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Perpetual Carnival
Essays on Film and Literature
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Book Presentation:
• Engages across disciplines with cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose
• Challenges widely accepted definitions of modernism as anti-realism
• Underscores realism's enduring legacy and its coexistence in great modernist works of art
Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.
About the Author:
Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. His previous books include Tracking the Signifier (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (FSG-Faber & Faber, 2004), and True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (OUP, 2011).
Press Reviews:
"Perpetual Carnival shows that MacCabe's reputation is richly deserved. This eclectic collection of essays, reviews, lectures and interviews, published in various venues over the past two decades, reflects the remarkable breadth of his interests ... Texts, Colin MacCabe states, have 'no obvious limits or boundaries', and the same might be said of Perpetual Carnival: moving between multiple media and traditions, the book reminds us of what criticism can still accomplish." - David Winters, Times Literary Supplement
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> From the same author:
True to the Spirit (2011)
Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity
Dir. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
> On a related topic:
Artificial Generation (2021)
Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
When Stories Travel (2012)
Cross-Cultural Encounters Between Fiction and Film
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
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