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Congenial Souls
Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern
Stephanie Trigg
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

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The Dilemma of Style
Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Postmodern
J. Mordaunt Crook
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Is architecture in a state of crisis? Or are the critics simply in a state of confusion? Either way, the problems of architecture today are rooted in the history of architectural ideas. Those ideas—from the Picturesque to the Modern Movement; from the Neo-Classicism and the Gothic Revival to New Brutalism and Post-Modernism—form the basis of this original and highly readable book. Ranging widely over English architecture during the last two hundred years—Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, Modern—The Dilemma of Style explores the way in which generations of architects and theorists have searched for a key to the conundrum of style. Richly illustrated and densely argued, with scores of quotations and hundreds of references, this is not another history of English architecture: it is almost an encyclopaedia of architectural ideas.

This challenging book confronts one of the central problems of architectural theory: the nature—and necessity—of style.
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Fellini's Films and Commercials
From Postwar to Postmodern
Frank Burke
Intellect Books, 2020
Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. He explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity, and then to “postmodern reproduction.” Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively “objective” standpoint, to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus, to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and the cinematic apparatus, to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification, Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable, if extremely complex.
 
Revisiting Burke’s 1996 monograph, this revised and updated edition includes a new preface and an additional chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, this book is essential reading for any Fellini fan or scholar.
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From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945-1989
Primary Documents
Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds.
Duke University Press
A trove of primary source materials, From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989 is an invaluable scholarly resource for readers who wish to explore the fascinating subject of avant-garde art in postwar Japan. In this comprehensive anthology, an array of key documents, artist manifestos, critical essays, and roundtable discussions are translated into English for the first time. The pieces cover a broad range of artistic mediums—including photography, film, performance, architecture, and design—and illuminate their various points of convergence in the Japanese context.

The collection is organized chronologically and thematically to highlight significant movements, works, and artistic phenomena, such as the pioneering artist collectives Gutai and Hi Red Center, the influential photography periodical Provoke, and the emergence of video art in the 1980s. Interspersed throughout the volume are more than twenty newly commissioned texts by contemporary scholars. Including Bert Winther-Tamaki on art and the Occupation and Reiko Tomii on the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, these pieces supplement and provide a historical framework for the primary source materials. From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989 offers an unprecedented look at over four decades of Japanese art—both as it unfolded and as it is seen from the perspective of the present day.

Publication of The Museum of Modern Art

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Guy Davenport
Postmodern and After
Andre Furlani
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Guy Davenport (1927–2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a breadth and depth of knowledge to his pursuits that few other writers could approach, let alone appraise. In Andre Furlani, this twentieth-century American master has finally found an apt critical reader. In this first sustained critical study of Davenport, Furlani elucidates the depths of Davenport's fiction and its poetic precedents, brings a rare understanding to the author's reworking of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, and offers unusual insight into his compositional technique.

Furlani explores key themes across the spectrum of Davenport's fiction: pastoral utopia; twentieth-century dystopia; sexual ethics; the mythologizing of childhood; the inseparability of the archaic and the modern; and a celebration of the union of sophia, eros, and poesia. Whether Davenport's view of art and the cosmos should be called "postmodern" is a question that Furlani considers closely--offering, finally, a new aesthetic for this American original who, in these pages, at last receives the thorough and meticulous attention he has long merited.
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Heterology and the Postmodern
Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard
Julian Pefanis
Duke University Press, 1991
In Heterology and the Postmodern, Julian Pefanis presents a new view of the history of poststructuralism (heterology) and the origins of postmodernism by analyzing three important French theorists, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.
Beginning with the introduction of Hegel in French postmodernist thought—largely but not exclusively through the thought of Georges Bataille—Pefanis argues that the core problematics of postmodern aesthetics—history, exchange, representation, and writing—are related to Bataille’s reconceptualization of the Hegelian framework. Pefanis explores how Bataille was influenced by Hegel, Marcel Mauss, Freud, and Nietzsche, and traces the effects of this influence on the analyses and critiques of later postmodernists, most notably Lyotard and Baudrillard. Finally, employing these postmodernists along with Freud and Jacques Lacan, Pefanis discusses discourse on postmodernism and its relation to Freud’s concept of the death drive.
This intellectual history makes valuable contributions to the debates over what the “postmodern” may mean for intellectual and political activity.
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Utopia Limited
The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern
Marianne DeKoven
Duke University Press, 2004
Utopia Limited is an original, engaging account of how postmodernism emerged from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Marianne DeKoven argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern. Analyzing classic sixties texts, DeKoven shows where the utopian master narratives underlying the radical and countercultural movements gave way to the “utopia limited” of the postmodern as a range of competing political values and desires came to the fore. She identifies the pivots where the modern was superseded by the nascent postmodern: where modern mass culture was replaced by postmodern popular culture, modern egalitarianism morphed into postmodern populism, and modern individualism fragmented into postmodern politics and cultures of subjectivity.

DeKoven rigorously analyzes a broad array of cultural and political texts important in the sixties—from popular favorites such as William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to political manifestoes including The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She examines texts that overtly discuss the conflict in Vietnam, Black Power, and second-wave feminism—including Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex; experimental pieces such as The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now; influential philosophical works including Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man; and explorations of Las Vegas, the prime location of postmodernity. Providing extensive annotated bibliographies on both the sixties and postmodernism, Utopia Limited is an invaluable resource for understanding the impact of that tumultuous decade on the present.

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