Bøger af Ben Stoltzfus

This volume presents the complete 'Proceedings of the Oxford University Robbe-Grillet Conference 1996'. Robbe-Grillet explores themes in his work with the key world experts on his novels and feature films. Unmissable for Literary/Film Theorists!"Je regarde, donc je dérobe" ['I watch, therefore I unveil'] Alain Robbe-GrilletSUMMARY: Alain Robbe-Grillet (literary "terrorist" and film-maker extra-ordinare), alongside a panoply of international authorities on his work, discusses the course of his career and the relationship between novels and films, the conscious world we normally inhabit and the realm of the subconscious and dreams. Equal focus is placed on his literary and cinematic work, both by Robbe-Grillet himself and by those who speak about his work. The text is an unabridged transcription of the Oxford University Robbe-Grillet Conference 1996, giving an up-close encounter with the author and the contemporary appreciators of his creative output. A 'must' for readers and students of modern literature and cinema theory.CONTRIBUTIONS: 0. In the Temple of Dreams - Editor's Foreword (Edouard d'Araille) / 1. Alain Robbe-Grillet - Opening Words (Prof. Ian Christie FBA) / 2. Au Temple des Rêves: L'Ecrivain à l'Ecran - Alain Robbe-Grillet (Main Talk of the Day) / 3. Question-Time: A Brief Dialogue with Alain Robbe-Grillet / 4. Magritte, Robbe-Grillet and La Belle Captive - Prof. Ben Stoltzfus / 5. A Sojourn in the Maison de Rendez-Vous - Prof. Roch Smith / 6. Text, Film et Code: Dysnarration et Cohérence - Prof. Van den Heuvel / 7. The Blue Villa: Within the Temple of Dreams - Prof. Anthony Fragola / 8. Sado-Erotic Surfaces - Prof. Raylene Ramsay / 9. The Mirror of Meta-Fiction - Prof. Royal S. Brown / 10. Open Discussion - hosted by Dr. Ann JeffersonEXTRAS: A Bibliography and a Filmography of all Alain Robbe- Grillet's major works up to the time of the conference (1996); introductory materials; publisher's note.AN EXTRACT: Opening Words - by Ian Christie: "Certainly, for someone of my generation, the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet is absolutely central to the possibility that cinema might acquire some of the complexity and modernity of literature. I still vividly remember queuing until two in the morning to see Last Year at Marienbad as an undergraduate in 1963 in Belfast. The film was so notorious and popular that screenings were held around the clock in a cinema near the university, and I believe people were still queuing at four o'clock in the morning. It is difficult, perhaps, to imagine people queuing today, to see a film as remarkable and experimental as Last Year at Marienbad. But it did happen, I was there, and I remember also the impact made by The Immortal One and The Man Who Lies when those were also shown in Britain.Sadly, it has been increasingly difficult to see the film works of Alain Robbe-Grillet in Britain; and it says something about our draconian cinema censorship system, which has prevented some of Robbe-Grillet's work being circulated. Britain is the only country in the world which has statutory legal censorship for video, which keeps a lot of challenging and controversial work out of circulation. Unfortunately, therefore, some of his more recent work has not been seen, except in private screenings, which I think is a pity, because Robbe-Grillet has continued to make films and to push forward the boundaries of what is possible on the screen, in parallel with his literary work.So this is a double career; that of a writer who works on the screen and on the page, and who has continued to do so for an extraordinary span of time. Robbe-Grillet's example renews the hope that film can be seen as involved in a similar enterprise to writing, a hope that is often forgotten in Britain, where cinema exists in a compartment labelled 'entertainment', and too often lacks the ambition, and complexity, that literature can aspire to".Truly a special book on the relationship between novels and films.

D.H. Lawrence's Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective explores how literature thinks; more specifically, how the reading of fiction influences behavior. Lawrence writes passionately about our alienation from ourselves, from other people, and from the cosmos. He believes that we need to heed the voices of our unconscious, and he shows us how to meld body and mind so that, psychoanalytically speaking, Id and Ego can come together. In this endeavor there is a salient convergence between Lawrences writings and those of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst.In this book, Stoltzfus examines the poetics of seven major fictions that Lawrence wrote between 1925 and 1930, five productive years that are referred to as his fabulation period. In each of the books seven chapters, in tandem with Lacans writings, Stoltzfus analyzes seven major characters, four of whom move from alienation to the renewal of self and the cosmos. He argues that Lawrences fiction is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive by showing us how to circumvent dysfunction. Stoltzfus brings literature and psychoanalysis together in readings that are both aesthetic and epistemological. They are recipes for curing the Anthropocene.

Magritte¿s interarts dialogue with literature. The Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte (1898¿1967) is well known for his thought-provoking and witty images that challenge the observer¿s preconditioned perceptions of reality. `Magritte and Literature¿ examines some of the artist's major paintings whose titles were influenced by and related to works of literature. Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Poe's The Domain of Arnheim are representative examples of Magritte's interarts dialog with literary figures. Despite these convergences the titles subvert the images in his paintings. It is the two images together that express the aesthetics of Surrealism¿for example, the juxtaposition of unrelated objects whose purpose is to spark recognition. Magritte's challenge to representation compares with metafiction's challenge to classic realism, Les Chants de Maldoror for example, and the intersecting space between art and writing, sometimes referred to as the iconotext, manifests itself whenever Magritte borrows a literary title for a painting. His strategy is to paint visible thought, and this reverse ekphrasis, the opposite of a rhetorical description, undermines the written text. When he succeeds, the effect is poetry.