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Carla Freccero

“Had he lived in the sixteenth century, André Breton would have proclaimed: ‘Art will be queer or it will not be.’ Such is the enduring truth we obtain from Carla Freccero’s powerful, inventive, indeed genial readings of the early modern canon. A brilliant work showing us what we can do with what we call the past.”--Tom Conley, author of The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France

“Carla Freccero’s beautifully written book offers a strong, persuasive, and new way of reading queer early modern texts. Refusing the historicist view that would draw fierce lines between premodern and modern, Freccero asks her reader to consider premodern texts as intervening in the logic of their times and persisting within modernity in spectral form. Her singular and deft way of moving between contemporary culture and politics and the animated remnants of premodern texts offers a brilliant model for contemporary scholarship and a truly innovative turn in queer studies.”--Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley

In Queer/Early/ModernCarla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term “queer,” in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the after-effects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of “fantasmatic historiography” that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.

Duke University Press

1/25/2006 192pp 9780822336907 PB £14.99 now only £10.49 when you quote CS0710QEMO when you order.

Diva

Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema

Angela Dalle Vacche & Guy Maddin

"Diva is an impressive study on an important and fascinating topic. Those interested in European cultural studies, feminism, World War I, theater history, and early twentieth-century nationalism--to name a few areas--will find this book of value.” Charles Musser, Professor of Film Studies and Theater Studies, Yale University

In Diva Angela Dalle Vacche offers the first authoritative study of this important “film” genre of the cinema that preceded the Great War of 1914-1918. She analyzes some seventy films, as well as the work of actresses such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, and Pina Menichelli, to establish what the diva film contributed to the modernist development of the “new woman.” Contrasting the Italian diva with the Hollywood vamp Theda Bara and the famous Danish star Asta Nielsen, Dalle Vacche shows how the diva oscillates between articulating Henri Bergson's vibrant life-force (élan vital) and representing the suffering figure of the Catholic mater dolorosa. Diva sheds important new light on the eccentric implantation of modernity in Italy, as well as on how, before World War I, the filmic image was associated with the powers of the occult and not with the Freudian unconscious, as has been argued until now.

Contents

Theory and Technology

1. The Shape of Time: Élan Vital and Memento Mori; 2. Laocoön's Filmstrip: Classicism, Marxism, Vitalism; 3. Orientalism: Ballets Russes, Occultism, Canudo; 4. Wings of Desire: Aviation, Fashion, Circus Stunts

History and Analysis

5. Acting: Prostitution, Vertigo, Close-up; 6. Modern Woman: Minor Stars and the Short Film; 7. Tropes: Obsessions and Traumas of a Genre; 8. Nino Oxilia: Blue Blood and Satanic Rhapsody

Conclusion: Beyond the Femme Fatale; Portraits: Biographical Profiles of Actresses; Time Line: Cultural Events and the Diva Film; Archival Locations and Filmography

University of Texas Press

8 colour and 108 b&w illustrations, 1 DVD

3/25/2008 330pp 9780292717114 PB £22.99 now only £16.09 when you quote CS0710QEMO when you order.

Orson Welles in Italy

Alberto Anile & Marcus Perryman

Fleeing a Hollywood that spurned him, Orson Welles arrived in Italy in 1947 to begin his career anew. Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kanehis six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile's book depicts the artist's life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of OthelloDrawing on revelatory new material on the artist's personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italyalso chronicles Italian cinema's transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the cold war.

Indiana University Press

29 b&w illustrations

9/25/2013 378pp 9780253010483 PB £23.99 now only £16.79 when you quote CS0710QEMO when you order.

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