Способы создания эффекта присутствия в литературе и кино: теоретический аспект

MUCH RECENT FILM THEORY is in debt to a corpus of ideas made current during the 1970s-ideas which became consolidated both theoretically and rhetorically at the point of film theory's shift of ground from structuralism to poststructuralism. Some critics speak of this poststructuralist phase of film theory as film theory; others speak of the and distinguish it from a so-called first semiology, one indebted to structuralism. Whichever term we might use to designate the domain of film theory after the move away from structuralism, we are speaking about film theory under the influence of Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-Saussurrean linguistics. This Marxist-psychoanalytic-semiological paradigm emerges in the work of those writing in the 1970s for the British film journal Screen-an important conduit for the dissemination of French poststructuralist thought, though this is often not recognized by literary theorists of poststructuralist and deconstructive persuasions. There have been many recent critiques of contemporary film theory, which share the sense that the Althusserian-Lacaniansemiological paradigm for film theory and criticism has been exhausted.' A more general dissatisfaction with the second semiology and with the tendencies of poststructuralist thought has emerged in cognate areas as well: particularly, criticisms of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction as interpretive models or methods in literary theory and cultural studies--including critical reexaminations of the work of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and others. In a confusing series of events, these critiques tend to run parallel with attempts to relegitimate many tenets of deconstruction and poststructuralism, either under the rubric of postmodernism or under the rubric of neostructuralism. I think there are good reasons for film theory to welcome the demise of the second semiology. To support this claim, I will examine the expansionist tendencies of contemporary film theory as well as the ways in which film theory has been transformed into an all-embracing methodology. My objective is to suggest how the disciplinary requirement for a fruitful

Reviewed by: Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema Gina Marchetti (bio) Shuqin Cui . Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. xxvi, 304 pp. Hardcover $39.00, ISBN 0-8248-2532-2. As Zhang Yingjin points out in Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), there has been an exponential growth in the "blooming field" of publications on Chinese cinema in English over the last twenty years (p. 18). In fact, recently, several books (in addition to Zhang's) have appeared that overlap with the project set forth in Cui's Women Through the Lens to look at the relation between gender and nation in Chinese cinema. Like Cui and Zhang, many of these authors build on Rey Chow's Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and Chow, for her part, adds to previous analyses of gender, sexuality, and the Chinese nation in research conducted by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Esther C. M. Yau, Chris Berry, E. Ann Kaplan, Peter Hitchcock, Paul Clark, Ma Ning, and Wang Yuejin, among others. Five recent books that deal most directly with the films Cui also analyzes are Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), Sheila Cornelius (with Ian Haydn Smith), New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations (London: Wallflower, 2002), Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London: Reaktion, 1999), Lu Tonglin, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, ed. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow (London: Verso, 2002). In scope, Women Through the Lens has most in common with Public Secrets, Public Spaces, since both books deal with a range of narrative-fiction films from the silent era to the present. However, since Cui focuses most of her attention on the post-Mao era, she deals with many of the same films as Lu, Cornelius, and Silbergeld, including Ju dou, Farewell My Concubine, and Army Nurse. Like Dai Jinhua, Cui provides a Lacanian reading of key films from the Fifth Generation, an overview of women filmmakers in China, and a detailed analysis of Huang Shuqin's Woman, Demon, Human.1 Given this bounty of scholarship on women in Chinese film, Women Through the Lens finds its niche as an overview of the existing research seen through the lens of feminist film and literary theory. Because of this approach and model analyses of a few key films, the book provides a very fine introduction to Chinese film for students approaching the topic in a feminist [End Page 129] film criticism course or in a course in which grounding in film theory cannot be assumed but is absolutely necessary for the students. Key concepts frame many of the close analyses in the book so that Cui's investigation of Center Stage could be used to discuss the concept of self-reflexivity and intertextuality, Ju dou to look at point of view and off-screen sound, Farewell My Concubine to examine space and other elements of the mise-en-scène, and Woman, Demon, Human to explore montage. Drawing on the stalwarts of film theory (e.g., Edward Branigan, Leo Braudy, Teresa de Lauretis, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Mary Ann Doane, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Anne Friedberg, Louis Giannetti, Christine Gledhill, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Sarah Kozloff, Annette Kuhn, Christian Metz, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Robert Stam, Gaylyn Studlar, Linda Williams), Cui's work firmly situates itself within film studies as a discipline, and her approach springs principally from this body of research. However, the detailed summary of the work of many of these film theorists, while useful for film students, tends to interrupt the flow of Cui's argument and encumbers the book with information that is tangential to the subject at hand. Also, some of the film theory cited, although...

