Crossmappings

On Visual Culture

Author: Elisabeth Bronfen and Griselda Pollock Series: New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts

A major cultural critic rethinks Creativity & the Cultural Imaginary

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Summary

A major cultural critic rethinks Creativity & the Cultural Imaginary

Description

The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.

Critic Reviews

“Brilliant essays on the female nude, on images not just of chess games but of chess queens in recent film and television ... full of marvelous and disturbing ideas ... Summing Up: Recommended.”

CHOICE
This is a very important, relevant book for today’s world. Bronfen is one of the very rare scholars who, in accessible prose, offers in-depth analyses of the interactions between “high” art and “popular” visual culture, focusing on the socio-political relevance of that crossover. Analysing literature, cinema, television series and other works of popular fiction, from present to past and back, Bronfen is a brilliant “image-thinker”, and so makes a strong case for the urgent necessity of the Humanities in today’s world. Mieke Bal, Independent scholar affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and video artist

About the Author

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and her books in psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic; The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents; Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film; Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, and Mad Men, Death and the American Dream.