Suchergebnisse

Isaak Babel''s masterpiece of revolution and civil war, though a collection of short stories, is also a book shaped into an artistic whole by patterns of style and a central action or plot. Renato Poggioli detected two major stylistic strains in the work —the "epic-heroic" and the "pathetic"—an insight that criticism has yet to pursue. Though much of Red Cavalry is devoted to genre sketches and anecdotes (many told in the speech of its characters, or skaz), the epic and pathetic modes function as polarities about which the diverse tales are organized. Each has its own language and clusters of imagery, and their interplay lends the work its distinctive shape and meanings.

Since the late 1980s visibility has become a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. It also brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, and a hotly contested debate unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of visual culture, whose impact can still be felt today. In this first comparative study Susanne von Falkenhausen reveals the concepts of seeing as scholarly act that underwrite these competing approaches to visuality and society, along with the agendas of identity politics that motivate them. In close readings of key texts spanning from the early 20th century to the present the author crosses expertly between American, German, and British versions of art history, cultural studies, aesthetics, and film studies.