Reviewed by: Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen Holly Yanacek Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. By Kata Gellen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 250. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810138933. With Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, Kata Gellen makes an important contribution to modernist scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of sound studies through her analysis of noise in Kafka's oeuvre. The book participates in the recent turn in scholarship to define "modernist epistemologies"—that is, to examine "the ways in which modernist art and literature produce new modes of perception and knowledge" (199). Gellen aims to show how Kafka responds to two central crises of modernism—the crisis of narration and the crisis of knowledge—through the treatment of noise in his collected stories, notebooks, and letters. A central premise of this book is that noise is a "productive obstacle" in modernist literary narration in general and in Kafka's works in particular (3). Gellen's interpretations reveal that Kafka never settled on a single, unified approach to sound. Instead, she emphasizes that each one of Kafka's texts that deals with sound presents a different attempt to explore the productive tension between noise and writing (33). Noise puts a strain on many of the characters in Kafka's stories, and Gellen's book examines the literary significance of these disruptive, persistent, and enigmatic noises. Kafka and Noise is noteworthy as the first sustained English-language study of sound in Kafka's collected works. Jürgen Daiber's Kafka und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) demonstrates a similar interest in sound in Kafka's writings; however, the book primarily focuses on Kafka's own frustrations with noise that disrupted his writing. Gellen adds to the scholarship on Kafka and sound through her innovative application of film theory and her focus not on Kafka's biographical writings, but on the literary significance of noise in his narration. Her approach yields fresh interpretations of Kafka's stories, including "Großer Lärm" (1912), "Die Verwandlung" (1915), "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), "Forschungen eines Hundes" (1922), "Der Bau" (1923), and "Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse" (1924). Although the use of film theory to analyze sound in Kafka's works is new, the study of the connection between Kafka and cinema has a long history, which Gellen traces back to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's debates about gesture in Kafka's writing in the 1930s. Inspired also by Gilles Deleuze and [End Page 613] Félix Guattari's interpretation of noise in Kafka in their theory of a minor literature, Gellen picks up where these critics left off and offers sustained close readings of the problem of sound in Kafka's works. Gellen's justification for her approach to analyze Kafka's literary works and silent film together in Kafka and Noise is persuasive. Concepts from film theory, such as acoustic close-up and acousmatic sound, provide the language necessary to analyze noise in literature, a silent medium. Gellen's application of these concepts offers new insights into Kafka's works that would not be possible with literary concepts and narrative theory alone. In addition, the interpretation of literary sound with film terminology illuminates what literature (and cinema) can do and what it cannot do, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to genre studies. There is another reason why concepts from film theory, rather than concepts in the field of sound studies, form the methodological underpinning of Kafka and Noise. According to Gellen, sound studies has "has, to a large extent, ignored literary sound" because literature is a medium that does not directly produce actual sounds (203). However, she argues that sound studies would have much to gain by focusing on literary sound as an object of analysis, and her book makes a strong case for that assertion. In each of the book's four chapters, Gellen introduces concepts from film theory and applies them in her close readings of Kafka's letters and stories, which she interprets...

