Elisabeth Bronfen

Addresses the question of how identity is formed as a result of corporeal and cultural positioning, by mapping Dorothy Richardson's early modernist text, Pilgrimage, against our postmodern interest in real and imagined geographies.

Stanley Cavell (*1926) ist ein Grenzgänger zwischen Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaft und Literatur. Seit seiner ersten Aufsatzsammlung MustWe Mean WhatWe Say hat er den Skeptizismus gegen alle Widerlegungsversuche durch die angloamerikanische analytische Philosophie entschieden verteidigt. Der andere Teil seines Werks besteht in einer engagierten philosophischen Diskussion der Dramen Shakespeares und der Schriften der amerikanischen Transzendentalisten, vor allem aber des Hollywood-Kinos. Cavells Grenzgänge zwischen Descartes, Freud, Heidegger, Kant, Rawls,Wittgenstein und den Filmkomödien sowie den Melodramen der 1930er und 1940er Jahre, Shakespeares Wintermärchen oder Thoreaus Walden zeichnen nicht nur einen persönlichen Atlas philosophischer Bildformeln, sondern bringen diese in immer neue Konstellationen.

Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home-and the power to get there-had been with her all along. This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home, and the comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire. Leading us on a journey through American film, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes a close reading of such classic films as Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Burton's Batman Returns, Hitchcock's Rebecca, Ford's The Searchers, and Sayles's Lone Star.

Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home-and the power to get there-had been with her all along. This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home, and the comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire. Leading us on a journey through American film, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes a close reading of such classic films as Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Burton's Batman Returns, Hitchcock's Rebecca, Ford's The Searchers, and Sayles's Lone Star.

In this new edition of her engaging and original study Elisabeth Bronfen examines Sylvia Plath’s poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, her shorter fiction as well as her autobiographical texts, in the context of the resilient Plath-Legend that has grown since her suicide in 1963 and to which, after over three decades of silence. Ted Hughes responded with his collection of commemorative poems, Birthday letters. Arguing that although we can not sever our reading of Plath’s work from the critical and biographical writings about her, the study nevertheless offers close readings of texts to explore the various self-fashionings in poetry and prose. Which this highly ambivalent poet developed. The central theme to which this study returns is Plath’s insistence on a clandestine traumatic knowledge of fallibility and fragility underlying the fiction of success, health and happiness so prevalent in post-World War Two, whether expressed as anger and violence, as the celebration of feminine figures of transcendence, or as the quiet dissolution of the subject and its world represented in her late Ariel poems; whether giving voice to the relentless self-absorption of her autobiographical texts or psychic recovery in her autobiographical novel, Plath’s struggle with gender and cultural identity is astonishingly timely.

In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs.