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Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains,
modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space
both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains'
reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with
modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity
based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical
and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none
more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German
culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of
Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the
circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology
and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the
high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality
of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive
engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media,
not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very
question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites
consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres,
and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine
Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and
the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other,
Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical
study of modernism.
Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains,
modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space
both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains'
reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with
modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity
based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical
and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none
more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German
culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of
Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the
circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology
and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the
high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality
of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive
engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media,
not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very
question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites
consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres,
and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine
Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and
the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other,
Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical
study of modernism.
Americans is the second book in a series on America by Christopher
Morris. While the first book My America (Steidl, 2006) focused on
Republican nationalism, Americans takes a much broader journey
across American society. With an empathetic and critical eye,
Morris presents a nation in a state of perpetual loss and its
people searching for an identity- stranded within two long-running
wars and an economy on the verge of collapse. Christopher Morris,
born in California in 1958, began his career as a documentary
conflict photographer, working almost exclusively with Time
Magazine, where he has been on contract since 1990. Parallel to his
career as a photojournalist, Morris has recently expanded into the
fashion world, working for such clients as Roberto Cavalli and
magazines on the collections of Louis Vuitton, Prada and Max Mara.
Morris has received many awards including the Robert Capa Gold
Medal, the Olivier Rebbot Award, and the Infinity Award for
photojournalism from the International Center of Photography.
Morris is a founding member of VII Photo Agency in New York.
New essays providing an overview of the major movements, genres,
and authors of 19th-century German literature in social and
political context. This volume provides an overview of the major
movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in
the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary
focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also
substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama,
philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in
its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary
scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following
the editors' introduction, essays consider the impact of
Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effectsof major
movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the
development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the
changing cultural scene. The second section presents overviews of
the principal movements ofthe time (Junges Deutschland, Vormarz,
Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and
Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres
of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. The final
section provides bibliographical resources in the form of a
critical bibliography and a list of primary sources. Contributors
to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature,
culture, and history from North America andEurope: Andrew Webber,
Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst
Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau,
Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer. Clayton Koelb is
Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at the University
of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is Associate
Professor of German at the same institution.
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Earth Dreams (Hardcover)
Janet Morris; Edited by Christopher Morris; Cover design or artwork by Roy Mauritsen
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R1,018
R840
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Literate Thief (Paperback)
Janet Morris; Illustrated by Roy Mauritsen; Edited by Christopher Morris
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R718
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Beyond Wizardwall (Hardcover)
Janet Morris; Edited by Christopher Morris
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R1,009
R831
Discovery Miles 8 310
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Jack Clark is a man who needs a break. A failed relationship,
mounting pressure in his TV production job means he needs to get
away. He escapes to a cabin in the woods near Manitoulin; a small
Mountain town north of Montreal. Jack hopes to find peace and maybe
a new start. What he finds is a small town gripped with rumour,
murder and child abduction. Unfortunately for him he is drawn to
the centre of the case by Annie and the Loon Jack rescues from a
cold northern lake. The Cry of the Loon is a tale of loss,
loneliness and love set amongst the mountains, forests and lakes of
central Quebec.
The work of E.L. Doctorow is most often seen as a political and
cultural critique of eras of American history, like the settlement
of the West, the Gilded Age, the Depression, or the beginnings of
the Cold War. In his fiction critics have found searching and
subversive questions concerning received national values. At the
same time, they have seen him as a literary experimentor, comparing
his with the work of such modernist writers as Faulkner and
Hemingway.
"Models of Misrepresentation," an original and comprehensive
reading of Doctorow's work, considers both these views under a
broader rubric, the struggle for representation in art. The author
of this penetrating and persuasive study considers this theme from
a philosophical standpoint: How can the writer depict America, or
how can the reader interpret its values, when the very capacity of
language to represent is put in doubt, as it is in Doctorow's
fiction? From this perspective, Doctorow's works form part of this
century's continuing intellectual crisis over the possibility of
meaning in art. The understanding of this crisis in the work of
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida shows how the broader issue of
representation underpins both Doctorow's political-cultural
critiques and his literary experimentalism.
This vantage-point sheds new light on some perennial questions
that intrigue Doctorow's readers: Who are the narrators of
"Ragtime" and "Loon Lake"? Why do the novels' left-wing critiques
also undermine left-wing solutions? What is the significance of
repeated leitmotifs in his work? Who does Doctorow's later fiction
seem to return to simpler literary forms? In "Models of
Misrepresentation" the answers to these questions are discovered in
the novels' continuing preoccupation is also apparent in Doctorow's
book reviews, interviews, and essays. It is animated by an
intransigent despair. Looking at Doctorow's novels as models of
misrepresentation reveals doubts in them more dangerous than those
usually associated with social satire or "avant-gardism," for they
extend to the heart of writing itself.
In The Big Muddy, the first long-term environmental history of the
Mississippi, Christopher Morris offers a brilliant tour across five
centuries as he illuminates the interaction between people and the
landscape, from early hunter-gatherer bands to present-day
industrial and post-industrial society.
Morris shows that when Hernando de Soto arrived at the lower
Mississippi Valley, he found an incredibly vast wetland, forty
thousand square miles of some of the richest, wettest land in North
America, deposited there by the big muddy river that ran through
it. But since then much has changed, for the river and for the
surrounding valley. Indeed, by the 1890s, the valley was rapidly
drying. Morris shows how centuries of increasingly intensified
human meddling--including deforestation, swamp drainage, and levee
construction--led to drought, disease, and severe flooding. He
outlines the damage done by the introduction of foreign species,
such as the Argentine nutria, which escaped into the wild and are
now busy eating up Louisiana's wetlands. And he critiques the most
monumental change in the lower Mississippi Valley--the
reconstruction of the river itself, largely under the direction of
the Army Corps of Engineers. Valley residents have been paying the
price for these human interventions, most visibly with the disaster
that followed Hurricane Katrina. Morris also describes how valley
residents have been struggling to reinvigorate the valley
environment in recent years--such as with the burgeoning catfish
and crawfish industries--so that they may once again live off its
natural abundance.
Morris concludes that the problem with Katrina is the problem with
the Amazon Rainforest, drought and famine in Africa, and fires and
mudslides in California--it is the end result of the ill-considered
bending of natural environments to human purposes.
A characteristic feature of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera is
the tendency to link scenes with numerous and often surprisingly
lengthy orchestral interludes, frequently performed with the
curtain closed. Often taken for granted or treated as a filler by
audiences and critics, these interludes can take on very prominent
roles, representing dream sequences, journeys and sexual
encounters, and in some cases becoming a highlight of the opera.
Christopher Morris investigates the implications of these important
but strangely overlooked passages. Combining close readings of
individual musical texts with an investigation of the critical
discourse surrounding the operas, Morris shows how the interludes
shed light not only on the representational and narrative
capacities of the orchestra, but also on the supposed 'absolute'
realm of instrumental music, a concept to which many critics
appealed when they associated the interludes with 'purely musical'
and 'symphonic' qualities.
In a radical new interpretation of the works of Alfred
Hitchcock, Christopher Morris argues that suspense--the fundamental
component of Hitchcock's cinema--is best understood through
deconstruction of the very meaning of the word, which relates to
dependence or hanging. He analyzes its portrayal first in painting
and sculpture and then in Hitchcock's body of work. In this
iconographic tradition, hanging figures challenge the significance
of human identity and rationality, and further imply that closure,
or an end to suspense, is all but illusory.
This work represents the first deconstructive approach to
suspense, and the first-ever survey of the iconography of the
hanging figure. Hitchcock's films provide ample opportunity for
such discussion, with their constant use of the tool of suspense,
and Morris argues that, essentially, all of human existence is in
this very state, a state embodied particularly well by the films he
discusses. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and
J. Hillis Miller, this cross-disciplinary study of an important
cinematic oeuvre establishes the advantage of a deconstructive and
figurative approach to an often-studied directorial style, one that
nearly embodies a genre unto itself.
A characteristic feature of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera is the tendency to link scenes with numerous and often surprisingly lengthy orchestral interludes, frequently performed with the curtain closed. Often taken for granted or treated as a filler by audiences and critics, these interludes can take on very prominent roles, representing dream sequences, journeys and sexual encounters. Combining studies of individual musical texts with an investigation of the critical discourse surrounding the operas, Christopher Morris investigates the implications of these important but strangely overlooked passages.
Mississippi represented the Old South and all that it stood
for--perhaps more so than any other state. Tracing its long
histories of economic, social, and cultural evolution, Morris takes
a close and richly detailed look at a representative Southern
community: Jefferson Davis's Warren County, in the state's
southwestern corner. Drawing on many wills, deeds, court records,
and manuscript materials, he reveals the transformation of a
loosely knit, typically Western community of pioneer homesteaders
into a distinctly Southern society based on plantation agriculture,
slavery, and a patriarchal social order.
"This thoughtful, well-written study doubtless will be widely read
and deservedly influential."--American Historical Review.
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