Böcker i Politics, Literature, & Film-serien

This book places early modern philosophy and political theory into conversation with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing on magic: plays, spell books, treatises, and witch trial narratives. Reading works by Hobbes and Bacon alongside writing by necromancers and witch-hunters reveals a broad cultural obsession with supernatural power.

The main premise of Philosophical Perspective on Cinema is simple: Can a visual medium such as cinema put in greater perspective diverse aspects of human experience? Films are usually sorted by genres, but by applying metaphysical/existential categories to cinema, the author enables readers to reflect on the nature and essence of existence by making life appear less transparent to itself. Undoubtedly, the connection between sensual reality and philosophical reflection is often glossed over when the emphasis is placed on theoretical abstractions, and not life itself. While this work is a reflection on the philosophy of existence, the author embraces a practical approach to the metaphysical/existential foundation of human existence.

Popular Culture and Foreign Policy: The Case of Turkey and the Valley of the Wolves: Ambush analyzes Turkish Foreign Policy from an interdisciplinary perspective. It seeks to understand and discuss how foreign policy discourses can be reproduced by a popular television series and consequently produce consent for certain foreign policies.

Defenses Against the Dark Arts argues that performances of magic in Harry Potter show us how to leap into political action, from high politics of governments and elections to everyday politics of private lives and popular cultures. It features learning to face and defend against dark arts in dark times.

In 1837, a small group of rebels proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Canada. Between then and the Act of Confederation of 1867, colonial Canadians tried to imagine the future of their communities in North America. The choice between monarchy and republicanism shaped both colonial self-images and images of the United States; it also drove the political deliberations that eventually united the colonies of British North America into a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown. Between Empire and Republic is a thematic exploration of the political discourse embedded in the literary output of the period. Colonial authors Susanna Moodie, Th. Ch. Haliburton, and John Richardson enjoyed transatlantic popularity and explained colonial realities to their British, Canadian, and American readership. Collectively, their writings serve as the lens into colonial Canadian perceptions of American and British political ideas and institutions. Between Empire and Republic discusses North America as a literary contact zone where British principles of constitutional monarchy competed with American ideas of republicanism and democratic self-government. The author argues that political ideas in pre-Confederation Canada filtered into the literary works of the time, creating two settler-colonial communities whose recognizable cultural characteristics echoed public attitudes towards the political projects underpinning them.

';As to Europekeep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog.'Ayn Rand (19051982) thus commented on the role of Europe in her key novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The same could be said of the way Europe features in her own biography and in the general perception of her persona. Even though Rand was born in pre-revolutionary Russia, she is nowadays considered anAmerican phenomenon, whose reach ends at the Atlantic shore. This book lifts the gray fog cast over her relationship with Europe, retracing the changing perception of the continent in both her fiction and thought. Her apparent lack of success with European readers is often explained by allegedly different reading tastes. However, a look at her publication history and reception shows that many factors played a role why her work found fewer European than US readers. Finally, an archipelago of European readers and admirers emerges which is testament to Rands impact on European art and politics.

William Friedkin's film Sorcerer (1977) has been subject to a major re-evaluation in the last decade. A dark re-imagining of the French Director H.G. Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear) (1953) (based on George Arnaud's novel); the film was a major critical and commercial failure on its initial release. Friedkin's work was castigated as an example of directorial hubris as it was a notoriously difficult production which went wildly over-budget. It was viewed at the time as th end of New Hollywood. However, within recent years, the film has emerged in the popular and scholarly consciousness from enjoying a minor, cult status to becoming subject to a full-blown critical reconsideration in which it has been praised a major work by a key American filmmaker.

Decades after its publication, Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses remains much talked about and little understood. The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion now responds to this critical gap through painstakingly detailed attention to the totality of Rushdie's text.

Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature applies historical and contemporary political and rhetorical theory to current popular culture to discuss the problem of the displaced autonomous self and the quest for a meaningful life.

