New in Paperback. Examines the tensions between the aims of military technology and modernist aesthetics in relation to perception. This book analyses the operation of mechanical and electronic technologies in connection with two seemingly disparate fields: state-of-the-art military equipment of the 20th and 21st centuries and the experimental art, music and writing of the late-19th and early-20th century. Reading the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells against Apache attack...

How does comedy in film attempt cultural criticism? How does cinema use its own visual technology to reflect on and critique its power within both politics and visual culture?
Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film addresses these questions in detail as it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means of staging cultural criticism. Focusing on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture that cinema helped to generate, foster and question in the twentieth century, it examines the issues of technology that allow film comedies to engage in self-reflexive cultural...

The influence of Roland Barthes on Burgin's work is well documented. Equally, Burgin's prominence as an artist and theorist concerned with text and image offers a productive dialogue with Barthes' work. Victor Burgin has long been considered both theorist and practitioner, while Barthes is more known as a theorist and writer. In bringing to the fore Barthes's practice of painting and drawing, Barthes/Burgin prompts a new critical consideration of Barthes/Burgin, theory/practice, writing/making and criticality/visuality.
Barthes/Burgin features two new interviews with Burgin, one concerned...

How does comedy in film attempt cultural criticism? How does cinema use its own visual technology to reflect on and critique its power within both politics and visual culture?
Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film addresses these questions in detail as it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means of staging cultural criticism. Focusing on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture that cinema helped to generate, foster and question in the twentieth century, it examines the issues of technology that allow film comedies to engage in self-reflexive cultural...