{"title":"Martin Harries","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"forgetting-lot-s-wife-book-martin-harries-9780823227341","title":"Forgetting Lot's Wife","description":"Can looking at disaster and mass death destroy us? Forgetting Lot's Wife provides a theory and a fragmentary history of destructive spectatorship in the twentieth century. Its subject is the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. The fragments of this history all lead back to the story of Lot's wife: looking back at the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, she turns into a pillar of salt. This biblical story of punishment and transformation, a nexus of sexuality, sight, and cities, becomes the template for the modern fear that looking back at disaster might petrify the spectator. Although rarely articulated directly,  this idea remains powerful in our culture. This book traces some of its aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical consequences.   Harries traces the figure of Lot's wife across media. In extended engagements with examples from twentieth-century theater, film, and painting, he focuses on the theatrical theory of Antonin Artaud, a series of American films, and paintings by Anselm Kiefer. These examples all return to the story of Lot's wife as a way to think about modern predicaments of the spectator. On the one hand, the sometimes veiled figure of Lot's wife allows these artists to picture the desire to destroy the spectator; on the other, she stands as a sign of the potential danger to the spectator. These works, that is, enact critiques of the very desire that inspires them.  The book closes with an extended meditation on September 11, criticizing the notion that we should have been destroyed by witnessing the events of that day.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363574550801,"sku":"CIN0823227340G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008485097745,"sku":"NIN9780823227341","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823227340.jpg?v=1751170488"},{"product_id":"scare-quotes-from-shakespeare-book-martin-harries-9780804736213","title":"Scare Quotes from Shakespeare","description":"This book argues that moments of allusion to the supernatural in Shakespeare are occasions where Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes register the perseverance of haunted structures in modern culture. This \"reenchantment,\" at the heart of modernity and of literary and political works central to our understanding of modernity, is the focus of this book. The author shows that allusion to supernatural moments in Shakespeare (\"scare quotes\") allows writers to both acknowledge and distance themselves from the supernatural phenomena that challenge their disenchanted understanding of the social world. He also uses these modern appropriations of Shakespeare as provocations to reread some of his works, notably Hamlet and Macbeth.   Two pairs of linked chapters form the center of the book. One pair joins a reading of Marx, concentrating on The Eighteenth Brumaire, to Hamlet; the other links a reading of Keynes, focusing on The Economic Consequences of the Peace, to Macbeth. The chapters on Marx and Keynes trace some of the strange circuits of supernatural rhetoric in their work, Marx's use of ghosts and Keynes's fascination with witchcraft. The sequence linking Marx to Hamlet, for example, has as its anchor the Frankfurt School's concept of the phantasmagoria, the notion that it is in the most archaic that one encounters the figure of the new. Looking closely at Marx's association of the Ghost in Hamlet with the coming revolution in turn illuminates Hamlet's association of the Ghost with the supernatural beings many believed haunted mines.   An opening chapter discusses Henry Dircks, a nineteenth-century English inventor who developed—and then lost his claim to—a phantasmagoria or machine to project ghosts on stage. Dircks resorted to magical rhetoric in response to his loss, which is emblematic for the book as a whole, charting ways the scare quote can, paradoxically, continue the work of enlightenment.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50465074217233,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50465075167505,"sku":"CIN0804736219G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0804736219.jpg?v=1757412742"},{"product_id":"theater-after-film-book-martin-harries-9780226838700","title":"Theater after Film","description":"A study of the impact of film and mass culture on drama after World War II.   In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in popular culture, theater had to respond to cinema’s hegemony. Theater couldn’t break that hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater made film’s domination of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling its power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented film’s mass cultural force, while knowing that it could never possess that force. Throughout the book, Harries brings critical theory into contact with theories of performance. Although Theater after Film treats the theatrical work of many figures, its central focus falls on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. Discussions of these dramatists consider their ways of addressing spectators, the politics of race between film and theater, and the place of the theatrical apparatus. Readings of these central figures in twentieth-century theater exemplify the book’s historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. This confrontation, Harries shows, was central to the development of some of the most continually compelling postwar drama.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51201942192401,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51201943470353,"sku":"NGR9780226838700","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226838706.jpg?v=1772035790"},{"product_id":"theater-after-film-book-martin-harries-9780226838717","title":"Theater after Film","description":"A study of the impact of film and mass culture on drama after World War II.   In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in popular culture, theater had to respond to cinema’s hegemony. Theater couldn’t break that hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater made film’s domination of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling its power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented film’s mass cultural force, while knowing that it could never possess that force. Throughout the book, Harries brings critical theory into contact with theories of performance. Although Theater after Film treats the theatrical work of many figures, its central focus falls on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. Discussions of these dramatists consider their ways of addressing spectators, the politics of race between film and theater, and the place of the theatrical apparatus. Readings of these central figures in twentieth-century theater exemplify the book’s historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. 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