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The starting-point for the book is its chapter on methodology. Found here are not only critiques of conventional Soviet Marxism-Leninism and post-modernism, but also a new rethinking of the classic dialectic. For the most part, however, the book focuses on revealing the new quality now assumed by commodities, money, and capital within the global economy. The market has become not only global, but a totalitarian force that is not a ‘socially neutral mechanism of coordination’. It is now a product of the hegemony of corporate capital, featuring the growth of new types of commodity: information, simulacra, and so forth. The book demonstrates the new qualities acquired by value, use value, price, and commodity fetishism within this new market, while exploring the contradictions of non-limited resources (such as knowledge) and the commodity form of their existence.
Money is now a virtual product of fictitious financial capital, possessing a new nature, contradictions, and functions. This analysis of the new nature of money helps to reveal the essence of so-called financialisation.
Capital has become the result of a complex system of exploitation. In the twenty-first-century context this exploitation includes the ‘classic’ extraction of surplus value from industrial workers combined with internal corporate redistribution of income by ‘insiders’; international exploitation; and the exploitation of creative labour through the expropriation of intellectual rent.
Environmental literary criticism, usually contracted to ecocriticism, has advanced considerably since the term was widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. This book considers examples of this advance across genres within literary studies and beyond into other creative forms. It explores the ecocritical implications of collaboration across genres in the humanities. The book also explores literary, artistic and performance production through direct collaboration between the creative disciplines and the sciences. It introduces the idea that the human denial of death has in part contributed to our approach to environmental crisis. The book argues that ecocriticism is a developing field, so attention must continue to be directed at reformulating thought in the (also) still unfolding aftermath of high theory. Examples of two poets' shared exploration show one's radical landscape poems side by side with the other's landscape drawings. Ecocritical ideas are integrated with the discussion of how this creative partnership has led to a body of work and the subsequent exhibitions and readings in which it has been taken to the public. One poet claims that to approach any art work ecocritically, it is necessary to bring to it some knowledge of current scientific thought regarding the biosphere. The book then explores poems about stones, on stones and stones which are the poem. The big environmental issues and Homo sapiens's problematic response to them evident in the mundane experience of day-to-day environments are discussed. Finally, the book talks about ecomusicology, past climate patterns, natural heritage interpretation, and photomontage in windfarm development.
This is a book-length study of one of the most respected and prolific producers working in British television. From ground-breaking dramas from the 1960s such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home to the ‘must-see’ series in the 1990s and 2000s such as This Life and The Cops, Tony Garnett has produced some of the most important and influential British television drama. This book charts his career from his early days as an actor to his position as executive producer and head of World Productions, focusing on the ways in which he has helped to define the role of the creative producer, shaping the distinctive politics and aesthetics of the drama he has produced, and enabling and facilitating the contributions of others. Garnett's distinctive contribution to the development of a social realist aesthetic is also examined, through the documentary-inspired early single plays to the subversion of genre within popular drama series.
This book aims to provoke increased interest in the work of the four directors: Dominique Cabrera, Noémie Lvovsky, Laetitia Masson and Marion Vernoux, although some of their early works have become more difficult to access, most of their films remain commercially available through French distributors. The four directors are not new arrivals and began making films in the early 1990s, yet they have received scant critical attention in both popular and academic film criticism. They share similar profiles in terms of box office success, number of films made and generational affinities and, shorts and feature films in France. They make films that straddle boundaries of categorisation and therefore escape the quickly established and self-perpetuating groupings that serve as powerful frameworks for popular access via DVD distribution, critical canonisation and academic curricula. Whilst Cabrera attests her sanguine awareness of the discriminatory treatment of women in all areas of the film industry she rejects the suggestion that the process of her filmmaking is determined by sexual difference or a gendered creative identity, asserting provocatively. The book discusses Masson's use of romance and detective narratives to debunk the former and subvert the later. The career path of Lvovsky remains distinctive from that of other directors. Vernoux's oeuvre maintains a coherent focus on the modes of transgression present within the generic conventions of comedy and romance in films which exploit the common narrative device of the encounter to propel narratives and characters across social boundaries within a dominant generic focus on romantic comedy.
