{"title":"Francoise Meltzer","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"dark-lens-book-francoise-meltzer-9780226625638","title":"Dark Lens","description":"The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of them force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge?    Fran oise Meltzer explores those questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization, the representation of catastrophe, and the targeting of civilians in war. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters' attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother's photographs taken in Berlin and other cities in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Ultimately, she concludes that while the viewer cannot help reimaging the devastation through the lenses of history, aestheticization, or voyeurism, these images at least allow us to approach the reality of ruins and grasp the larger issue of targeting civilians in modern warfare for what it is. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memories of war.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730684518673,"sku":"NGR9780226625638","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52496657449233,"sku":"CIN022662563XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53268277559569,"sku":"CIN022662563XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022662563X.jpg?v=1750940836"},{"product_id":"salome-and-the-dance-of-writing-book-francoise-meltzer-9780226519722","title":"Salome and the Dance of Writing","description":"How does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Françoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portrait—the painted portrait, framed—appears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing.   Meltzer's readings of textual portraits—in the Gospel writers and Huysmans, Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and Rousseau, Walter Scott and Mme de Lafayette—reveal an interplay of control and subversion: writing attempts to veil the visual and to erase the sensual in favor of \"meaning,\" while portraiture, with its claims to bringing the natural object to \"life,\" resists and eludes such control. Meltzer shows how this tension is indicative of a politics of repression and subversion intrinsic to the very act of representation. Throughout, she raises and illuminates fascinating issues: about the relation of flattery to caricature, the nature of the uncanny, the relation of representation to memory and history, the narcissistic character of representation, and the interdependency of representation and power.   Writing, thinking, speaking, dreaming, acting—the extent to which these are all controlled by representation must, Meltzer concludes, become \"consciously unconscious.\" In the textual portrait, she locates the moment when this essential process is both revealed and repressed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49804218958097,"sku":"CIN0226519724G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226519724.jpg?v=1751133254"},{"product_id":"hot-property-book-francoise-meltzer-9780226519760","title":"Hot Property","description":"This text examines the anxiety of origins about the literary enterprise. Using case studies, Meltzer reveals the tenuous status of originality as a basic principle of the critical establishment. She shows how a threat to a writer's status as creator betrays the originality myth itself.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52820007977233,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52820008239377,"sku":"CIN0226519767G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226519760.jpg?v=1764326756"},{"product_id":"hot-property-book-francoise-meltzer-9780226519753","title":"Hot Property","description":"This text examines the anxiety of origins about the literary enterprise. Using case studies, Meltzer reveals the tenuous status of originality as a basic principle of the critical establishment. She shows how a threat to a writer's status as creator betrays the originality myth itself.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53336304943377,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53336305467665,"sku":"NGR9780226519753","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226519753.jpg?v=1774307658"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-francoise-meltzer.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}