Theory in Practice The Theory Wars, or, Who's Afraid of Judith Butler? Lisa Duggan Over the past two decades, feminist historians have struggled through the sex wars, the culture wars, and the science wars. There is a lot of battle fatigue, but also the camaraderie produced by being mostly on the same side. Another conflict that has divided our ranks, however, exposes a generational shift as well as a complex political divide: the "theory wars." The theory wars have shaped my development as a feminist historian , journalist, and activist since my days as a graduate student in the early 1980s in the history department of the University of Pennsylvania. I was trained there as a social historian primarily by Marxist-influenced New Left professors dedicated to a "bottom up" approach to reshaping the dominant narratives of U.S. history. My interest in women's history and lesbian and gay history fit easily within the "new social history" framework of making invisible populations visible, of allowing the silenced to speak. I had an inkling that something different was going on in many English departments and in the kind of feminist theory that was then reshaping literary criticism and film theory. My window on that world was the work of my dissertation director, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Alone among the history faculty, she read widely across the disciplines and engaged feminist scholarship from the fields of anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, and film theory. The reception of her work in that department was, well, anxious. I began to understand that she was importing something called "Theory" into her historical work and that this was a controversial practice. It was not until the early 1980s, when the English translation of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1, appeared in Philadelphia bookstores and on university reading lists, that I figured out what the fuss was about.1 The theory wars as they appeared to me then pitted various strains of British-influenced Marxism, proceeding from the work of Raymond Williams or E. P. Thompson, against French-inflected theories, from the Marxist structuralism of Louis Althusser to the post-May 1968 post-Marxist poststructuralism represented in history departments in the United States primarily by Foucault.2 Lesbian and gay historians quickly gravitated to Foucault's work, which began to reshape the "social construction" theory then current—an © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 1 (Spring) 10 Journal of Women's History Spring amalgam of sociology (via Mary Mcintosh through Jeffrey Weeks), Marxist culturalism (via E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman), feminist theories from anthropology (e.g., Gayle Rubin), and history (e.g., Joan Kelly).3 Through Foucault, some historians of sexuality introduced themselves to the world of poststructuralist cultural theory and learned of the intellectual developments in literary theory and film studies, philosophy, linguistics, and communications that were revolutionizing f eminist theory in the humanities but had left history departments relatively untouched during the 1980s. A few feminist historians appropriated or commented on the uses of poststructuralist theories for historical scholarship (Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Judith Walkowitz, and Joan Scott among them), and a few lesbian and gay scholars produced Foucauldian historical studies (e.g., David Halperin).4 But a split began to develop. Most practitioners of women's history continued to work within the parameters of the social history framework, and most lesbian and gay historians took up Foucault from within social construction theory without adopting the broader theoretical tenets of poststructuralism. Such work continued to have much in common with feminist and lesbian/gay work in anthropology and sociology , sharing intellectual paradigms and social networks. Meanwhile, the study of gender and sexuality in English departments, media programs, and multiple interdisciplinary humanities sites in the academy proceeded through deep engagement with European critical theories, especially the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Foucault.5 By 1990, this split had developed into a war often framed in reductionist terms as social science versus the humanities, accessible populist scholarship versus jargonistic elitist obscurantism, or naïve empiricism versus sophisticated cultural analysis. But the most distorted framings appeared as Politics versus Theory from one point of view, and antiintellectual posturing versus engaged cultural critique...

The Lithuanian‐born French philosopher and Jewish scholar Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) has come to be regarded as a central figure in the history of twentieth‐century French philosophy, particularly in the areas of phenomenology and ethics, although his influence is now to be found in literary and film theory – despite the suspicions about “the aesthetic element” he raises in his essay “Reality and its shadow” (1989[1948]) and elsewhere – and in other diverse fields. His description of human subjectivity and its formation in an encounter with “the Other” of ethics has been attractive to those seeking to decenter human experience, in order to complicate an understanding of subjectivity as, in Levinas's words, “home” or as “conquest and jealous defense” (1981). Levinas's thinking of “alterity” is pitched against what he describes as ontology's totalizing grip on philosophy. “The Other” is a common translation of Levinas's l'Autre or Autrui , although his own use of terms and capitalization is inconsistent, as part of a refusal to “thematize” his work. This refusal of thematization is made manifest, structurally, in the metonymic chains through which Levinas seeks to rehabilitate philosophical terms such as “truth” (1981). An important interlocutor was Jacques Derrida, whose essay “Violence and metaphysics” (1978[1964]), constituted a major response to Levinas's Totality and Infinity (1969 [1961]) – one that in many ways shaped Levinas's later work.

