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Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres such as science fiction and horror. This study of what the text names New Bollywood contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films' evolving treatment of romantic relationships. It argues that the form of the conjugal duo in movies reflects other social forces in India's new consumerist and global society. The book takes a look at recent Hindi films and movie trends—the decline of song-and-dance sequences, the upgraded status of the horror genre, and the rise of the multiplex and multiplot—to demonstrate how these relationships exemplify different formulas of contemporary living.

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. This book explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, the book shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth.

What is the fate of photography? Displaced as a tool of identification by genetics and biometrics, dematerialized and dispersed as a document into the virtual archives of data centers and social networks, transformed as aesthetic practice into monumental visual fictions, photography in the digital age confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. Notably, in this moment when some of the most heralded contemporary photographers have relinquished a relation to the world and systematically eroded the evidential aspect of their medium, artists, filmmakers and writers have turned toward photography as a powerful emblem of truth and proof. Cited and quoted, dramatized and ventriloquized, photography as both form and logic finds its home in other media at precisely the moment of its own material demise and theoretical contestation. Whether in contemporary film or video, painting or drawing, literature or philosophy, the photograph has asserted itself as a guarantor of identity and a stubbornly material form of evidence. Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects thus looks beyond the material and historical boundaries of the medium and opens photography to a thoroughly interdisciplinary, multi-media study. Why “daguerreotypes”? The daguerreotype not only marks the moment of photography’s origins. It also comes to stand, at the moment of medium’s prophesied end, as an emblem of all that has accrued to the object and idea of the photographic image.

Friending the Past asks if today's society, increasingly captivated by up-to-the-minute information media, can have a sense of history. What is the relation between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal or self-aware sense of history—for example, storytelling in prehistorical oral societies, or the great print works of historicism in the nineteenth century—and today's "instant" networked information society? How did the sense of history once balance between the feeling for the present and for the absent, the temporal and the social, the individual and the collective, and the static and the dynamic? And how do digital networks now change the balance? Blending the approaches of intellectual history, media studies, and digital humanities, the book proposes novel ways of thinking about the evolving sense of history. Topics include the relation between high-print historicism and social networking; narratives of "new media encounters" between societies; graphically visualized and conceptualized understandings of history; and "network archaeology" as the variant of media archaeology needed to grasp the networked texture of our contemporary feeling for history. At its close, the book asks the question: is there a sense of history in the digital, networked age? The book concludes with an example of what a digitally networked sense of history can be by examining (in a manner poised between "close reading" and "distant reading") the code of one of today's JavaScript "timelines" and comparing it to the experience of temporality encoded in William Wordsworth's poetry during the era of romanticism.

Knowledge work is now the reigning business paradigm and affects even the world of higher education. But what perspective can the knowledge of the humanities and arts contribute to a world of knowledge work whose primary mission is business? And what is the role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of a new technological cool? This book reflects on these questions as it considers the emergence of new information technologies and their profound influence on the forms and practices of knowledge.

The language of networks now describes everything from the Internet to terrorist organizations. But even as “network” has become an early-twenty-first century keyword, its overuse has also limited its analytic usefulness. Network Aesthetics shows how popular American cultural forms mediate our experience and promise greater insight into the contemporary network imaginary. The first part of the book looks to narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including novels such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, films such as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, and television series such as David Simon’s The Wire. All of these works experiment with network form in order to open up thought about the maximal, emergent, and realist aspects of networks in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. The second part of the book examines video games and digital media artworks that are interactive, nonlinear, procedural, and dependent on networked audiences. New media, including popular video games such as thatgamecompany’s Journey and emergent transmedia storytelling forms, such as alternate reality games, open up thought about the participatory and improvisational dimensions of networks. The book makes its key contributions to the fields of new media theory, literary criticism, and American studies. It revises the long-standing and still common view of networks as control structures that originated in the computing and cybernetics research of the early Cold War. Attention to cultural productions, from novels to video games, complicates clichés of sublime interconnection and illuminates the ordinary, lived aspects of networked life in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. This is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through the book's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. This book shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing this preoccupation through the period's films—as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts—the author pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one's will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, the author also develops an innovative reading of Kafka's novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.

Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally killed in Rome in 1975, a macabre end to a career that often explored humanity's capacity for violence and cruelty. Along with the mystery of his murderer's identity, Pasolini left behind a controversial but acclaimed oeuvre as well as a final quartet of beguiling projects that signaled a radical change in his aesthetics and view of reality. This book is an interpretation of these final works: the screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario for Porn-Theo-Colossal, the immense and unfinished novel Petrolio, and his notorious final film, 120 Days of Sodom, a disturbing adaptation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Together these works, the author contends, reveal Pasolini's obsession with sodomy and its role within his apocalyptic view of Western society. Exploring the ramifications of Pasolini's homosexuality, the book also breaks new ground by putting his work into fruitful conversation with an array of other thinkers such as Freud, Strindberg, Swift, Henri Michaux, and Norman O. Brown.

Four American film critics of the 1940s—Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—changed the way Hollywood cinema was understood. They also wrote idiosyncratic, multi-flavored prose that constituted a new kind of arts journalism. This book considers their writing styles, their conceptions of film, their intellectual sources, their quarrels, and their impact on later generations of film writers. Ferguson believed that Hollywood cinema had created a new medium of dynamic, engaging storytelling—one that had a power of arousal found in jazz and swing music. Agee saw Hollywood as a source of poetic revelation beyond what literature could create. Manny Farber considered cinema a form of pictorial art that, in an age praising Abstract Expressionism, could revive supposedly outdated concepts like “illusion” and “illustration.” And Tyler brought a surrealist eye to cinema, discovering in “the Hollywood Hallucination” a repository of wild and piquant fantasies. All asked the reader scrutinize what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, these critics had a robust influence on a later generation of film critics, including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert.

Casting light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Robert Bresson, and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, this book is a comprehensive study of European art cinema's postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, it argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, the book begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. It then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, the book provides a history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism's origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, it ultimately lays out new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

Nearly a decade ago, the author of this book cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. This book explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature, and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects the author engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists' Books Online to the as yet unrealized Paracritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, the book functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies the contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

“Welcome to the European Family!” is the banner under which East European countries joined the European Union following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. This book offers an analysis of the imbrication of the ensuing imagined European kinship with its corollary: the traffic in women. The book revisits Claude Lévi-Strauss concept of kinship, as well as its re-articulation by second-wave feminists, Gayle Rubin most prominently, in order to remind the reader that kinship has been traditionally anchored in the traffic in women. This is not the traffic in women invoked by the media to refer to sex trafficking per se, but a broad anthropological concept that describes the circulation of women between kinship groups, traditionally through marriage. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame the European traffic in women, the book shows that, in today’s Europe, racialized East European migrant women are “exchanged” so they can engage in labor traditionally performed by wives within the institution of marriage. Following a pattern of what the book calls Americanization, East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, become responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives. A feminist intervention in the heated debate on the making and unmaking of Europe, the book argues that the critical project of pluralizing post-1989 Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the traffic in East European women.

This book follows recent artists in a vein of second-wave of Conceptual art practice dubbed Conceptualism 2.0—in works shadowed by the digital if not directly employing it: works that negotiate a sensory space between medium specificity, in the high modernist mode, and recent claims for the “convergence” of platforms in the electronic vanishing point of global computerization. In objects and installations increasingly designated as “art research,” divided up here into two Scenes (one of still, one of moving, images), and regularly involving extensive paratextual explanation in catalog copy or on gallery walls, this work specifies an interface between—and operating across (trans)—separate media forms, whose intersection is materialized, and thereby analyzed, in works resistant to the leveling hegemony of the digital. These are transmedial images or structures—their object, art—that insist not on a coherent and fetishized specificity but on a dialectical specification.

In the past two decades, the contemporary art world has exhibited an ever-increasing fascination with the cinema; or better, a certain memory of the history of theatrical cinema. A principle material of contemporary art—and it is a rich and varied one—is the ever-fading memory of cinema: a vast archive of cultural experience, elliptical and discontinuous fragments of memory-images, which become an ever more powerful source of fantasmatic resurrection and recreation because they can no longer be invoked directly. These works challenge both the history of cinema, and our memory of the history of cinema in complex ways. In this book, D. N. Rodowick examines how the moving image in contemporary art, in all its complex varieties, is producing a new kind of virtuality or time-image in terms of how it presents a “naming crisis” around questions of movement, image, time, and history in the works of artists such as Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Ken Jacobs, Robert Morris, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and Ernie Gehr.