A disorder that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism remains in large part a mystery, giving rise to both fear and fascination. Sonya Freeman Loftis’s groundbreaking study examines literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. Imagining Autism looks at fictional characters (and an author or two) widely understood as autistic, ranging from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Harper Lee’s Boo Radley to Mark Haddon’s boy detective Christopher Boone and Steig Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. The silent figure trapped inside himself, the savant made famous by his other-worldly intellect, the brilliant detective linked to the criminal mastermind by their common neurology―these characters become protean symbols, stand-ins for the chaotic forces of inspiration, contagion, and disorder. They are also part of the imagined lives of the autistic, argues Loftis, sometimes for good, sometimes threatening to undermine self-identity and the activism of the autistic community.

Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum

Literature & Fiction

Loftis, Sonya Freeman

History & Criticism

P648 - MANCHESTER UNIV PR

The Last Opera: The Rake's Progress in the Life of Stravinsky and Sung Drama (Russian Music Studies)

From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it--his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

Carter, Chandler

Dramas & Plays

From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it--his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

My Struggle for Peace is a remarkable political document offering insights into the complex workings of the young Israeli political system, set against the backdrop of the disintegration of the country’s fragile armistice with the Arab states. Replete with the diarist’s candid comments on Israel’s first generation leaders and world statesmen of the day, the diary also tells the dramatic human story of a political career cut short―the removal of an unusually sensitive, dedicated, and talented public servant. My Struggle for Peace is, above all, an intimate record of the decline of Moshe Sharett’s moderate approach and the rise of more "activist-militant" trends in Israeli society, culminating in the Suez/Sinai war of 1956. The diary challenges the popular narrative that Israel’s confrontation with its neighbors was unavoidable by offering daily evidence of Sharett’s statesmanship, moderation, diplomacy, and concern for Israel’s place in international affairs. This long-awaited 3-volume English abridgement of Sharett’s Yoman Ishi [Personal diary] (Ma’ariv, 1978) maintains the integrity, flavor, and impact of the 8-volume Hebrew original and includes additional documentary material that was not accessible at the time. The volumes are also available to purchase individually.

My Struggle for Peace, 3 Vol. Set: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953–1956 (Perspectives on Israel Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics

In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering―the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better―Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary's role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.

Humor & Entertainment

Zimmermann, Patricia R.

Movies

Roger Sandall's Films and Contemporary Anthropology: Explorations in the Aesthetic, the Existential, and the Possible

In Roger Sandall's Films and Contemporary Anthropology, Lorraine Mortimer argues that while social anthropology and documentary film share historic roots and goals, particularly on the continent of Australia, their trajectories have tended to remain separate. This book reunites film and anthropology through the works of Roger Sandall, a New Zealand–born filmmaker and Columbia University graduate, who was part of the vibrant avant-garde and social documentary film culture in New York in the 1960s. Mentored by Margaret Mead in anthropology and Cecile Starr in fine arts, Sandall was eventually hired as the one-man film unit at the newly formed Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1965. In the 1970s, he became a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney. Sandall won First Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival in 1968, yet his films are scarcely known, even in Australia now. Mortimer demonstrates how Sandall's films continue to be relevant to contemporary discussions in the fields of anthropology and documentary studies. She ties exploration of the making and restriction of Sandall's aboriginal films and his nonrestricted films made in Mexico, Australia, and India to the radical history of anthropology and the resurgence today of an expanded, existential-phenomenological anthropology that encompasses the vital connections between humans, animals, things, and our environment.

Arts & Photography

Mortimer, Lorraine

Photography & Video

Art History: A critical introduction to its methods provides a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. Offering a lucid account of approaches from Hegel to post-colonialism, the book provides a sense of art history’s own history as a discipline from its emergence in the late-eighteenth century to contemporary debates. By explaining the underlying philosophical and political assumptions behind each method, along with clear examples of how these are brought to bear on visual and historical analysis, the authors show that an adherence to a certain method is, in effect, a commitment to a set of beliefs and values. The book makes a strong case for the vitality of the discipline and its methodological centrality to new fields such as visual culture. This book will be of enormous value to undergraduate and graduate students, and also makes its own contributions to ongoing scholarly debates about theory and method.

Art history: A critical introduction to its methods

Hatt, Michael

Klonk, Charlotte

Film theory: an introduction offers a highly readable account of film theory and is an indispensable resource for students. The discussion ranges from the late 1960s to the present, a period in which a number of conceptual strands, notably politics, semiotics and psychoanalysis were woven together in an ambitious synthesis. In this book, the authors chart the construction of this synthesis and its subsequent fragmentation, and clearly explain the various intellectual currents which have contributed to it. Divided into two parts, the first covers the conceptual background of film theory, dealing with historical materialism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, whilst in the second the authors concentrate on particular topics such as authorship, narrative, realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism. For this new edition, the authors have added a new foreword, a fully updated and expanded bibliography, and a 60-page Retrospect outlining developments within film theory since the book’s original publication in 1988. This Retrospect identifies a number of broad readings of Theory, each with a different perspective on the main content of the book. As such, it provides a new and original mapping of the ‘post-theory’ moment in this complex and often fractured terrain. Accessible and authoritative, this book is essential reading for students of film theory, or indeed anyone seeking a deeper understanding of modern cinema.

Film theory: An introduction

Lapsley, Robert

Michael Westlake Ltd

Film light: Meaning and emotion

A unique and wide-ranging analysis of the aesthetic and emotional impact of lighting in cinema. Lara Thompson looks at the way light informs the cinematic experience, from constructing star identities, sculpting natural light and creating imaginary worlds, to the seductive power of darkness, fading representations of the past and arresting twilight encounters. This groundbreaking and accessible introductory study offers a unique insight into the way illumination has transcended its diffuse functional boundaries and been elevated to a position of narrative and emotional importance, transforming it from an unobtrusive element of film style to an expressive and essential component. It includes analyses of over fifty renowned international films, discussed in inventive and illuminating combinations, from cinema's earliest moments to its most recent digital manifestations. -- .

Thompson, Lara

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the P648 - MANCHESTER UNIV PR publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by P648 - MANCHESTER UNIV PR

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the P648 - MANCHESTER UNIV PR publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum

The Last Opera: The Rake's Progress in the Life of Stravinsky and Sung Drama (Russian Music Studies)

The Last Opera: The Rake's Progress in the Life of Stravinsky and Sung Drama (Russian Music Studies)

My Struggle for Peace, 3 Vol. Set: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953–1956 (Perspectives on Israel Studies)

Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics

Roger Sandall's Films and Contemporary Anthropology: Explorations in the Aesthetic, the Existential, and the Possible

Roger Sandall's Films and Contemporary Anthropology: Explorations in the Aesthetic, the Existential, and the Possible

Art history: A critical introduction to its methods

Film theory: An introduction

Film light: Meaning and emotion