Noted literary critic, psychoanalyst, and theorist Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, just delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of childhood regained, providing an explanation for Proust's...
Noted literary critic, psychoanalyst, and theorist Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of ...
With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman--many of which have...
With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging,...
Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that a ~curiositya (TM), with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.
Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modern...
An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and itnerest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the reader compelled to respond, one way or another. This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian...
An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature...
Some of the most significant currents in modern intellectual and cultural history pass by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). By choosing in her book as a guiding theme the idea of the scientist who creates a monster, she both revives for the Romantic period the traditional link between scientific experiment and natural magic, and makes her own contribution to the debate on the difference between "creation" and "production" that was flourishing among the natural scientists of her time. Frankenstein thus signals a remarkable integration of the broad issues of...
Some of the most significant currents in modern intellectual and cultural history pass by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). By choosin...
Originally published in 1984, The Clothing of Clio is concerned with the wide variety of ways in which the past was represented in Britain and France in the nineteenth century. This was a period of unprecedented historical-mindedness, in which novelists, poets, painters, collectors, as well as historians, took the past as their subject matter. Dr Bann argues that the concrete vision of the past should be studied across the whole field of representation. He shows that, with the advent of the nineteenth century, there comes into existence a historical poetics - a set of linguistic procedures in...
Originally published in 1984, The Clothing of Clio is concerned with the wide variety of ways in which the past was represented in Britain and France ...
Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth-century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and combative correspondents. His letters raise issues of particular and widespread interest both within Scotland and further afield. His correspondence with Stephen Bann, the English poet and academic, have a very special place in this context. These letters present in a clear and commensurable form the development of his ideas about poetry and art, and increasingly about sculpture and gardening, over this critical five-year period of his creative...
Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth-century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and co...
