Spectacular Realities

Spectacular Realities PDF Author: Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520221680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
"An exciting, innovative, and significant work. The author points to how the crowd experience transcended class and gender divisions and was transformed from acts of collective violence into acts of collective consumption."—Michael B. Miller, author of Shanghai on the Métro

Spectacular Realities

Spectacular Realities PDF Author: Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520221680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
"An exciting, innovative, and significant work. The author points to how the crowd experience transcended class and gender divisions and was transformed from acts of collective violence into acts of collective consumption."—Michael B. Miller, author of Shanghai on the Métro

Spectacular Realities

Spectacular Realities PDF Author: Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520924208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.

The Spectacular Past

The Spectacular Past PDF Author: Maurice Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

It's So French!

It's So French! PDF Author: Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226742431
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Looks at the influence of French culture on a variety of motion pictures in the 1950s and 1960s, including "Gigi" and "Funny Face."

The Spectacular Now

The Spectacular Now PDF Author: Tim Tharp
Publisher: Scholastic UK
ISBN: 1407146467
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Sutter's the guy you want at your party. Aimee's not. She needs help and it's up to Sutter to show Aimee a splendiferous time and then let her go forth and prosper. But Aimee's not like other girls and before long he's over his head. For the first time in his life he has the power to make a difference in someone else's life - or ruin it forever.

Society Of The Spectacle

Society Of The Spectacle PDF Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: Bread and Circuses Publishing
ISBN: 1617508306
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s

Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s PDF Author: Daniel Stein
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030158950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
This volume examines the emergence of modern popular culture between the 1830s and the 1860s, when popular storytelling meant serial storytelling and when new printing techniques and an expanding infrastructure brought serial entertainment to the masses. Analyzing fiction and non-fiction narratives from the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Brazil, Popular Culture—Serial Culture offers a transnational perspective on border-crossing serial genres from the roman feuilleton and the city mystery novel to abolitionist gift books and world’s fairs.

A Spectacular Secret

A Spectacular Secret PDF Author: Jacqueline Goldsby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679198X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity. To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors—Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson—and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidence—lynching photographs—to show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise. An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.

The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World

The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World PDF Author: Tom Roston
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683356934
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
An “engrossing” history of the restaurant atop the World Trade Center “that ruled the New York City skyline from April 1976 until September 11, 2001” (Booklist, starred review). In the 1970s, New York City was plagued by crime, filth, and an ineffective government. The city was falling apart, and even the newly constructed World Trade Center threatened to be a fiasco. But in April 1976, a quarter-mile up on the 107th floor of the North Tower, a new restaurant called Windows on the World opened its doors—a glittering sign that New York wasn’t done just yet. In The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World, journalist Tom Roston tells the complete history of this incredible restaurant, from its stunning $14-million opening to 9/11 and its tragic end. There are stories of the people behind it, such as Joe Baum, the celebrated restaurateur, who was said to be the only man who could outspend an unlimited budget; the well-tipped waiters; and the cavalcade of famous guests as well as everyday people celebrating the key moments in their lives. Roston also charts the changes in American food, from baroque and theatrical to locally sourced and organic. Built on nearly 150 original interviews, The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World is the story of New York City’s restaurant culture and the quintessential American drive to succeed. “Roston also digs deeply into the history of New York restaurants, and how Windows on the World was shaped by the politics and social conditions of its era.” —The New York Times “The city’s premier celebration venue, deeply woven into its social, culinary and business fabrics, deserved a proper history. Roston delivers it with power, detail, humor and heartbreak to spare.” ?New York Post “A rich, complex account.” ?Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The Science of Proof

The Science of Proof PDF Author: E. Claire Cage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009198386
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The Science of Proof traces the rise of forensic medicine in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and examines its implications for our understanding of expert authority. Tying real life cases to broader debates, the book analyzes how new forms of medical and scientific knowledge, many of which were pioneered in France, were contested, but ultimately accepted, and applied to legal problems and the administration of justice. The growing authority of medical experts in the French legal arena was nonetheless subject to sharp criticism and scepticism. The professional development of medicolegal expertise and its influence in criminal courts sparked debates about the extent to which it could reveal truth, furnish legal proof, and serve justice. Drawing on a wide base of archival and printed sources, Claire Cage reveals tensions between uncertainty about the reliability of forensic evidence and a new confidence in the power of scientific inquiry to establish guilt, innocence, and legal responsibility.