Can detective stories help us to understand the socio-political transformation of Western society since the days of the Enlightenment?
I love ambitious books of interdisciplinary analysis, and this book sets out to bridge the gap between the fantastical worlds of Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and Jules Maigret and the harsh realities of Adam Smith, Erving Goffman, and Richard Hofstadter.
The detective, the conspiracy theorist, and the sociologist all share a desire to establish order and certainty during chaotic and dangerous times.
The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular…
The 1970s were a second ‘Golden Age’ for Hollywood cinema, but many creative individuals from this time remain marginalized. Their names are unfamiliar, and their films are unseen.
This new collection of essays edited by Lennard, Palmer, and Pomerance combines canonical directors (De Palma, Lumet, Ashby, Peckinpah) with more neglected figures whose work won’t be easy to find on Netflix: Elaine May, Paul Mazursky, Joan Micklin Silver, Bob Rafelson…
During cinema’s current craze for pre-sold sequels, franchises, biopics, and 1980s nostalgia, a look back at the 1970s reminds us of how fresh and original (if not always profitable) Hollywood could be.
In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases.With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of…
Religious ideas are alive and well, sometimes in the most secular of places.
In this book, Nicole Aschoff explains how four contemporary prophets–Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, the Gates Foundation, and John Mackey (founder of Whole Foods)–help to sustain capitalism by appropriating forces of socio-political and environmental critique.
Drawing upon the work of Luc Boltanski, Aschoff’s sociological analysis is vibrant, insightful, and (at a mere 150 pages) refreshingly economical.
As severe environmental degradation, breathtaking inequality, and increasing alienation push capitalism against its own contradictions, mythmaking has become as central to sustaining our economy as profitmaking.
Enter the new prophets of capital: Sheryl Sandberg touting the capitalist work ethic as the antidote to gender inequality; John Mackey promising that free markets will heal the planet; Oprah Winfrey urging us to find solutions to poverty and alienation within ourselves; and Bill and Melinda Gates offering the generosity of the 1 percent as the answer to a persistent, systemic inequality. The new prophets of capital buttress an exploitative system, even as the…
Cinema emerged in 1895 to crown a century of Romantic multimedia experimentation. Artists began to explore a medium that incorporates all the others and has seemingly unlimited potential to affect the way we think and feel.
Decades before Hollywood made celebrity superstars and fan culture a global phenomenon, artists such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner hoped to establish a new religion of audio-visual spectacle. But could an ultimate synthesis of all the arts really save humanity?
Through an exploration of musical biopics such as Song Without End (1960) and Lisztomania (1975), this book traces the various historical and political consequences of nineteenth-century multimedia culture and the artist’s conflicted desire to explain the world in a new way.
