that gradually allowed African Americans greater entree into the mainstream American entertainment industry. The book also discusses how many of these historic recordings are withheld from the public today because of stringent U.S. copyright laws._x000B__x000B_Lost Sounds includes Brooks's selected discography of CD reissues, and an appendix by Dick Spottswood describing early recordings by black artists in the Caribbean and South America.
Comics versus art Beaty, Bart
Comics versus art,
c2012, 20120914, 2012, 2012-09-14, 2012-07-17
eBook
Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world; including museums, auction houses, and the art press.
The unfolding of words Henderson, Judith Rice
The unfolding of words,
2012, 20130122, 2013-01-22, 2012-12-07
eBook
The Unfolding of Wordsbrings together international scholarship to explore crucial changes in writers' interactions with religious and classical texts.
In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments ...of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe,The Language of the Gods in the World of Menasks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.
What have Lumière in common with Wachowski? More than one hundred years separate these two pairs of brothers who astonished, quite similarly, the film spectator of their respective time with special ...effects of movement: a train rushing into the audience and a bullet flying in slow motion. Do they belong to the same family of "cinema of attractions"? Twenty years ago Tom Gunning introduced the phrase "cinema of attractions" to define the essence of the earliest films made between 1895 and 1906. His term scored an immediate success, even outside the field of early cinema. The present anthology questions the attractiveness and usefulness of the term for both pre-classical and post-classical cinema. With contributions by the most prominent scholars of this discipline (such as Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser, Charles Musser, Scott Bukatman and Vivian Sobchack) this volume offers a kaleidoscopic overview of an important historiographical debate.
Middleton and Rowley Nicol, David
Middleton and Rowley,
c2012, 20130115, 2012, 2013-01-15, 2012-10-30
eBook
This first full-length study of Middleton and Rowley uses their plays to propose a new model for the study of collaborative authorship in early modern English drama.
The poetry of archaic Greece gives voice to the history and politics of the culture of that age. This 2005 book explores the types of history that have been, and can be, written from archaic Greek ...poetry, and the role this poetry had in articulating the social and political realities and ideologies of that period. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the stance of exhortation adopted in early Greek elegy, and to the political poetry of Solon. Part I of this study argues that the singing of elegiac paraenesis in the elite symposium reflects the attempt of symposiasts to assert a heroic identity for themselves within this wider polis community. Part II demonstrates how the elegy of Solon both confirms the existence of this elite practice, and subverts it; Part III looks beyond Solon's appropriations of poetic traditions to argue for another influence on Solon's political poetry, that of tyranny.
PDF
