Creative Transformations

In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.

Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between trauma and creativity. It is about art in the service of healing, mourning, and memorialization. This book addresses the questions of how artistic expression facilitates the healing process; what the therapeutic action of art is, and if there is a relationship between mental instability and creativity. It also asks how self-analysis through art-making can be integrated with psychoanalytic work in order to enrich and facilitate emotional growth. Drawing on four decades of clinical practice and a critical reading of creativity literature, Sophia Richman presents a new theory of the creative process whose core components are relational conceptualizations of dissociation and witnessing. This is an interdisciplinary book which draws inspiration from life histories, clinical case material, neuroscience, and interviews with creators, as well as from various art forms such as film, literature, paintings, and music. Some areas of discussion include: art born of genocide, confrontation with mortality in illness and aging, and the clinical implications of memoirs written by psychoanalysts. Visual images are interspersed throughout the text that illustrate the reverberations of trauma and its creative transformation in the work of featured artists. Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma powerfully articulates how creative action is one of the most effective ways of coping with trauma and its aftershocks - it is in art, in all its forms, that sorrow is given shape and meaning. Here, Sophia Richman shows how art helps to master the chaos that follows in the wake of tragedy, how it restores continuity, connection and the will for a more fully lived life. This book is written for psychoanalysts as well as for other mental health professionals who practice and teach in academic settings. It will also be of interest to graduate and post-graduate students and will be relevant for artists who seek a better understanding of the creative process.

In this compelling book, Lauren Levine explores the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, Levine considers the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one’s own story, resonant with personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. Levine sees creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. She utilizes film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. She is concerned too with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim what has been lost, is at the heart of this volume. Attentive to the work of helping patients reclaim their memory and creative agency, his book will prove invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.

This book draws on agenda setting theory to examine how cultural organizations relate to media in order to increase their visibility, valence, and eventually build their public image. Most organizations have a keen interest in their symbolic presence, as their media visibility influences public knowledge, perceptions and even behaviors. Diminished public funding, in combination with the global proliferation of cultural entities, creates a competitive environment, leading to a transformation of cultural industries. In the book, several questions are under scrutiny: How do cultural organizations acquire symbolic significance? How do they become prominent in media content? Which mechanisms and processes should be examined by cultural managers as they set out to achieve salience? Is there a relationship between media and public salience? In other words, if an organization becomes symbolically prominent, in what ways is the public influenced, both in terms of perceptions as well as behaviors?

In Russia in the Context of Global Transformations (Capitalism and Communism, Culture and Revolution), the authors focus on the dramatic changes in Russia’s socio-economic system over the past hundred years. The contradictions of Russia’s triumphs and tragedies are studied in connection with the shifts in the world economic system. Basing themselves on the views of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, the authors show the causes and consequences of the main shifts in Russia’s development during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Topics addressed include the October Revolution, the contradictions of post-revolutionary development, the disintegration of the USSR, the collapse and stagnation during the post-USSR period and the prospects for overcoming contemporary problems.

This research-based book investigates the effects of digital transformation on the cultural and creative sectors. Through cases and examples, the book examines how artists and art institutions are facing the challenges posed by digital transformation, highlighting both positive and negative effects of the phenomenon. With contributions from an international range of scholars, the book examines how digital transformation is changing the way the arts are produced and consumed. As relative late adopters of digital technologies, the arts organizations are shown to be struggling to adapt, as issues of authenticity, legitimacy, control, trust, and co-creation arise. Leveraging a variety of research approaches, the book identifies managerial implications to render a collection that is valuable reading for scholars involved with arts and culture management, the creative industries and digital transformation more broadly.

This collection of papers from two workshops - held in Heidelberg, Germany, in July 1996 and Jerusalem, Israel, in October 1997 - is concerned with anthropological rather than theological aspects of the Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, ranging from the 'primary' religions of the archaic period and their complex developments in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the 'soteriological' movements and 'secondary' religions that emerged in Late Antiquity. The first part of the book focuses on "Confession and Conversion", while the second part is devoted to the topic of "Guilt, Sin and Rituals of Purification". The primary purpose of this volume is to convey a sense of the dynamics and dialectical relationships between the various Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions from the archaic period to Late Antiquity.