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American Obscurantism - History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,680
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American Obscurantism - History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film (Hardcover)
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Total price: R1,700
Discovery Miles: 17 000
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American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S.
culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late
twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling
manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this
content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning
the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every
stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers
such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen
brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of
American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western
frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual
history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of
a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these
explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable
occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or
naivete that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such
oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds
with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that
marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing
critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to
politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an
emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a
formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly
white-,bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism
posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of
American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a
canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the
value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or
critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting
historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the
Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The
Bridge, one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an
optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to
the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive
visual culture as well as racial vision.
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