IntroductionFilm and / as Ethics Robert Sinnerbrink (bio) and Lisa Trahair (bio) The relationship between film and philosophy, along with the idea of film as philosophy, has attracted widespread interest over the last decade. Film theorists and philosophers of film have explored not only the philosophical questions raised by cinema as an artform, but also the possibility that cinema might contribute to philosophical understanding or even engage in varieties of “cinematic thinking” that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be known as “film-philosophy,” developing philosophical insight out of their close engagement with film, and bringing philosophical concepts to bear on the aesthetic experience cinema affords. Despite the flourishing of this encounter between film and philosophy, there has been as yet comparatively little attention given to the relationship between ethics and cinema (see Choi and Frey, Cine-Ethics; Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics; Terman, “Ethics”). Prior to the emergence of film-philosophy, questions about cinematic ethics came to the fore in relation to the photographic basis of the medium. André Bazin’s statement that the photograph has an irrational power to “bear away our faith” undoubtedly indicates some qualms about the ethics of the artform (14). And it is unsurprising that the first point of focus on cinematic ethics was the documentary film. The direct cinema and cinéma verité movements emerged in the wake of concerns about the ethics of the medium and its purported objectivity in representing “others,” and such movements were explicitly oriented toward developing more assuredly ethical and political means of telling stories. And there have always been filmmakers whose interest in cinema lay in its capacity to show us realities that were ethically complex. We only need to think of the cinema of Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick to remind ourselves that ethical work has always been among cinema’s enterprises. The ascendancy of Hollywood cinema was made possible in the 1920s and 1930s by illegal and immoral monopolistic and exploitative practices that put national cinemas around the globe out of business, but such practices were actually buttressed by the implementation of the Production Code and a lot of loud talk about [End Page 3] the need for films to be moral. The assurances repeatedly given for Hollywood’s moral rectitude, even while its international ambitions meant that it avidly sought to colonize the cultural spheres of other nations, provide an obvious reason for why film studies has been more interested in unpacking the moral and political dimensions of the industry than in contemplating the ethical inquiry of some of its most revered directors. It is worth remembering that Cavell’s book on the remarriage cycle is a study of a popular film genre’s forays into finding a means to articulate the ethics of relations between men and women. Deleuze identifies ethical concerns in the European films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and in the work of the Japanese filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi; but these by no means delimit the field of the filmmakers of the twentieth century who took up ethical inquiry in the cinematic medium. In the fields of film criticism and film theory, the study of documentary is the most overtly ethical treatment of film but it would be remiss not to point to feminist film theory, psychoanalytic film theory, queer film theory and the study of third cinema as raising questions of ethical importance. That film has an ethical potential—for exploring moral issues, ethically ambiguous situations, or moral “thought experiments”—is clear from the way in which film theorists have explored cinema from a variety of philosophical perspectives (Mulhall, On Film; Shaw, Morality at the Movies; Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen). More recently, scholars have begun to explore the ways in which cinema can be read alongside philosophical approaches to ethics, or how certain filmmakers can be understood as engaging in ethics through film (Cooper, Selfless Cinema?; Downing and Saxton, Film and Ethics; Stadler, Pulling Focus; Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema). Philosophical film theory has now not only begun to...

This textbook introduction to current feminist theories maps the development of feminist thought and suggests future directions. Reflecting the diversity of feminist theory, and its multiple practices and approaches, the chapters range across the humanities and social sciences covering: social theory; theory and economic change; political theory; jurisprudence;anthropological theory; psychoanalytic theory; theories of gender; lesbian theory; postmodern and cultural theory; black theory; literary theory; linguistic theories; media and film theory; postcolonial theory; perspectives on science; theorising the personal; methodologies/epistemologies; and women's studies.

This is the first study to apply a broad range of theory to contemporary film. With dazzling insight and critical aplomb Maggie Humm highlights and explains feminist issues and offers a fascinating array of original film analyses. She begins with an in-depth historical survey of contemporary feminist theory, visual aesthetics and film theory, with a particular focus on the work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks. Subsequent chapters examine the issues of reproduction, pornography and the gaze, autobiography and literary theory, postmodernism, Black feminism and 'the personal is political' in relation to a variety of mainstream and independent films, including Klute , Dead Ringers , A Question of Silence , Orlando and Daughters of the Dust .

This chapter demonstrates the evolution of relationships between sound design and music in cinematic representations of the interstellar space vacuum. Mera provides a framework for understanding how audiences believe they are physically present in the represented environment and argues that, in the late 2000s, we move towards three-dimensional (3-D) sound, an aesthetic and technical extension of the superfield and the ultrafield as defined by Chion and Kerins, respectively. 3-D Sound’s primary characteristic is the emancipation of music from a fixed sound-stage spatialization, resulting in greater fluidity between sound design and music. This chapter examines the relationship between two types of spatial presence, articulating both the audience’s suspension of disbelief within a film’s narrative world and the spatial presence of sound and music within a multichannel cinema environment.

Time loop narratives raise a number of interesting questions for narrative theory. There is the curious temporality of a work in which past, present, and future are rearranged. There is also the question of how such narratives progress, given that they are composed of repeated events that must be sequenced and developed, and provided with an ending that should satisfactorily conclude such works. The status of characters in these works also needs to be explored; they can (and sometimes do) encounter their “other” selves in the storyworld. Observations on the ontological status of the fictional world of such narratives and comments on the ways in which they are represented and misrepresented in literary criticism and narrative theory are also set forth.

