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American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film: Used

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Item specifics

Condition
Good: A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including ...
Book Title
American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature
Publication Date
2018-06-01
Pages
232
ISBN
9780199797318

About this product

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Oxford University Press, Incorporated
ISBN-10
0199797315
ISBN-13
9780199797318
eBay Product ID (ePID)
240901692

Product Key Features

Number of Pages
232 Pages
Publication Name
American Obscurantism : History and the Visual in U. S. Literature and Film
Language
English
Subject
Film / General, Subjects & Themes / Historical events, American / General
Publication Year
2018
Type
Textbook
Author
Peter Lurie
Subject Area
Literary Criticism, Performing Arts
Format
Hardcover

Dimensions

Item Height
0.5 in
Item Weight
19.2 Oz
Item Length
6.3 in
Item Width
9.3 in

Additional Product Features

Intended Audience
Scholarly & Professional
LCCN
2017-043137
Dewey Edition
23
Reviews
"In four chapters, bookended by a critical introduction and conclusion, Lurie usefully complicates other critical approaches such as New Historicism and trauma studies. In the conclusion he shifts to considering how direct seeing of the events of 9/11 did not, predictably, lead observers to understand those events. Instead, he posits in the conclusion that recent works by "visual artists and citizen-documentarians" offer "a more encompassing and efficacious mode" than previously found. This book will be required reading for scholars working at the intersections of American literature/film, historical trauma, and visual representation." -- CHOICE "American Obscurantism not only exemplifies a range of possible futures for American Studies, it also has much to say about the future of America as such. This is ambitious, theoretically rich, sophisticated cultural criticism of a very high order. It deserves a wide and attentive audience." -- Modern Fiction Studies, "In four chapters, bookended by a critical introduction and conclusion, Lurie usefully complicates other critical approaches such as New Historicism and trauma studies. In the conclusion he shifts to considering how direct seeing of the events of 9/11 did not, predictably, lead observers to understand those events. Instead, he posits in the conclusion that recent works by "visual artists and citizen-documentarians" offer "a more encompassing and efficaciousmode" than previously found. This book will be required reading for scholars working at the intersections of American literature/film, historical trauma, and visual representation." -- CHOICE"American Obscurantism not only exemplifies a range of possible futures for American Studies, it also has much to say about the future of America as such. This is ambitious, theoretically rich, sophisticated cultural criticism of a very high order. It deserves a wide and attentive audience." -- Modern Fiction Studies, "In four chapters, bookended by a critical introduction and conclusion, Lurie usefully complicates other critical approaches such as New Historicism and trauma studies. In the conclusion he shifts to considering how direct seeing of the events of 9/11 did not, predictably, lead observers to understand those events. Instead, he posits in the conclusion that recent works by "visual artists and citizen-documentarians" offer "a more encompassing and efficacious mode" than previously found. This book will be required reading for scholars working at the intersections of American literature/film, historical trauma, and visual representation." -- CHOICE
Illustrated
Yes
Dewey Decimal
791.4365873
Table Of Content
ContentsDedicationAcknowledgements Introduction: Envisioning Obscurity: History, Racial Knowing, and the "Perfect Whiteness of the Snow"Chapter 1: Seeing in the Dark Houses: History and Obscurity in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!Chapter 2 : "Orders from the House": American Historicism in The Shining Chapter 3: Fargo's Whitened Spaces: Race, History, and the Postmodern SublimeChapter 4: Queer Historicity in The BridgeConclusion: "Rememory," the Visual, and America's Future History: Race and the Digital TurnNotesWorks Cited Index
Synopsis
American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or naïveté that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-,bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The Bridge, one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision., American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in US culture. Critiquing the impulse to see history in seminal works like Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the residual positivism of New Historicist methodology, the book challenges this shared visual epistemology . It traces meaningful exceptions to this pattern across canonical figures from US literature and film., American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or naïveté that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The Bridge, one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision., American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or na vet that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The Bridge , one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision., American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or navetthat is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The Bridge , one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision.
LC Classification Number
PN1995.2

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