How does Game of Thrones mirror international politics and how may the series provide a useful tool for better understanding the theories of international relations? This book connects international relations theories to the series, providing examples from characters whose actions reflect applied scenarios of decision-making and strategy.

The book is about the pedagogic rapport in the post-1980s U.S. when the professor-student relationship gained unprecedented attention. Using eleven American novels, Aristi Trendel examines the complexity, richness, and exceptional nature of the pedagogic encounter and calls for a new genre, the Master-Disciple novel.

Inspired and in honor of the work of noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols, the essays in this volume explore political ideas and implications in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and film from classical antiquity to the present day, creating an interdisciplinary conversation across genres.

This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. Drawing upon the existential insights of Baudelaire it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics, and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure.

Although he writes in a different genre than most other political thinkers, Francois Rabelais's contribution to political philosophy carries weight because of his famous humor and unique style, which provide sharp insight into the limits of human agency and throw doubt on the more "serious" projects of his peers.

The authors of this volume explore the Bard's dramatization of perennial questions about human nature, moral virtue, and statesmanship. Reading his plays as works of philosophical literature enhances our understanding of political life and provides a source of advice and inspiration for the citizens and statesmen of today and tomorrow.

Danoff argues that novels and films with an ambiguous, nuanced, and tragic outlook help teach citizen-readers how to think through the moral complexities of political issues on which they must render judgment. He claims that some of the most profound American thinking about the nature of democratic leadership has come through works of fiction.

This book examines politics in terms of space fiction, international relations and theory, using the Star Wars and Star Trek television and movie franchises to illustrate these dimensions.

Flannery O'Connor's fiction continues to haunt American readers, in part because of its uncanny ability to remind us who we are and what we need. This book reveals the extent to which O'Connor was a serious reader of the history of political philosophy and why O'Connor feared that the habit to govern by tenderness would lead to terror.

It's hard to imagine the American dream without American road trips. This book takes readers on a journey through American road trip stories, revealing that they involve more than mere escapism-that they are an important and long-neglected source of American political thought.

This book provides an analysis of five of the best known comedies of the award winning American film makers Joel and Ethan Coen. It demonstrates that their films, while popular and entertaining, also contain substantial philosophic and political ideas, particularly focusing on the nature of liberal democracy.

This book analyzes how films have accurately or inaccurately portrayed the powers, rights, and freedoms within the U.S. Constitution, and it also explores how filmmakers' lessons about the Constitution have changed over time. This book would make an excellent addition to a course or research on constitutional law or film analysis.

As political units grow it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a shared sense of humanity and to recognize people as individuals rather than anonymous beings. To overcome our most pressing political issues we need to develop a moral imagination so that we may renew our sense of connectedness and responsibility to one another. Bringing together politics and art is one way this can be accomplished. This book draws upon political sources as well as works in literature, film and theater to show the limits of politics and the need for a moral imagination.

This book analyzes works of late 20th century literature to unearth themes related to western classical liberal societies. The analysis suggests new ways of thinking about building political philosophies capable of replacing the classical liberal model.

Lights, Camera, Execution! engages in detailed critical analysis of nine different films about capital punishment in the United States. It examines well-known movies from the last thirty years; explores the cinematic techniques used; and identifies common themes such as race and human dignity.

This book revisits representations of AIDS in the 1980s in the U.S. in order to highlight a discourse of trauma and witness that emerged in the wake of a crisis. The book also emphasizes the potential of literary language to call attention to historical trauma where other discourses may fail.

This book looks at why Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is either the most inspirational or the cruelest film American cinema has ever produced. It depicts, perhaps unwittingly, an ontological war in which two well-matched adversaries fight a series of pitched battles that neither side can win without producing tragic remainders.

Reality is made up of absolute and casualty ideals. This book analyzes the lower aspects of absolute ideals that result in personal and social dysfunction and the ultimate end of civilization. Conversely, a society based on casualty and justice is stable and vibrant. It is a classless society, free of gender and ethnic biases.

The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the ';what' of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the ';what' of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.