Focusing on necessary lessons and skills to make watchable films, this profusely illustrated volume provides budding directors with vital information they can use. Featuring a wealth of definitions and concise, jargon-free explanations, this handy guide also explores many questions, such as "Why do movies move? What is the best way to light and expose shots for excellent results? What is the ideal method to create an eye-pleasing composition within the frame? "and" What is the optimal procedure for recording crystal clear sounds?" Armed with this do-it-yourself resource, film and video makers of all ages and experience levels can stride confidently into multimedia projects of any size.

In May 1906, the "Atlantic Monthly commented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves.
Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism, "A Sense of Things will be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone-the humanities continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? In Other Things, Bill Brown explores this question by considering an assortment of objects-from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers-that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo. Brown ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles's Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, he ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Brown provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

In this 15th installment of 'Dream Whip', it is 2006 and Bill Brown decides to take a cycle trip across America.

Have you heard the terms structuralism and deconstruction and postmodernism but aren t really sure what they mean? Have you taken a whole course on literary criticism but are still feeling lost? Here s the book you need to sort it all out and enjoy doing so!

In Literary Theory For Beginners, Mary Klages takes you into her classroom, cuts through the jargon, and explains the ABCs (and the DEFs as well) in terms you can get your head around. Her breadth of knowledge, her unique skills as a teacher, and the delightful illustrations of Frank Reynoso help us understand why literature matters, how it affects us, and how it reflects history, culture, and diversity. Here are ways of thinking about literature not just reading it methods of study and frameworks of interpretation from classical humanism all the way up to psychoanalysis, gender and queer theory, race, postcolonialism, and, yes, postmodernism

With wit and wisdom, Klages takes on the two most frequently asked questions about literature and makes it all fun:

- What does the work MEAN? (What is the deeper, hidden, or symbolic meaning? Did the author intend all these meanings? Are any and all meanings present in the text? Are all meanings equally valid?) - What does the work DO? (Why is literature important? What effect does it have on the reader? How can literature be a force for social change?)

So sit back, relax, and take it all in!