This book is a contribution to the emerging field of research-based performance, which seeks to gain a wider audience for issues that are crucial to our understanding of history and to informing our future actions. The book examines the role of theater in portraying the Shoah in France, the French Resistance, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each of the three chapters consists of an original dramatic work by the author and an accompanying critical essay.

This book is a contribution to the emerging field of research-based performance, which seeks to gain a wider audience for issues that are crucial to our understanding of history and to informing our future actions. The book examines the role of theater in portraying the Shoah in France, the French Resistance, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each of the three chapters consists of an original dramatic work by the author and an accompanying critical essay.

Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer is an attempt to identify and properly contextualize the social critique in Kafka’s biography and work that links father-son antagonisms, heterodox Jewish religious thinking, and anti-authoritarian or anarchist protest against the rising power of bureaucratic modernity. The book proceeds chronologically, starting with biographical facts often neglected or denied relating to Kafka’s relations with the Anarchist circles in Prague, followed by an analysis of the three great unfinished novels—Amerika, The Trial, The Castle—as well as some of his most important short stories. Fragments, parables, correspondence, and his diaries are also used in order to better understand the major literary works. Löwy’s book grapples with the critical and subversive dimension of Kafka’s writings, which is often hidden or masked by the fabulistic character of the work. Löwy’s reading has already generated controversy because of its distance from the usual canon of literary criticism about the Prague writer, but the book has been well received in its original French edition and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish.

Ranging over the broad spectrum of contemporary literary and film theory, Breaking the Frame explores the different approaches to cinematic art that are offered by cognitive psychology, feminist theory, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. In this study Inez Hedges looks closely at films that challenge accepted norms in both form and content. The films discussed here, including Zazie, La Nuit de Varennes, and Interiors, break out of conventional frames, upsetting our expectations about how films should look (the film frame) as well as how experience is usually organized by cinematic works of art (the psychological or cognitive frame). Hedges focuses on two primary areas: the way that the structure of film texts guides the interpretations of the spectator (hermeneutics) and the way that films reflect social models (representation).

Breaking the Frame will be of interest not only to scholars and students of film and literature but also to today's "filmliterate" public who enjoy exploring the theoretical and philosophical implications of cinematic works.

In this interdisciplinary cultural history that encompasses film, literature, music, and drama, Inez Hedges follows the thread of the Faustian rebel in the major intellectual currents of the last hundred years. She presents Faust and his counterpart Mephistopheles as antagonistic--yet complementary--figures whose productive conflict was integral to such phenomena as the birth of narrative cinema, the rise of modernist avant-gardes before World War II, and feminist critiques of Western cultural traditions.

"Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles "pursues a dialectical approach to cultural history. Using the probing lens of cultural studies, Hedges shows how claims to the Faustian legacy permeated the struggle against Nazism in the 1930s while infusing not only the search for socialist utopias in Russia, France, and Germany, but also the quest for legitimacy on both sides of the Cold War divide after 1945.

Hedges balances new perspectives on such well-known works as Thomas Mann's "Dr. Faustus "and Jack Kerouac's "Dr. Sax "with discussions of previously overlooked twentieth-century expressions of the Faust myth, including American "film noir" and the Faust films of Stan Brakhage." "She evaluates musical compositions--Hanns Eisler's "Faust "libretto, the opera "Votre Faust "by Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, and Alfred Schnittke's "Faust Cantata--"as well as works of fiction and drama in French and German, many of which have heretofore never been discussed outside narrow disciplinary confines.

Enhanced by twenty-four illustrations, "Framing Faust "provides a fascinating and focused narrative of some of the major cultural struggles of the past century as seen through the Faustian prism, and establishes Faust as an important present-day frame of reference.