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REVIEWS 745 as his efforts to get away from his family and thus escape the ecosystem that sustained his authorial existence. Both trips exposed Chekhov’s psychological and artistic limits, revealing to him his creative and existential dependency on others, which, as Rylkova argues, he then explored in ‘Sakhalin Island’ (1893–95) and ‘The Steppe’ (1888). In ‘The Steppe’ Rylkova finds a synthesis of the apprehensions Chekhov had to live through on the steppe and his authorial anxiety at being alone in the boundless terrain of his first novel (p. 88). The form of the novel moved Chekhov to think intensely about the meaning of life and death. In the second part of the book Rylkova explores the effect of Tolstoi’s and Chekhov’s texts on other others’ exploration of mortality. For Meierkhol´d the staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895), where Meierkhol´d both identified with, and strove to overcome, the tragic fate of Konstantin Treplev, offered an opportunity to overcome his own artistic stagnation and develop his innovative stylized theatre. In a chapter on Ivan Bunin Rylkova explores Bunin’s attempts at writing biographies of Tolstoi and Chekhov as a means of living his own life through an intense identification with these two literary giants. The final two chapters offer Rylkova’s reading of Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard (1904) in connection with the writer’s last days and funeral. Galina Rylkova’s Breaking Free from Death is a deeply personal study of Chekhov and Tolstoi and their respective legacies. The book is steeped in the author’s intimate knowledge not only of the writers’ fictional writings but also their epistolary heritage. While the book is aimed at a broad audience, specialists in the field will discover many new and intellectually provocative ways to think about these famous Russian writers. Vanderbilt University Denis A. Zhernokleyev Moss, Anne Eakin. Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xviii + 272 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95 (paperback and e-book). The present study explores the depiction of women in Russian literature and film in the context of passionate debates in Russia which started in the 1860s about the woman question and about the role of women’s communities in transcending and modernizing Russia. As Anne Moss explains, she uses the term ‘women’s community’ with the view ‘to capture the philosophical and cultural meaning that accrued to the idealized portrayal of women’s relations’ SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 746 found in Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is to Be Done (1863) and in Lev Tolstoi’s epic War and Peace (1863–69) (p. 1). Moss aptly argues that ‘as much as friendship among women came to figure a return to the past’ in the form of a national collective identity, ‘it also was mobilized to represent a future form of social relations that would be more altruistic and enlightened’ (p. 2). While Moss devotes more attention to nineteenth-century writers including Tolstoi, Chernyshevskii, Dostoevskii and Chekhov, she also analyses several works by twentieth-century authors such as Maksim Gor´kii, Aleksandr Kuprin and Lydia Zinov´eva-Annibal. In Moss’s view, the notion of women’s community was ‘central to the Russian and Soviet social imagination and literary tradition from that idea’s inception in the 1860s, to its disenchantment at the turn of the twentieth century, to its re-enchantment in the 1930s’ (p. 195). The epilogue briefly talks about Liudmilla Ulitskaia’s novel, Medea and Her Children (1996) which, as Moss notes, shifts away from ‘Tolstoy’s family idyll’ and presents it as a classical tragedy, ‘leaving us with women who live their lives ethically, if not heroically’ (p. 195). While the diversity of different approaches to the idea of a women’s community and its broad chronological scope make this study difficult to follow at times, the main focus on the uniqueness of women’s relationships as found in literary and cinematic representations as discussed in the book makes the analysis coherent and engaging. Thebookcomprisesanintroduction,fivechaptersandanepilogue.Itdevelops Nina Auberbach’s vision of...

