Scenes of the Obscene

Scenes of the Obscene
Author: Kassandra Nakas
Publisher: VDG Weimar - Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3958994539

Artists and the public alike have always been fascinated by obscene imagery. The Obscene, however, is difficult to define. One of the earliest interpretations is of Greek origin and argues that the word derives from "ob skene", indicating the space behind the stage or scene. "Off-scene" remains what should be hidden from public view, be it morally questionable, offensive, disgusting or unbearable to look at. This book presents a collection of essays that cast light on some "Scene of the Obscene" in art and visual culture from the Middle Ages to today, taking into consideration the malleable nature of socio-cultural assumptions and theoretical reflections on the topic.The contributions focus on historically distinct artistic acts and social sites where established cultural categories and legal norms are violated, with artists and publishers deliberately breaking moral taboos and offending the public taste. They discuss how society reacted to these transregressions and how obscenity and its conceptions shape the face of their respective time.

Obscene Pedagogies

Obscene Pedagogies
Author: Carissa M. Harris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501730428

In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

At the Limit of the Obscene

At the Limit of the Obscene
Author: Erica Weitzman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2021-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810143186

As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

Scenes from the City

Scenes from the City
Author: James Sanders
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0847842908

Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York is a celebration of the rise of New York-shot films, particularly after the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting was formed in 1966. This revised and expanded edition, edited by James Sanders, includes a new decade of filmmaking in NYC, a section on women filmmakers and rare, behind-the-scenes shots directly from studio archives. It also explores the recent growth of the City's television industry with more episodic series being produced in New York City now than ever before. Today's the City's entertainment industry employs 130,000 New Yorkers and contributes more than $7 billion to the local economy each year.

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative. An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative. An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature
Author: Pablo Armellino
Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2012-02-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3838258738

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative is an exhaustive survey of Australian literature proposing itself as a journey through time and space. With a careful selection of texts which recount Australian history from the early days of white colonization to the present, this study endeavours to cast light on the process of socio-topographic construction that the settlers imposed upon the continent.As suggested by the title, the textual inquiry conducted in this book is driven by the stimulating ambiguity that lies between physical space and its discursive construction. A selection of canonical and non-canonical texts by authors ranging from Henry Lawson to Christos Tsiolkas aims to reveal the relationship between the space of the city (the scene) and the outback (the ob-scene space beyond the metropolitan area) and its role in the process of spatial construction that, through the last two centuries, has shaped Australia.Pablo Armellino’s distinctive approach to Australian literature makes Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative a very interesting work. Using a carefully selected range of novels, linked together using social and literary theory, it recounts the history of colonization in Australia in a particularly approachable manner. Through the analysis of each text the reader seamlessly learns about the expansion of the frontier, the creation of an ob-scene space beyond it and the use the Discourse makes of this mechanism. These characteristics would appeal to both an academic audience, which would appreciate the detailed text analysis, and a general audience, which would enjoy the historical and thematic aspect of the book.– Professor Carmen Concilio and Professor Pietro Deandrea, Facoltà di Lingue, Università di Torino

Sex Scene

Sex Scene
Author: Eric Schaefer
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2014-03-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822376806

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world. Contributors. Joseph Lam Duong, Jeffrey Escoffier, Kevin M. Flanagan, Elena Gorfinkel, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Eithne Johnson, Arthur Knight, Elana Levine, Christie Milliken, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Jacob Smith, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Linda Williams

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Author: Saidiya Hartman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2022-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324021594

The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated. Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.

Talking Bodies Vol. II

Talking Bodies Vol. II
Author: Bodie A. Ashton
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030369943

This volume brings together scholars from across disciplines and continents in order to continue to analyse, query, and deconstruct the complexities of bodily existence in the modern world. Comprising nine essays by leading and emerging scholars, and spanning issues ranging from literature, history, sociology, medicine, law and justice and beyond, Talking Bodies vol. II is a timely and prescient addition to the vital discussion of what bodies are, how we perceive them, and what they mean. As the essays of this volume demonstrate, it is imperative to question numerous established presumptions about both the manner by which our bodies perform their identities, and the processes by which their ownership can be impinged upon.

The Svetlana Boym Reader

The Svetlana Boym Reader
Author: Svetlana Boym
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 557
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501337513

Svetlana Boym was a prolific writer, a charismatic professor, a novelist, and a public intellectual. She was also a fiercely resourceful and reflective immigrant; her most resonant book, The Future of Nostalgia, was deeply rooted in that experience. Even after The Future of Nostalgia carried her fame beyond academic circles, few readers were aware of all of her creative personas. She was simply too prolific, and her work migrated across most people's disciplinary boundaries-from literary and cultural studies through film, visual, and material culture studies, performance, intermedia, and new media. The Svetlana Boym Reader presents a comprehensive view of Boym's singularly creative work in all its aspects. It includes Boym's classic essays, carefully chosen excerpts from her five books, and journalistic gems. Showcasing her roles both as curator and curated, the reader includes interviews and excerpts from exhibition catalogues as well as samples of intermedial works like Hydrant Immigrants. It also features autobiographical pieces that shed light on the genealogy of her scholarly work and rarities like an excerpt from Boym's first graduate school essay on Russian literature, complete with marginalia by her mentor Donald Fanger. Last but not least, the reader includes late pieces that Boym did not live to see through publication, as well as transcripts of her memorable last lectures and performances.