Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark...

Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party' - a party which includes such memb...

One of the most distinguished filmmakers working today, David Lynch is a director whose vision of cinema is firmly rooted in fine art. He was motivated to make his first film as a student because he wanted a painting that “would really be able to move.” Most existing studies of Lynch, however, fail to engage fully with the complexities of his films’ relationship to other art forms. The Film Paintings of David Lynch fills this void, arguing that Lynch’s cinematic output needs to be...

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions:What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence?How is presence achieved through th...

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associat...

For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made independent films such as Scanners and A History of Violence which aim to disturb, surprise, and challenge audiences. He has also repeatedly drawn on literary fiction for inspiration, adapting themes from authors like William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Patrick McGrath for the big screen; David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? is the first book to explore how underground and mainstream fiction have influence...

In Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey addresses some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship and narrative. New media technologies, such as video and DVD, have transformed the way we experience film, and the viewers’ relationship to film image and cinema’s narrative structure has also been fundamentally altered. These technologies give viewers the means to control both image and story, so that films produced to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be ...

Why have certain kinds of documentary and non-narrative films emerged as the most interesting, exciting, and provocative movies made in the last twenty years? Ranging from the films of Ross McElwee (Bright Leaves) and Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I) to those of Abbas Kiarostami (Close Up) and Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), such films have intrigued viewers who at the same time have struggled to categorize them. Sometimes described as personal documenta...

Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers, including the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This volume takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar; and like all grammars, it forms part of the system of rules t...

A Companion to Translation Studies is the first work of its kind. It provides an authoritative guide to key approaches in translation studies. All of the essays are specially commissioned for this collection, and written by leading international experts in the field. The book is divided into nine specialist areas: culture, philosophy, linguistics, history, literary, gender, theatre and opera, screen, and politics. Contributors include Susan Bassnett, Gunilla Anderman and Christina Schäffner. ...

A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth.In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North Ame...

What does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre’s potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to fail?In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US expe...