Author: William C. Wees File Type: pdf To view a film is to see anothers seeing mediated by the technology and techniques of the camera. By manipulating the cinematic apparatus in unorthodox ways, avant-garde filmmakers challenge the standardized versions of seeing perpetuated by the dominant film industry and generate ways of seeing that are truer to actual human vision.Beginning with the proposition that the images of cinema and vision derive from the same basic elements--light, movement, and time--Wees argues that cinematic apparatus and human visual apparatus have significant properties in common. For that reason they can be brought into a dynamic, creative relationship which the author calls the dialectic of eye and camera. The consequences of this relationship are what Wees explores.Although previous studies have recognized the visual bias of avant-garde film, this is the first to place the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film in a long-standing, multidisciplinary discourse on vision, visuality, and art.About the AuthorWilliam C. Wees is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal. He has written articles for many film journals and has made several short experimental films.

Author: Woody Holton File Type: epub Abigail Adams offers a fresh perspective on the famous events of Adamss life, and along the way, Woody Holton, a renowned historian of the American Revolution, takes on numerous myths about the men and women of the founding era. But the book also demonstrates that domestic dramas-from unplanned pregnancies to untimely deaths-could be just as heartbreaking, significant, and inspiring as the actions of statesmen and soldiers. A special focus of the book is Adamss complex relationships with her mother, sisters, and children with her husbands famous contemporaries and with Phoebe, one of her fathers slaves. At the same time that John exhibited his own diplomatic skills on a better-known canvas, Abigail struggled to prevent the charitable gifts she gave her sisters from coming between them. In a departure from the persistently upbeat tone of most Adams biographies, Holtons work shows how frequently her life was marred by tragedy, making this the deepest, most humanistic portrayal ever published. Using the matchless trove of Adams family manuscripts, the author steps back to allow Abigail to respond to her many losses in her own words. Holton reveals that Abigail Adams sharply disagreed with her husbands financial decisions and assumed control of the familys money herself-earning them a tidy fortune through her shrewd speculations (this during a time when married women were not permitted to own property). And he shows that her commitment to womens equality and education was intense and explicitly expressed and practical, from the more than two thousand letters she wrote over her lifetime to her final will (written in defiance of legislation prohibiting married women from bequeathing property). Alternately witty, poignant, and uplifting, Holtons narrative sheds new light on one of Americas best-loved but least-understood icons.From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. While Abigail Adams has always been viewed as one of the most illustrious of Americas founding mothers, University of Richmond historian Holton (Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution), drawing on the rich collection of Adamss letters and other manuscripts, paints a strong-minded woman whose boldness developed in the context of the revolutionary era in which she lived. Holton offers a captivating portrait of a reformer both inside and outside the home. Best known for exhorting her husband, John Adams, to remember the ladies in devising Americas new political system, she also, Holton has discovered, wrote a will leaving most of her property to her granddaughters, in defiance of the law that made her husband the master of all she owned. Furthermore, she was a businesswoman and invested her own earnings in ways John did not always approve of. Tracing Adamss life from her childhood as the daughter of a poor parson to her long and sometimes uncertain courtship with John, her joys and sorrows as a mother and her life as the wife of a president, Holtons superb biography shows us a three-dimensional Adams as a forward-thinking woman with a mind of her own. (Nov. 3) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Review Insightful, sensitive, and original.... Here is a bounty of fine-grained social history as well as a feast of language, from the eye and the voice of a historian-poet. ---Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People

Author: Abigail M. Markwyn File Type: pdf When the more than 18 million visitors poured into the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco in 1915, they encountered a vision of the world born out of San Franciscos particular local political and social climate. By seeking to please various constituent groups ranging from the government of Japan to local labor unions and neighborhood associations, fair organizers generated heated debate and conflict about who and what represented San Francisco, California, and the United States at the worlds fair. The PPIE encapsulated the social and political tensions and conflicts of preWorld War I California and presaged the emergence of San Francisco as a cosmopolitan cultural and economic center of the Pacific Rim. Empress San Francisco offers a fresh examination of this, one of the largest and most influential worlds fairs, by considering the local social and political climate of Progressive Era San Francisco. Focusing on the influence exerted by women, Asians and Asian Americans, and working-class labor unions, among others, Abigail M. Markwyn offers a unique analysis both of this worlds fair and the social construction of preWorld War I America and the West. **Review By emphasizing the Pacific Rim and paying attention to Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American voices, Markwyn offers new insight into the limitations to the exercise of American power abroad and implicitly challenges accounts of fairs that are overly comfortable within the safe historiographical confines of the nation-state.Colin Fisher, Journal of American History (Colin Fisher Journal of American History) The beautifully illustrated Empress San Francisco is much more than a social and cultural history of the PPIE it will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of urban history, U.S. imperialism and foreign policy, womens history, labor history, and the study of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Progressive-era America.Bonnie M. Miller, Western Historical Quarterly (Bonnie M. Miller Western Historical Quarterly) Empress San Francisco provides an impressive, little-known account of this important fair.Charles Fracchia, Panorama (Charles Fracchia Panorama) This book offers a fresh consideration that focuses on the social and political climate of the Fair, and is essential to any study of early San Francisco in general and the PPIE in particular.Midwest Book Review (Midwest Book Review) This close study of a fleeting but significant event underscores the diversity, vitality, and complexity of not only a city on the cusp of the continent and the century, but also the foundation upon which it, and the nation itself, continues to wrestle with fundamental questions of the meaning of America and its place in the world today.Sherry L. Smith, American Studies (Sherry L. Smith American Studies) Empress San Francisco is an excellent work, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of worlds fairs, American western settlement, urban development, and Progressive-era racial, ethnic, and gender relations, reform movements, and foreign relations.Elaine Naylor, American Historical Review (Elaine Naylor American Historical Review) About the Author Abigail M. Markwyn is an associate professor of history at Carroll University. She is the coeditor of Gendering the Fair Histories of Women and Gender at Worlds Fairs.

Author: Marwa Elshakry File Type: pdf In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwins global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwins writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes. Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwins ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry shows how, in an age of massive regional and international political upheaval, these readings were suffused with the anxieties of empire and civilizational decline. The politics of evolution infiltrated Arabic discussions of pedagogy, progress, and the very sense of history. They also led to a literary and conceptual transformation of notions of science and religion themselves. Darwin thus became a vehicle for discussing scriptural exegesis, the conditions of belief, and cosmological views more broadly. The book also acquaints readers with Muslim and Christian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and theologians, and concludes by exploring Darwins waning influence on public and intellectual life in the Arab world after World War I. * * Reading Darwin in Arabic is an engaging and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the intellectual and political history of the Middle East. **