The Memory Of Tiresias

"Iampolski deals with concepts and ideas that are highly complex and frequently very abstract, yet his discussion—and the progression of his analyses—is always precise and easy to follow. . . . Each of his points is grounded in a careful examination of a specific text, and most of the texts are well-known to American audiences."—Vladimir Padunov, University of Pittsburgh

This book examines different affinities between major classical authors and great filmmakers alongside representations of ancient myth and history in popular cinema.

After many decades of neglect, the last forty years have seen a renewed scholarly appreciation of the literary value of the Greek novel. Within this renaissance of interest, four monographs have been published to date which focus on individual novels; I refer to the specialist studies of Achilles Tatius by Morales and Laplace and those of Chariton of Aphrodisias by Smith and Tilg. This book adds to this short list and takes as its singular focus Xenophon's Ephesiaca. Among the five fully extant Greek novels, the Ephesiaca occupies the position of being an anomaly, since scholars have conventionally considered it to be either a poorly written text or an epitome of a more sophisticated lost original. This monograph challenges this view by arguing that the author of the Ephesiaca is a competent writer in artistic control of his text, insofar as his work has a coherent and emplotted focus on the protagonists' progression in love and also includes references to earlier texts of the classical canon, not least Homer's Odyssey and the Platonic dialogues on Love. At the same time, the Ephesiaca exhibits stylistically an overall simplicity, contains many repetitions and engages with other texts via a thematic, rather than a pointed, type of intertextuality; these and other features make this text different from the other extant Greek novels. This book explains this difference with the help of Couégnas' view of 'paraliterature, ' a term that refers not to its status as 'non-literature' but rather to literature of a different kind, that is simple, action-oriented, and entertaining. By offering a definition of the Ephesiaca as a paraliterary narrative, this monograph sheds new light on this novel and its position within the Greek novelistic corpus, whilst also offering a more nuanced understanding of intertextuality and paraliterature.

This is the first book to offer a systematic account of the concept of opacity in the aesthetic field. Engaging with works by Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low, the study considers the cultural, epistemological, and ethical values of images and sounds that are fuzzy, indeterminate, distorted, degraded, or otherwise indistinct. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture shows how opaque forms of art address problems of mediation, knowledge, and information. It also intervenes in current debates about new systems of visibility and surveillance by explaining how indefinite art provides a critique of the positivist drive behind these regimes. A timely contribution to media theory, cinema studies, American studies, and aesthetics, the book presents a novel and extensive analysis of the politics of transparency.

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

“Widdis’s rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema.” —Kritika This major reimagining of the history of Soviet film and its cultural impact explores the fundamental transformations in how film, through the senses, remade the Soviet self in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a shared ambition for a ‘sensory revolution’ to accompany political and social change: Soviet men and women were to be reborn into a revitalized relationship with the material world. Cinema was seen as a privileged site for the creation of this sensory revolution: Film could both discover the world anew, and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing upon an extraordinary array of films, noted scholar Emma Widdis shows how Soviet cinema, as it evolved from the revolutionary avant-garde to Socialist Realism, gradually shifted its materialist agenda from emphasizing the external senses to instilling the appropriate internal senses (consciousness, emotions) in the new Soviet subject.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

Screen Culture: History and Textuality explores the impact of digital culture on the discipline of film and television studies. Whether the notion of screen culture is used to designate the technological platforms common to present-day digital media, or whether it refers to the support material on which moving images have historically been projected, scanned, or displayed, the 15 previously unpublished essays included here are primarily concerned with the intermedial appraisal of film, television, and digital culture. Contributors are Richard Abel, William Boddy, Ben Brewster, John Fullerton, Douglas Gomery, Alison Griffiths, Vreni Hockenjos, Jan Holmberg, Arne Lunde, Peter Lunenfeld, Charles Musser, Jan Olsson, Barry Salt, Michele L. Torre, William Uricchio, and Malin Wahlberg. Stockholm Studies in Cinema series Distributed for John Libbey Publishing