This book explores the interactions of comedy and drama within a group of significant and influential films released during the decade of the 1990s. It examines a group of British films from this period which engage with economic and social issues in unusual and compelling ways.
How do you create a fictional story out of an historical period? What do you need to know about the people, the places, the events? What’s the better inspiration: historical scholarship or popular knowledge? A writer’s guide to Ancient Rome serves as inspiration and a guide to the Roman population, economy, laws, leisure, and religion for the author, student, general reader seeking an introduction to what made the Romans tick. The Guide considers trends and themes from roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE with the occasional foray into the antecedents and legacy on either side of the period. Each chapter explicates its main themes with examples from the original sources. Throughout are suggestions for resources to mine for the subject at hand and particular bits affected by scholarly debate and changing interpretation based on new discoveries or reinterpretation of written and material remains. It’s up to you whether or not you will produce a work of careful verisimilitude or anachronistic silliness (or one of the flavours in between). That’s your call as creator. This little guide is but a brief survey of a vast quantity of resources, sources, and scholarship on the Classical world that is available for reflection, evaluation, interpretation, and creativity. It is intended to open doors for further reading and consideration as you construct your own Roman world – it’s a welcome mat inviting you in to listen to the stories of the Romans and to contribute tales of your own.
history is made. In Rushdie's Midnight's Children ( 1981 ), his narrator-protagonist's self-obsessed account of India's history presents an extreme form of subjectivity that poses questions about historical objectivity; how can we disentangle the personal from the political? Here, literature seeks to disrupt, rather than simply reflect, the real world. Creative interruptions can also expose the risible pomposity, racism and classism of the arts establishment, as, for example, in Mathieu Kassovitz's film La Haine (1995), where three young working-class men of
Capital of the twenty-first century as a dialectical negation of the previous evolution of capitalism: relations of exploitation Before reviewing the most modern forms of exploitation involving the subordination of creative activity to capital, we should stress that modern capitalism is a complex system involving all the basic ‘layers’ of interaction between labour and capital, in their modern spatial reality, that characterise the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production. 1
What did it mean to be a woman and a painter at the heart of abstract gestural painting in New York during the 1950s, if the iconic artist of that decade was Jackson Pollock, and the icon of Woman was Marilyn Monroe? Elaborating and explaining the relevance of theories of psycho-symbolic formations of sexual difference and their inscription in artistic practice, this book explores the 1950s triangulation Pollock–Monroe–Krasner, analysing how two painters of the two generations New York abstract artists, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, negotiated this paradox artistically. Differencing a masculinized canon of Abstract Expressionism defiantly disseminated in recent blockbuster exhibitions, Pollock argues for a theoretically rich feminist reading of gestural abstract painting that centred the psycho-sexual body through gesture. She argues for a resonance with the cultural antithesis of New York gestural painting – its popular other – in the performance work of Marilyn Monroe, which exceeded the star’s iconic image of white sexuality. Igniting a still-urgent debate about difference, artmaking and artwriting, Pollock presents a transdisciplinary feminist intervention in the context of blockbuster exhibitions such as Abstract Expressionism (London and Bilbao, 2016–17) – which omitted almost entirely that school’s women members – and the women-only Women in Abstract Expressionism (USA 2018), Making Space: Women in Postwar Abstraction (New York, MoMA, 2018) and Women in Abstraction (Paris and Bilbao, 2021–22). as well as solo ‘rediscovery’ shows – Lee Krasner: Living Colour (London and Bilboa, 2019–20) and Helen Frankenthaler (Venice, 2019).
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and writing guide, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller’s life and the challenges it presents. How do we write about the relationships that have formed us? How do we describe our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean to have your writing, or living, dismissed as “navel-gazing”—or else hailed as “so brave, so raw”? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? Drawing on her journey from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor—via addiction and recovery, sex work and academia—Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas—and occasional notes of caution—to anyone who has ever hoped to see their true self reflecting back from the open page.