BiblioVault - Books about Hjort, Mette

Creativity and Academic Activism

Instituting Cultural Studies

Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort, eds.

Duke University Press

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programs and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs, and founding social activist networks.

This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization, and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy.

Contributors. Tony Bennett, Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Douglas Crimp, Dai Jinhua, John Nguyet Erni, Mette Hjort, Josephine Ho, Koichi Iwabuchi, Meaghan Morris, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wang Xiaoming, Audrey Yue

[more]

Creativity and Academic Activism

Instituting Cultural Studies

Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort, eds.

Duke University Press

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programs and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs, and founding social activist networks.

This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization, and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy.

Contributors. Tony Bennett, Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Douglas Crimp, Dai Jinhua, John Nguyet Erni, Mette Hjort, Josephine Ho, Koichi Iwabuchi, Meaghan Morris, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wang Xiaoming, Audrey Yue

[more]

The Danish Directors 3

Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema

Edited by Mette Hjort, Ib Bondebjerg, and Eva Novrup Redvall

Intellect Books, 2014

Following the two previous volumes in this series of practitioner interviews with Danish directors, Danish Directors 3 focuses on Danish documentary cinema. Although many of the directors interviewed here have ventured successfully into the terrain of fiction, their main contributions to the thriving post-80s milieu lie in the interconnected areas of documentary film and television. Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features filmmakers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark’s now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term “new” also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the filmmakers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and, indeed, of the professional environments in which they operate. A comprehensive overview of documentary directors currently working in Denmark, this is the only book of its kind about this growing area of Danish cinema.

[more]

Danish Directors

Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema

Edited by Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg

Intellect Books, 1995

Profiling the canonized figures alongside recently-established filmmakers, this collection features interviews with Lars von Trier, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Thomas Vinterberg and Henning Carlsen among many others. It poses questions that engage with ongoing and controversial issues within film studies, which will stimulate debate in academic and filmgoing circles alike.

Each interview is preceded by a photograph of the director, biographical information, and a filmography. Frame enlargements are used throughout to help clarify particular points of discussion and the book as a whole is contextualised by an informative general introduction. A valuable addition to the growing library of books on Scandinavian film, national cinema and minority cinema.

[more]

Small Nation, Global Cinema

The New Danish Cinema

Mette Hjort

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Small Nation, Global Cinema engages the effects of globalization from the perspective of small nations. Focusing her study on the specific cultural context of the international film market, Mette Hjort argues that the New Danish Cinema presents an opportunity to understand the effects of globalization within the culture and economy of a privileged small nation.

Hjort offers two key strategies underwriting the transformation and globalization of contemporary Danish cinema—the processes of cultural circulation and the psychological efficacy of heritage. Exploring the Dogma 95 movement initiated by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg as well as films by Erik Clausen, Gabriel Axel, Henning Carlsen, and Ole Bornedal, among others, Hjort examines means for cinematic globalization specific to Denmark, but then evolves her investigation into a truly comparative framework encompassing references to Hong Kong, Latin America, and Hollywood filmmaking. Providing a fresh way of looking at cultural influence in the era of globalization, Hjort’s concept of “small” nation points as much to the dynamics of recognition, indifference, and participation as it does to more common measures of population size, economic strength, or linguistic reach.

Mette Hjort is professor of intercultural studies at Aalborg University.

[more]

The Strategy of Letters

Mette Hjort

Harvard University Press, 1993

Although literary theories describe a world of strategies—textual, discursive, interpretive, and political—what is missing is the strategist. Poststructuralists try to explain agency as the effect of large-scale systems or formations; as a result, intuitions about individual action and responsibility are expressed in terms of impersonal strategies. Mette Hjort's book responds to this situation by proposing an alternative account of strategic action, one that brings the strategist back into the picture.

Hjort analyzes influential statements made by Derrida, Foucault, and others to show how proposed conceptions of strategy are contradictory, underdeveloped, and at odds with the actual use of the term. Why, then, has the term acquired such rhetorical force? Since “strategy” evokes conflict, Hjort suggests, its very use calls into question various pieties of idealism and humanism, and emphasizes a desired break between modernism and postmodernism. It follows that a theory of strategy must explore some of the psychological implications of conflict, and Hjort pursues these implications through traditions as diverse as game theory, discourse ethics, and the philosophy of war. Unstable frames, self deception, promiscuous pragmatism, and social emotion are some of the phenomena she explores as she develops her account of strategic action in the highly competitive domain of letters.

In her reflection on strategy, Hjort draws on such literary examples as Troilus and Cressida, Tartuffe, the autobiographical writings of Holberg, and early modern French and English treatises on theater. For its well-informed and incisive arguments and literary historical case studies, this book will be invaluable to literary theorists and will appeal to readers interested in drama, philosophy and literature, aesthetics, and theories of agency and rationality.

[more]

To Destroy Painting

Louis Marin

University of Chicago Press, 1994

The work of the eminent French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-92) is becoming increasingly important to English-speaking scholars concerned with issues of representation. To Destroy Painting, first published in France in 1977, marks a milestone in Marin's thought about the aims of painting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A meditation on the work of Poussin and Caravaggio and on their milieux, the book explores a number of notions implied by theories of painting and offers insight into the aims and effects of visual representaion.

[more]