Photography After Postmodernism

In life after postmodernism our conception of photography is not the same as before. Photography After Postmodernism starts with this conception and explores what changes have affected photography, its relation to social life and our image-centred culture. Engaging with the visual environment and issues that have emerged in the postmodern world, David Bate introduces fresh approaches and analysis of photographs and their place within the aftermath of postmodernist thought. The book shows how photographs circulate in an 'image-world' beyond their art or media origins that deeply affects our sense of time and relation to memory. The role of archives, dreams, memories and time are deployed to develop and resituate arguments about photography made by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida to further engage and understand our contemporary condition. By considering how ‘afterwardness’ is invoked in the developments of modern and contemporary photography, Bate demonstrates the complex ways in which photographic images resonate across public and private spaces, while carrying a slippage of meaning that is never quite fixed, yet always contingent and social. The approach shows how modernist photography was already invested in values that its discourse could not enunciate, which resonates with much contemporary photography today. Featuring a range of historical and contemporary images, the book offers detailed and innovative readings of specific photographs which open new avenues of thought for those studying and researching visual culture and photography.

This book explores the major challenges that the long-standing and diversely debated demise of postmodernism signifies for American literature, art, culture, history, and politics, in the present, third decade of the twenty-first century. Its scope comprises a vigorous discussion of all these diverse fields undertaken by distinguished scholars as well as junior researchers, U.S. Americanists and European Americanists alike. Focusing on socio-political and cultural developments in the contemporary U.S., their contributions highlight the interconnectedness of the geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological crises that define the historical present on global scale. Chapter 16 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Del Loewenthal's career has been wide-ranging, spanning existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical psychotherapy, humanism, postmodernism, phototherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy and childhood studies. This collection combines new and recent works with earlier writings, drawing together his outstanding research and contribution to existential theory, practice and research. Containing chapters and papers chosen by Loewenthal himself, the book is divided into the following sections: • Existentialism after postmodernism and the psychological therapies • Practice, ideologies and politics: Now you see it, now you don’t! • Practice, practice issues and the nature of psychotherapeutic knowledge • Practice and theory: Implications not applications • Thoughtful practice and research • Conclusion: Hopefully unending, continually changing and astonishing After an introduction to the overall book, each section is accompanied by the author's exploration of his further thoughts on the pieces, his own subsequent learning and his comments on developments in the field since the time of writing. Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling after Postmodernism will be inspiring reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, counsellors, other mental health professionals in general, and existential therapists in particular.

Cities are material and symbolic spaces through which nations define their cultural identities. The great cities that have arisen on the North American continent have stimulated the imaginations of the United States and Canada in very different ways. This first comparative study of North American urban fiction starts out by delineating the sociohistorical and literary contexts in which cities grew into diverging symbolic spaces in American and Canadian culture. After an overview of recent developments in the cultural conception of urban space, the book takes New York and Toronto fiction as exemplary for exploring representations of the urban after postmodernism. It analyzes four twenty-first-century novels: two set in New York - Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved and Paule Marshall's The Fisher King - and two set in Toronto - Carol Shields's Unless and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For. While these texts continue to echo the specific traditions of nation building and canon formation in the United States and Canada, they also share certain features. All of them investigate the affective crossroads of the city while returning to a more realistic mode of representation. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor of American Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

This book engages with the critical decline of postmodernism and newer currents of thinking that have come to the fore, including postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural studies, constituting an exploration of the cultural landscape after the heyday of postmodernism in the West and its profound influence on the Chinese cultural scene. Topics discussed include the prevalent theoretical trends and cultural phenomena in the West in the wake of postmodernism, how these developments have influenced contemporary Chinese literary and cultural criticism, and how Chinese scholars can have an equal dialogue with the dominant Western theorists. The chapters examine critical issues and figures in the fields, including postmodernity and globalization, as well as the theories of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler. Taking a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, especially between China and the West, the title also sheds light on the imprint of Western theoretical trends on the literature and culture of contemporary China, exemplified in diasporic writing, cinema, women’s literature, popular culture, and the overall orientation of contemporary Chinese literature. The book will be a critical reference for all levels of reader interested in postmodernism, critical theory, postcolonialism, feminism, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

Shows how current photographic discourse can illuminate the analysis of recent literary realism and proposes a truly original photographic hermeneutics for literary study. Both realist, post-postmodernist aesthetics in the twenty-first century and the legacy of analog photography in its recent digital incarnation depend on an aesthetics of trust and a sense of contingent referentiality. Julia Breitbach's innovative study demonstrates how current photographic discourse may be used as an illuminating critical idiom for the analysis of recent forms of literary realism, thus proposing a photographic hermeneutics for the study ofliterature. Along with a thorough critical investigation of both fields, Breitbach offers a pioneering theoretical exploration of analog and digital photography based on recent "thing theory," which she then applies to in-depth analyses of realist aesthetics in selected post-millennial novels by Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and Ali Smith, yielding fresh perspectives on the remediation between photography and literature in the twenty-first century. An original contribution to the study of contemporary Anglophone literatures with an interdisciplinary appeal, this study will be of interest especially to scholars and students in Anglophone literary studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and media studies. Julia Breitbach is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

The second edition of Why Art Photography? is an updated, expanded introduction to the ideas behind today’s striking photographic images. Lively, accessible discussions of key issues such as ambiguity, objectivity, fiction, authenticity, and photography’s expanding field are supplemented with new material around timely topics such as globalization, selfie culture, and photographers’ use of advanced digital technologies, including CGI and virtual reality. The new edition includes: an expanded introduction extended chapters featuring emerging trends a larger selection of images, including new color images an improved and expanded bibliography This new edition is essential for students looking to enrich their understanding of photography as a complex and multi-faceted art form.

What comes after 'postmodernism'? A buzzword which began as an energising, radical critique became, by the 20th Century's end, a byword for fracture, eclecticism, political apathy and intellectual exhaustion. The last few years have seen a growing interest in critical realism as a possible, alternative way of moving forward. The virtues of critical realism lie in its successful provision of a philosophical grounding for the social sciences and humanities and of a methodology applicable to many different fields of analysis. After Postmodernism brings together some of the best-known names in the field to present the first truly interdisciplinary introduction to critical realism. The book presents the reader with a compendium of accessible essays illustrating the connection between meta-theory, theory and substantive research across Sociology, Philosophy, Literary Studies, Politics, Media Studies, Psychology and Science Studies. The flexibility of critical realism is illustrated in the range of topics discussed - ranging from quantum mechanics to cyberspace, to literary theory, nature, smoking, the future fo Marx, the unconscious and, of course, postmodernsim and the future of theory itself. Contributors: Allison Assiter, Ted Benton, Francis Barker, Roy Bhaskar, Jean Bricmont, Sue Clegg, Andrew Collier, Justin Cruickshank, Robert Fine, David Ford, Tim Forsyth, Rom Harre, Pam Higham, Philip Hodgkiss, Jose Lopez, Christopher Norris, Bertell Ollman, Jenneth Parker, Frank Pearce, Douglas V. Porpora, Garry Potter, John Scott, Philip Tew, Charles R Varela, Anthony Woodiwiss