Reflexivity refers to those moments in fiction and film when the work suddenly calls attention to itself as a fictional construct. For example, in literature a character might suddenly step out of the story and address the reader. This study of reflexivity in film and literature pays special attention to "Don Quixote", one of the first such examples of reflexivity in the novel, and to Jean-Luc Godard and the nouvelle vague in cinema, where self-reflection prevailed. It examines the rise of modernism, the complicity of the reader-spectator in creating illusion and the production process in film. The discussion of film includes "Rear Window", "Tom Jones" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman".

Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard

Humor & Entertainment

Stam, Robert

Movies

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Sightlines)

Unthinking Eurocentrism explores issues of Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in relation to popular culture, film and the mass media. The book 'multiculturalizes' media studies by looking at Hollywood movie genres such as the western, the musical and the imperial film from multicultural perspectives, examining issues from the racial politics of casting to colonialist discourse and gender and Empire. More than just a critique of Eurocentrism and racism, Unthinking Eurocentrism also confirms artistic, cultural and political alternatives, discussing a wide range of non-Eurocentric media including Third World films, rap video and indigenous media. Synthesising literary theory, meida theory and cultural studies to form a challenging interdisciplinary study, the authors argue that current debatess about Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are merely surface manifestations of a deep-rooted shift: the decolonisation of global culture.

Politics & Social Sciences

Shohat, Ella

Social Sciences

Routledge

Unthinking Eurocentrism, a seminal and award-winning work in postcolonial studies first published in 1994, explored Eurocentrism as an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constituted a broadly shared epistemology. Within a transdisciplinary study, the authors argued that the debates about Eurocentrism and post/coloniality must be considered within a broad historical sweep that goes at least as far back as the various 1492s – the Inquisition, the Expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Conquest of the Americas, and the Transatlantic slave trade – a process which culminates in the post-War attempts to radically decolonize global culture. Ranging over multiple geographies, the book deprovincialized media/cultural studies through a "polycentric" approach, while analysing in depth such issues as postcolonial hybridity, antinomies of Enlightenment, the tropes of empire, gender and rescue fantasies, the racial politics of casting, and the limitations of "positive image" analysis. The substantial new afterword in this 20th anniversary new edition brings these issues into the present by charting recent transformations of the intellectual debates, as terms such as the "transnational," the "commons," "indigeneity," and the "Red Atlantic" have come to the fore. The afterword also explores some cinematic trends such as "indigenous media" and "postcolonial adaptations" that have gained strength over the past two decades, along with others, such as Nollywood, that have emerged with startling force. Winner of the Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Film Book Award, the book has been translated in full or in its entirety into diverse languages from Spanish to Farsi. This expanded edition of a ground-breaking text proposes analytical grids relevant to a wide variety of fields including postcolonial studies, literary studies, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies.

History

Americas

Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism

The question "Why do they hate us?" is one of the most oft-cited puzzles of contemporary American affairs, yet it’s not clear to whom "they" or "us" refers, nor even what "hate" means. In this bold new work, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam take apart the "hate discourse" of right-wing politics, placing it in an international context. How, for example, do other nations love themselves, and how is that love connected to their attitudes toward America? Is love of country "monogamous" or can one love many countries? When can a country’s self-love be a symptom of self-hatred?   Drawing upon their extensive experience with South American, European, and Middle Eastern societies, the authors have written a long engagement with a problem that refuses to go away. Flagging Patriotism considers these complex features of "being patriotic," and in so doing insists that the idea of patriotism, instead of being rejected or embraced, be accorded the complex identity it possesses.

The question "Why do they hate us? " is one of the most oft-cited puzzles of contemporary American affairs, yet it's not clear to whom "they" or "us" refers, nor even what "hate" means. In this bold new work, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam take apart the "hate discourse" of right-wing politics, placing it in an international context. How, for example, do other nations love themselves, and how is that love connected to their attitudes toward America? Is love of country "monogamous" or can one love many countries? When can a country's self-love be a symptom of self-hatred? Drawing upon their extensive experience with South American, European, and Middle Eastern societies, the authors have written a long engagement with a problem that refuses to go away. Flagging Patriotism considers these complex features of "being patriotic," and in so doing insists that the idea of patriotism, instead of being rejected or embraced, be accorded the complex identity it possesses.

Film Theory: An Introduction

Providing a collection of some of the most provocative and influential writings of film theory in the past thirty years, this anthology aims to provide a polylogue among theorists, deprovincializing the subject. Film Theory multiplies the perspectives and positions, the situations and locations, from which film theory is spoken.

Wiley/Blackwell

Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media, and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range, Robert Stam explores issues that include the "translinguistic" critique of Saussurean semiotics and Russian formalism, the question of language difference in the cinema, issues of national culture in Latin America, and "the carnivalesque" in literature and film. He discusses literary works by Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Jarry and treats films by Vigo, Bunuel, Wertmuller, Imamura, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Marleen Gooris, and others. Now in paperback, Subversive Pleasures is a splendidly lucid introduction to the central concepts and analytical methods of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle.

Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

Johns Hopkins University Press

One of François Truffaut's most poignantly memorable films, Jules and Jim, adapted a novel by the French writer and art collector Henri-Pierre Roch. The characters and events of the 1960s film were based on a real-life romantic triangle, begun in the summer of 1920, which involved Roch himself, the German-Jewish writer Franz Hessel, and his wife, the journalist Helen Grund. Drawing on this film and others by Truffaut, Robert Stam provides the first in-depth examination of the multifaceted relationship between Truffaut and Roch. In the process, he provides a unique lens through which to understand how adaptation works-from history to novel, and ultimately to film-and how each form of expression is inflected by the period in which it is created. Truffaut's adaptation of Roch's work, Stam suggests, demonstrates how reworkings can be much more than simply copies of their originals; rather, they can become an immensely creative enterprise-a form of writing in itself. The book also moves beyond Truffaut's film and the mnage--trois involving Roch, Hessel, and Grund to explore the intertwined lives and work of other famous artists and intellectuals, including Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, and Charlotte Wolff. Tracing the tangled webs that linked these individuals' lives, Stam opens the door to an erotic/writerly territory where the complex interplay of various artistic sensibilities-all mulling over the same nucleus of feelings and events-vividly comes alive.

François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation

Rutgers University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stam, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stam, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stam, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Sightlines)

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Sightlines)

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Sightlines)

Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism

Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism

Film Theory: An Introduction

Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation

François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation