Claire Huot: China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (2000)

The Cultural Revolution of China’s Maoist era has come and gone, yet another cultural revolution of a different sort has been sweeping through China in the 1990s. Although recently much interest has been focused on China’s economy, few Westerners are aware of the remarkable transformations occurring in the culture of ordinary people’s daily lives. In China’s New Cultural Scene Claire Huot surveys the wide spectrum of art produced by Chinese musicians, painters, writers, performers, and filmmakers today, portraying an ongoing cultural revolution that has significantly altered life in the People’s Republic.

Western observers who were impressed by the bravery of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square—and stunned at the harshness of their suppression—will learn from this book how that political movement led to changes in cultural conditions and production. Attending to all the major elements of this vast nation’s high and low culture at the end of a landmark decade, Huot’s discussion ranges from the cinematic works of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others to emerging musical forms such as rock, punk, and rap. Other topics include television, theater, and avant-garde art, the new electronic media, and subversive trends in both literature and the visual arts.

With a comprehensive index of artists and works, as well as a glossary of Chinese words, China’s New Cultural Scene will enlighten students of Chinese culture and general readers interested in contemporary Asia.

Publisher Duke University Press, 2000
ISBN 0822324458, 9780822324454
258 pages

publisher
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PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (2009)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text focuses on the intersection between Deleuzian philosophy and the arts. Deleuze combined exceptionally rigorous insight into important Western philosophers with an extraordinary sensitivity to literature, music, painting and film. He was intensely interested in the medium of thought, which is by no means limited to philosophy alone: it also takes place in science, mathematics, literature, painting and cinema, to name just some of the genres of thought to which Deleuze most often refers. His own thinking emerged almost as often in conversation with artists and literary writers as in engagement with other philosophers, and his philosophy cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of his engagement with the arts.

This significant and timely collection of essays from an international team of leading Deleuze scholars brings together interpretations and commentaries from Deleuzian perspectives on subjects such as literature, painting, music and film.

The book represents diverse modes of engagement with Deleuze’s philosophical concepts and problems and demonstrates the central role the arts play in any understanding of his philosophical ideas.

Editors Eugene W. Holland, Daniel Warren Smith, Charles J. Stivale
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009
ISBN 0826439233, 9780826439239
276 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2013-1-24)

Anna Everett, John Thornton Caldwell (eds.): New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (2003)

The mushroom-like growth of new media technologies is radically challenging traditional media outlets. The proliferation of technologies like DVDs, MP3s and the Internet has freed the public from what we used to understand as “mass media.” In the face of such seismic shifts and ruptures, the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of film and TV studies are being shaken to their core. New Media demands a necessary rethinking of the field. Writing from a range of disciplines and perspectives, the scholars here outline new theses and conceptual frameworks capable of engaging the numerous facets of emergent digital technology.

Publisher Routledge, 2003
AFI Film Readers series
ISBN 041593995X, 9780415939959
274 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2012-7-31)