Film Theory in the United States and Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Buckland
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Reality Effect ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

Since the 1960s, film theory has undergone rapid development as an academic discipline—to such an extent that students new to the subject are quickly overwhelmed by the extensive and complex research published under its rubric. “Film Theory in the United States and Europe” presents a broad overview of guides to and anthologies of film theory, followed by a longer section that presents an historical account of film theory’s development—from classical film theory of the 1930s–1950s (focused around film as an art), the modern (or contemporary) film theory of the 1960s–1970s (premised on semiotics, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis), to current developments, including the New Lacanians and cognitive film theory. The second section ends with a very brief overview of film and/as philosophy. The article covers the key figures and fundamental concepts that have contributed to film theory as an autonomous discipline within the university. These concepts include ontology of film, realism/the reality effect, formalism, adaptation, signification, voyeurism, patriarchy, ideology, mainstream cinema, the avant-garde, suture, the cinematic apparatus, auteur-structuralism, the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, film and emotion, and embodied cognition.

The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
World System ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Book Studies

Comic book studies has developed as a solid academic discipline, becoming an increasingly vibrant and field in the United States and globally. A growing number of dissertations, monographs, and edited books publish every year on the subject, while world comics represent the fastest-growing sector of publishing. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies examines the history and evolution of the visual narrative genre from a global perspective, bringing together readable, jargon-free essays written by established and emerging scholars from diverse geographic, institutional, gender, and national backgrounds. In particular, the Handbook explores how the term “global comics” has been defined, as well the major movements and trends that drive the field. Each essay will help readers understand comic books as a storytelling form grown within specific communities, and will also show how these forms exist within what can be considered a world system of comics.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Maslow Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
Abortion Law ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S

This article discusses critical debate about individual control over the beginnings of life that has sprawled across the fields of academic law, philosophy, politics, religion, the life sciences, and the self-christened field of bioethics from the 1960s up to the present. The subject has formed in and around a cascade of popular pressures; biomedical advances; legislative, judicial, and public policy initiatives; media attention; and the boiling politics in which, at least in the United States, the whole series of enterprises has been bathed. The present undertaking will train on the law. It covers contraception in the United States, abortion law and policy in the United States, and contraception and abortion in Europe and the United Kingdom.

Buddhism in the West (North America and Europe)

Buddhism ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Mitchell ◽  
Thomas Calobrisi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Subject

The study of Buddhism in the West is built on the pioneering work of a handful of scholars in the mid-1970s. These individuals were bold enough to take the subject seriously within a reluctant academic discipline. Charles Prebish’s American Buddhism (1979) set the standard and many terms of debate for the decades to come. The field has grown considerably, despite a perceived lack of methodological sophistication (see Numrich 2008, cited under General Overviews). Scholars in this area generally approach the subject from one of three directions: area studies (Buddhism in the United States, Buddhism in France, etc.), something of a reverse area studies (e.g., Japanese Buddhism in the United States, Theravada in Britain), or topical studies (e.g., ritual studies, immigration and ethnicity, Buddhism and psychology). The most wide-reaching debates in the field generally revolve around questions of identification or classification and can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. For example, some question what “the West” is meant to signify, placing their research squarely in the context of postcolonial studies, transnational studies, or the construction of Buddhist modernism (McMahan 2002, cited under Ch’an, Zen, Sŏn). Others, such as Tweed 2002 (cited under Matters of Identity), recognize the difficulty of defining what constitutes a Western Buddhist when Buddhist culture has so thoroughly permeated the broader cultural milieu. Serving as a backdrop to these issues has been the wide-ranging and perennial debate regarding the “two Buddhisms” typology that, over the years since Prebish coined the phrase in 1979, has been considered, reconsidered, rearticulated, expanded to three Buddhisms, and renamed in a variety of ways. This article reflects these methodological approaches and topical debates, and it includes relevant sources from postcolonial studies, ritual studies, and engaged Buddhism. As mentioned, “the West” as an area of study is itself somewhat contested. Is the West limited to areas dominated by European culture? Do we extend this category to Australia and Oceania? For the sake of brevity, this article focuses on North America and Europe.

Asian American Experimental Theater and Solo Performance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Bacalzo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Racial Perceptions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Minor

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the present day, a wide range of performers and playwrights have contributed to Asian American experimental theater and performance. These works tend toward plot structures that break away from realist narratives or otherwise experiment with form and content. This includes avant-garde innovations, community-based initiatives that draw on the personal experiences of workshop participants, politicized performance art pieces, spoken word solos, multimedia works, and more. Many of these artistic categories overlap, even as the works produced may look extremely different from one another. There is likewise great ethnic and experiential diversity among the performing artists: some were born in the United States while others are immigrants, permanent residents, or Asian nationals who have produced substantial amounts of works in the United States. Several of these artists raise issues of race as a principal element in the creation of their performances, while for others it is a minor consideration, or perhaps not a consideration at all. Nevertheless, since all these artists are of Asian descent, racial perceptions still inform the production, reception, and interpretation of their work.

What the War is Doing to Us

1943 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Edwin E. Witte
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Economy ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
First World

There is by this time quite a literature on the war economy. With the one exception of the recent symposium by Professor Steiner and his associates, most of whom are connected with the University of Indiana, all of the longer treatises on the subject discuss the war economy in abstract terms or on the basis of the experience of the First World War. These treatises served a useful purpose and were the only books on the economies of war which could be written at the time; but they now seem unreal, because this war differs so greatly from the prior struggle. The University of Indiana book, dealing as it does with concrete problems of present war, is up-to-the-minute and excellently done in all respects. It does not attempt, however, to do what I am venturing: a brief, overall picture of what the war has been doing to the United States.

Erwin Panofsky

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Art History ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Professor ◽  
New York University ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
The University

Erwin Panofsky (b. 1892–d. 1968) was a German art historian who, after immigrating to the United States in 1933, became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century art history. His method of reading works of art as historical documents and understanding their interpretation as intimately connected to the literary and philosophical currents of their times is called iconology. While his early writings reflect the theoretical problems of art historical analysis, his later writings aim more at applying than at justifying this procedure. Panofsky was born in Hanover. He went to high school in Berlin and subsequently studied art history at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he completed his doctorate in 1913 with a prize thesis on Albrecht Dürer’s art theory. He worked as a Privatdozent from 1920 at the University of Hamburg, where he was appointed to the chair of art history in 1926 after defending his thesis on formal principles in the works of Michelangelo and Raffael. In his Hamburg years two important influences on Panofsky’s thought stand out: On the one hand, the neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer and on the other, Aby Warburg’s iconological project of the afterlife (Nachleben) of Antiquity in Western art. Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism contributed to Panofsky’s project to define principles by which one may evaluate the artwork’s transhistorical aesthetic values. Aby Warburg’s concern for the shifts of meaning caused by the artwork’s relation to historical discontinuities contributed to Panofsky’s insight that a purely stylistic interpretive system, as proposed, for example, by art historian Heinrich Wölfflin would not do. Panofsky’s focus on the complex historical embeddedness of an artwork’s content in relation to its formal aspects, a focus influenced by his 1920 reworking of art historian Alois Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen, facilitated the success of his iconological method. Panofsky taught in Hamburg as full professor until 1933, when he and his Jewish colleagues were dismissed. The new Nazi law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service excluded non-Aryans from teaching at universities. In 1934 Panofsky immigrated to the United States, where he had already taught at New York University as a visiting professor for alternate terms since 1931. In 1935 he became professor of art history at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. All of his later publications were written in English. Panofsky’s importance for art history rests as much on his groundbreaking work for this academic discipline as on his ability to popularize his research via public lectures and eloquent studies.

Promoting Local Change: Models for Implementing NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards

1992 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Mary M. Hatfield ◽  
Jack Price
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Mathematics ◽  
Study Group ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Evaluation Standards ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Change Models ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University

For more than thirty years the mathematics education programs of the United States have been the subject of proposals for change. Such efforts as those of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG), the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics (UICSM), and the Madison Project were well intentioned but fell short of attaining the anticipated reform.

The Trial of Socrates That Never Ends: An Introduction to the Socrates Tenured Symposium

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-39
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World View ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

This introduction to the Socrates Tenured symposium reflects on the history of philosophy’s institutionalization as a specialized academic discipline, noting its relative recency in the English-speaking world. Despite occasionally paying lip service to its German idealist origins, philosophy in the United States is best understood as an extension of the Neo-Kantian world-view which came to dominate German academic life after Hegel’s death. Socrates Tenured aims to buck this trend toward philosophy’s academic specialization by a strategy that bears interesting comparison with the anti-professionalism of Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago.

The Cold War and the Transformation of Latin American Studies in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald H. Chilcote
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The Cold War assumptions of mainstream Latin American studies in the United States were challenged in the 1960s by a new generation of academics that opened up the field to progressive thinking, including Marxism. West Coast intellectuals played a major role in this transformation. These new Latin Americanists rejected the university-government-foundation nexus in the field and emphasized field research that brought them into close relationships with Latin Americans struggling for change and engaging with radical alternatives to mainstream thinking. In the course of this work, they confronted efforts to co-opt them and to discourage and even prevent their field research. Despite this they managed to transform Latin American studies into a field that was intellectually and politically vibrant both in theory and in practice. Los supuestos de la Guerra Fría dominantes en los estudios latinoamericanos en los Estados Unidos fueron cuestionados en la década de 1960 por una nueva generación de académicos que abrió el campo al pensamiento progresista, incluso el Marxismo. Los intelectuales de la costa oeste jugaron un papel importante en esta transformación. Estos nuevos latinoamericanistas rechazaron el nexo universidad-gobierno-fundación que caracterizó el campo y enfatizaron la investigación en el terreno que los ubicó en una estrecha relación con los latinoamericanos que luchan por el cambio y se enfrentan con alternativas radicales al pensamiento dominante. En el curso de este trabajo, confrontaron esfuerzos para cooptarlos y desalentar e incluso prevenir su investigación en el terreno. A pesar de esto, lograron transformar los estudios latinoamericanos en un campo que era intelectualmente y políticamente vibrante tanto en la teoría como en la práctica.

scholarly journals The Optimism of Absence: An Archaeology of Displacement, Effacement, and Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Mullins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Projects ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University ◽  
American Cities

In the 1960s Edward J. Zebrowski turned the razing of Indianapolis, Indiana into a compelling show of forward-looking community optimism illuminating the power of displacement. When Zebrowski’s company toppled the Knights of Pythias Hall in 1967, for instance, he installed bleachers and hired an organist to play from the back of a truck as the twelve-storey Romanesque Revival structure was reduced to rubble. Two years later, the ‘Big Z’ hosted a party in the Claypool Hotel and ushered guests outside at midnight to watch as the floodlit building met its end at the wrecking ball (Figure 12.1). Zebrowski’s theatricality perhaps distinguished him from the scores of wrecking balls dismantling American cities, but his celebration of the city’s material transformation mirrored the sentiments of many urbanites in the wake of World War II. The post-war period was punctuated by a flurry of destruction and idealistic redevelopment in American cities like Indianapolis just as the international landscape was being rebuilt from the ruins of the war. In 1959 the New York Times’ Austin Wehrwein (1959: 61) assessed the University of Chicago’s massive displacement in Hyde Park and drew a prescient parallel to post-war Europe when he indicated that ‘wrecking crews have cleared large tracts, so that areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II’. Indeed, much of Europe was distinguished less by ruins and redevelopment than demolition and emptied landscapes removing the traces of warfare that states wished to reclaim or efface; in the United States, urban renewal likewise took aim on impractical, unappealing, or otherwise unpleasant urban fabric and the people who called such places home (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10, for this process associated with the policies of apartheid in Cape Town). These global projects removed wartime debris and razed deteriorating prewar landscapes, extending interwar urban renewal projects that embraced the fantasy of a ‘blank slate’ as they built various unevenly executed imaginations of modernity. However, many optimistic development plans in Europe and the United States alike were abandoned or disintegrated into ruins themselves, simply leaving blank spaces on the landscape. Consequently, the legacy of urban renewal and post-war reconstruction is not simply modernist architecture; instead, post-war landscape transformation is signalled by distinctive absences dispersed amidst post-war architectural space and traces of earlier built environments.

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