This anthology explores African American lived experiences and their representations through cinema and literary forms in the twentieth century. By mapping literary and filmic texts produced for African Americans based on their lived experiences, narratives, and aesthetics within larger historical, cultural dynamics, and material contexts, Intersecting Aesthetics aims to illuminate uncovered patterns in literary, cinematic, and social history. The authors of Intersecting Aesthetics position their work in contrast to preceding scholarly ideas and expand the scope of research on African American film adaptations. Through challenging the perspectives that frame discussions on Black filmic representations and adaptations tractable to Sara Martín's survey published in Literature/Film Quarterly (1999), this volume seeks to move beyond the insights of studies of adaptations around and from canonical texts that feature reliance on whiteness and prestige art (5). Adaptation scholarship on Black films that oftentimes get published as isolated case studies and incoherent chapters is criticized as a problematic academic trend (9). This volume enriches the long-seated overlook of the unique experiences and expressions of African American artists in literature and film while including non-canonical material sources. Underexplored fields of Black film adaptations, such as political censorship and cultural circulations are included in the contributors' reflection on how race-inflicted normality is manifested and intertextualized in literary and cinematic representations. Asking a central research question, “What insights about society, cinema, and literary works become visible when the scholarship concentrates on film adaptations involving Black writers, directors, or stories?” (4), the authors navigate a fundamental departure from traditional methods of analysis that often view literary sources and film adaptations in separation. The contributors' unconventional adoption of non-canonical source materials informs this methodology carried away with their exploratory, rather than “evaluative” analytic approach. For instance, archival records and firsthand interviews are employed to better facilitate understanding of censorship, marketing, and press coverage of African American film adaptations that affect and shape the audience's reception and interpretation of Black narrative (5). Studio-era and post-studio film directors and writers' negotiations with cultural normality in writing, studio productions, and indie filmmaking are also addressed. The contributors of the volume insisted that literary sources and film adaptations cannot be analyzed without being drawn together and grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the social, cultural, and material contexts of Black narratives (3). The book examines how African American artists, such as Walter Mosley and Carl Franklin in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), use the aesthetic tools of their art forms to reveal the realities that allow white Americans to ignore the incommensurable humanity of African Americans and remain indifferent to the racism permeated in society. This analysis successfully highlights the power of art to potentially challenge racial prejudices and cultural normativity (66). The authors also discuss the character Bigger in writer Richard Wright's Native Son, exploring the critique of Bigger and how views are historically varied. They argue that Wright's portrayal of Bigger was not so much a capitulation to a racist culture, but an exposé of how literary characters are shaped by the cultural and social embeddedness of racism. This argument is supported by the viewpoint of Alain Locke, who defended Wright's depiction of Bigger as socially and historically constructed (12). The volume also delves into the sociological and ethical aspects of Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). It examines the narrative techniques used to explore the protagonist Easy Rawlins' conscience and his reflection on the shared experiences of Black men in white-dominated America. This analysis aligns the novel and film with a literary-historical tradition that includes works such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which manifests the social and moral considerations in Mosley's work (30–31). Intersecting Aesthetics poised itself as an innovative and comprehensive work that offers significant contributions to the field of Black literary and film adaptations. Its methodological and analytic ingenuity enables new insights and helps critics challenge existing academic paradigms restrained by white norms in contemporary adaptation studies. This anthology demonstrates that racialized social discourses serve as a central factor that affects the creation, distribution, and reception of Black literature and cinematic adaptations. By combining incisive insights from various disciplines such as film and media studies, comparative literature, and African American studies, this volume enriches the scholarship on film adaptation, Black artistry, and African American experiences. The authors present literature and films as reflective, negotiating, and challenging racialized social hierarchies and cultural orders demised by whiteness. Despite a more in-depth comparison of Black films and literature with mainstream or white-centered narratives that could be conducted to further highlight the distinctiveness of Black artists' contributions, this volume discovered patterns in literary, cinematic, and social history that have been overlooked or underrepresented in traditional accounts of film studies.

The purpose of this book is to show how the wedding of fiction and film works out concretely in a book that focuses on the screen versions of the work of a single novelist, Joseph Conrad. Conrad is not only one of the greatest writers of this century, but has the distinction of having all of his major works committed to film, including Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (as Apocalypse Now). Here is an in-depth study of the films of Conrad's fiction, solidly based on both literary and cinematic theory. The author conducted interviews with several of the notable directors who made Conrad films, including Sir Alfred Hitchcock and Francis Coppola; this interview material is a highlight of the book.

This article seeks to engage with the notion of “discourse,” and to test and apply ideas from literary and film theory in the analysis of architectural—and particularly museum—space. It examines the complex set of relations between “narrative,” “story” and “discourse” as they manifest in a particular contemporary museum: The Novium in Chichester, UK. This museum was opened in 2012 and designed to contain the remains of Chichester's Roman bathhouse. This article considers the varying degrees of synonymity between the concepts of “story” and “discourse,” or “medium” and “message,” as encountered during visitors’ journeys through the space of the museum.