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Dear MECCSA Subscribers, Free postage to UK customers We hope the following title will be of interest to you. Melodrama An Aesthetics of Impossibility Jonathan Goldberg "Jonathan Goldberg is always interesting and always incisive. In this wide-ranging and powerfully revisionist study he tracks the melodramatic form across music, film, fiction, and television, from Fidelio to The Wire. His suggestive readings show how melodrama's rhetoric of moral peril generates queer energy and brings about 'an aesthetics of the impossible situation.'"-Michael Warner, author of Publics and Counterpublics "Melodrama is a major work that offers a superbly original way of thinking queerness, impossibility, and melodrama together. Exploring the insistence of nonidentity in the melodramatic mode, Jonathan Goldberg reads texts by Beethoven, Sirk, Fassbinder, Haynes, Hitchcock, Highsmith, Cather, and Davies to show how melodrama, by confronting limitation, reveals that nothing is only what it seems: other readings are always available; other potentialities always inhere. Beautifully elaborated, theoretically pointed, and intellectually provocative, Melodrama gives thought in constant motion a chance to take center stage."- Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials. Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University and the author of several books, most recently Strangers on a Train: A Queer Film Classic. He is also the author of Willa Cather and Others and editor of Queering the Renaissance, both also published by Duke University Press. Duke University Press Theory Q August 2016 224pp 9780822361916 PB £19.99 now only £15.99* when you quote CSL816MELO when you order http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/melodrama UK Postage and Packing FREE, Europe £4.50, RoW £4.99 (PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: CSL816MELO ** for discount) To order a copy please contact Marston on +44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> or visit our website: http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/ where you can also receive your discount *Price subject to change. **Offer excludes the USA, Canada, South America Follow us on Twitter @CAP_Ltd<http://twitter.com/#!/CAP_Ltd> or Facebook Combined Academic Publishers<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Combined-Academic-Publishers/196269570500> Sign up to our newsletter email alerts here<http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/content/34-subscribe-to-our-newsletter> -------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA mailing list -------------------------------------------------------- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the MECCSA list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MECCSA&A=1 ------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education. This mailing list is a free service and is not restricted to members. It is an unmoderated list and content reflect the views of those who post to the list and not of MeCCSA as an organisation. MeCCSA recommends that the list be used only for posting of information (for example about events, publications, conferences, lectures) of interest to members or to promote discussion of current issues of wide general interest in the field. Posts to the MeCCSA mailing list are public, indexed by Google, and can be accessed from the JISCMail website (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/meccsa.html). Any messages posted to the list are subject to the JISCMail acceptable use policy, which states that users should avoid “engaging in unreasonable behaviour, or disrupting the general flow of discussion on a list.” For further information, please visit: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/ --------------------------------------------------------