Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema. Over the course of a fifty-year career, he completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. Exhaustively researched yet elegantly written, The Adventure of the Real is the first comprehensive analysis of his practical filmmaking methods.
Rouch developed these methods while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvisation by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, Paul Henley reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch’s pioneering career, Henley examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch’s cinematographic legacy. Featuring over one hundred and fifty images, The Adventure of the Real is an essential introduction to Rouch’s work.
In the most wide-ranging history of phenomenology since Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement over fifty years ago, Baring uncovers a new and unexpected force—Catholic intellectuals—behind the growth of phenomenology in the early twentieth century, and makes the case for the movement’s catalytic intellectual and social impact.
Of all modern schools of thought, phenomenology has the strongest claim to the mantle of “continental” philosophy. In the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology expanded from a few German towns into a movement spanning Europe. Edward Baring shows that credit for this prodigious growth goes to a surprising group of early enthusiasts: Catholic intellectuals. Placing phenomenology in historical context, Baring reveals the enduring influence of Catholicism in twentieth-century intellectual thought.
Converts to the Real argues that Catholic scholars allied with phenomenology because they thought it mapped a path out of modern idealism—which they associated with Protestantism and secularization—and back to Catholic metaphysics. Seeing in this unfulfilled promise a bridge to Europe’s secular academy, Catholics set to work extending phenomenology’s reach, writing many of the first phenomenological publications in languages other than German and organizing the first international conferences on phenomenology. The Church even helped rescue Edmund Husserl’s papers from Nazi Germany in 1938. But phenomenology proved to be an unreliable ally, and in debates over its meaning and development, Catholic intellectuals contemplated the ways it might threaten the faith. As a result, Catholics showed that phenomenology could be useful for secular projects, and encouraged its adoption by the philosophical establishment in countries across Europe and beyond.
Baring traces the resonances of these Catholic debates in postwar Europe. From existentialism, through the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to the speculative realism of the present, European thought bears the mark of Catholicism, the original continental philosophy.
Law and Society is a rapidly-growing interdisciplinary field that turns on its head the conventional, idealized view of the “Law” as a magisterial abstraction. Kitty Calavita’s Invitation to Law and Society brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law shapes and manifests itself in the institutions and interactions of human society, while inviting the reader into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements.
Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar personal examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to the use of the law in everyday life, as well as its potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. In a field of inquiry that has long lacked a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to its ways of thinking, Invitation to Law and Society will serve as an engaging and indispensible guide.
Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.
Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema's persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema's ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and "feminization."
Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.
To show how the imagined world of the storyteller informs us about the real world of experience, a distinguished social scientist brings the perspective of his discipline to bear on two and a half centuries of fiction. Under his scrutiny, the novel reveals a wealth of insight into sociological, historical, and political phenomena. Morroe Berger illustrates his points with an extraordinary range of novels in Europe and America, from Defoe to Forster and Golding.
The interaction between the novel and social science started in the eighteenth century, when these two ways of examining human behavior and social life achieved their modern form. Writers of fiction broadened their outlook to take in social class and touched upon other issues that are still very much alive, such as individualism, marriage, and the status of women. The novelist, Berger makes clear, is no intruder among historians and social scientists, but rather has been focusing on the same landscape through a different lens. Berger demonstrates that the novel has enriched our understanding of political power, class, law, cultural conflict, and interpersonal relations. He compares Fielding's fiction with Mandeville's essays in the eighteenth century, and Silone's novels of power and bureaucracy with social scientists' treatments of these themes in the twentieth. He points out how such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies amplify the theory of the social contract. And he examines the clash of cultures as portrayed in the novel of colonial life. Having affirmed the novel's contribution to social science, Berger explodes its claims to offering a higher scientific truth—Balzac's zoology and Zola's experimental novel are cases in point—and reviews the long-standing dispute between science and literature exemplified in the writings of C. P. Snow.
“Reality Squared develops the scholarly discussion of the aesthetic of realism, documentary conventions, and modes of television broadcasting, in sophisticated new directions. Friedman’s historical perspective is especially valuable since so much discussion of the new aesthetic of realism on television fails to take into account similar trends throughout television history.”—Ellen Seiter, professor of communication, University of California at San Diego
“Reality Squared offers a rich variety of insights into the way television and new media make us believe in the worlds they represent. Spanning across the decades of early live TV to contemporary digital culture, this volume is an important history, not only of media but alsoof our perception of reality itself.”—Lynn Spigel, University of Southern California and author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the television industry and its critics have identified and promoted the re-emergence of “reality-based” television. During the past two decades, this type of programming has come to play a major role in both production decisions and network strategy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, viewers’ desire for “reality TV” shows no signs of diminishing, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Survivor, and MTV’s Real World.
Although debates concerning the relationship between representational media and reality have occupied scholars and artists for quite some time, a surprisingly small number of books have examined this subject. As the title suggests, Reality Squared examines the representation of reality within the squared televisual viewing frame, as
well as the exponential growth of these representational programs on broadcast, cable TV, and even beyond, to the worldwide web. The contributors approach the issues surrounding television and reality from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Topics include: the internet, the impact of global news events, weather predictions on the Weather Channel, and the representation of criminality on America’s
Most Wanted. This diverse volume contributes to the ongoing conversation about reality and representation, history and fiction, text and context, and the “inside” and “outside” of that box we call television.
In literary and cinematic fictions, the fantastic blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Lacking a consensus on definition, critics often describe the fantastic as supernatural, or similar to, but quite different from fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism.
In Unraveling the Real Cynthia Duncan provides a new theoretical framework for discussing how the fantastic explores both metaphysical and socially relevant themes in Spanish American fictions. Duncan deftly shows how authors and artists have used this literary genre to convey marginalized voices as well as critique colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism. Selecting examples from the works of such noted writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, among others, she shows how capacious the concept is, and why it eludes standard definition.
Challenging the notion that the fantastic is escapist in nature, Unraveling the Real shows how the fantastic has been politically engaged throughout the twentieth century, often questioning what is real or unreal. Presenting a mirror image of reality, the fantastic does not promoting a utopian parallel universe but rather challenges the way we think about the world around us and the cultural legacy of colonialism.
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