Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 158-162.

Feminist Theory and Pop Culture (Second Edition) synthesizes feminist theory with modern portrayals of gender in media culture. This updated text provides comprehensive and interdisciplinary scholarship focused on topics related to: - Historical examination of feminist theory - Application of feminist research methods - Feminist theoretical perspectives such as the male gaze, feminist standpoint theory, Black feminist thought, queer theory, masculinity theory, theories of feminist activism, and postfeminism. - Contributor chapters cover a range of topics from Western perspectives on belly (...) dance to television shows such as Girls, Scandal, and Orange is the New Black. - Feminist theory and the wave of feminism, including a discussion of the fourth wave - Pedagogical features - Suggestions for further reading and discussion questions for classroom use Feminist Theory and Pop Culture was designed for classroom use and has been written with an eye toward engaging students in discussion. The book's polished perspective on feminist theory juxtaposes popular culture with theoretical perspectives which have served as a foundation for the study of gender. This interdisciplinary text can serve as a primary or supplemental reading. (shrink)

_The Politics of Gender_ presents an international and intersectional approach to the multiple ways gender is intertwined with political institutions and addresses topics that range from the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to same-sex laws in Nigeria.

This article argues thatPanegyricus LatinusXII(9), a speech performed before Constantine in Trier in 313c.e.following his defeat of Maxentius the previous year, acted as a crucial localized act of communication to the emperor. Through a series of allusions and the careful presentation of his narrative, the orator made a case for the continued political and cultural importance of Trier within the newly expanded Constantinian empire.

The form of Western mainstream film is the crux of its ideological efficiency: by using established formal techniques, films ensure audiences un- derstand that aesthetic decisions support and clarify the narrative to ensure maximum spectatorial satisfaction. However, some films exploit their formal aesthetics in order to prevent clarification, thwarting satisfaction in favour of viewing practices that can be considered perverse in that they withhold, suspend or obstruct immediate pleasure. Contemporary Western filmmaking in the mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of a distinct (...) group of filmmakers and films that, in the popular discourse of cinematic criticism, were together coded as “difficult” or “perverse.” These films were, as a result of the characteristics we identify below, situated obliquely in relation to the larger economic and artistic struc- tures of a commercially oriented “mainstream” cinema. Included in this new form of cinematic production were films from directors such as Tim Burton: Edward Scissorhands ; David Cronenberg: eXistenZ ; David Fincher: Se7en ; Peter Greenaway: The Baby of Maçon ; David Lynch: Lost Highway ; Quentin Tarantino: Pulp Fiction and Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves . Whilst Western cinema as a whole has a long history of exploring “difficult” or “perverse” material within the overt or covert content of narrative, plot and story, such films demonstrate a particular relationship between the content being explored and the specific formal characteristics utilised in the delivery of that content. Thus where previous examples would utilise standardised formal techniques as a way of both delivering and containing the difficult or objectionable material, the films instead offer instances where the material of the narrative content seems to bleed backwards, affecting the form and rendering the very materiality of the film itself suspect and problematic. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to responsible innovation by developing a conceptual framework for the processes of creativity and innovation. The hypothesis is that creative and innovative processes are similar in that both are affective in nature. I develop this conceptual framework through an interpretation of the insights of Henri Poincaré’s notion of the ‘four stages’ in the creative process and Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of the entrepreneur. Building on this framework, I analyze the creative and innovative practices (...) of the film director Lars von Trier and the entrepreneur Steve Jobs. The interpretation and analysis suggest that the processes of creativity and innovation are similar in nature in that both are based on the moods of disturbance and enthusiasm; but that they differ in that creativity is based on the feelings of interest and irritation, whereas innovation is based on the feelings of desire and anger. In the conclusion I discuss the implications of this for responsible innovation with regard to the social aspect of resistance towards innovation and the ethical aspects of anger in entrepreneurial leadership. (shrink)

Lars von Triers Filme »Antichrist«, »Melancholia« und »Nymphomaniac« vermitteln den Autoren zufolge in einer verstörenden Weise den »Schock des Realen«, der aus einer Zone des Unvorstellbaren und Unbegreiflichen einbricht. Es sind absurde, sinnfreie Zumutungen, die sich der Filmszenen bemächtigen und diese in »Oberflächenabgründe« verwandeln. Solche Effekte werden in ausgewählten Szenen in den erwähnten Filmen v.a. im Rückgriff auf Lacans Theorien untersucht.

In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ’s love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as an indictment of (...) the institutions structuring its expression. Finally, I argue that Bess’s love for Jan combines aspects of love that have typically been segregated into eros and agape in a way that enriches our understanding of agape and prompts us in turn to re-evaluate our understanding of Christ’s love and death. (shrink)

O presente trabalho, a partir da articulação inicial dos conceitos de dialogismo, tal como defendido inicialmente por Bakhtin, argumenta que um filme é produto cultural inscrito em um período sócio-histórico. Assim, a proposta que aqui se sucede é buscar interrogá-lo, já que ele oferece um conjunto de representações que remetem direta ou indiretamente à sociedade na qual se inscreve. Para tanto, se escolheu como obra analisada o filme _Melancolia_, do diretor Lars von Trier. A metodologia utilizada foi a abordagem (...) qualitativa, com procedimentos para uma desconstrução de algumas cenas, escolhidas de maneira não probabilística, mas que contemplem o todo em suas partes. A análise se focou, em especial, na direção de fotografia e na análise do roteiro como argumento filosófico, tudo para se entender a construção discursiva maior proposta na obra. Assim, se procedeu a uma análise filosófico-escatológica e a uma busca por entender como a direção de fotografia ajuda a compreender melhor a obra em questão dentro da discussão sobre o fim do mundo. Dessa forma, a narrativa do filme é mais bem entendida quando pensada a partir da intertextualidade, ao se considerar as diversas vozes que compõem o discurso, tais como o acorde cromático, os quadros, os formatos, a história, a discussão escatológica, as obras de arte, enfim, todos os padrões e processos inseridos no filme. (shrink)

Why did human beings throughout the millennia so often think about a doomsday? Could there be a profit to our inner pleasure and pain equilibrium, when believing that doomsday is nearing, an idea suggested by Sigmund Freud? An analogous instinctive dynamics was thought by Nietzsche who wrote that human beings do prefer to want the nothingness rather than not to want anything at all. In this essay, 'Melancholia', a movie by Lars von Trier, is taken as an exquisite masterpiece, (...) a grandiose exposition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche Philosophies.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer’s print Melencolia (...) I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume’s contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists. (shrink)

This article presents how the act of falling has been used as a metaphor for invention within avant-garde art and aesthetics. It takes Lars von Trier’s documentary The Five Obstacles (2003) as its point of departure and seeks to historically contextualize the figure of falling by discussing Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques’/‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1955 [1855–1857]). The article also discusses the fascination with falling in early cinema, stressing (...) how cinematic representations of the fall highlight the new medias potential for grasping general modern conditions like motion, speed and contingency. To think of art in terms of falling makes it possible to see a link between cinematic popular culture and so called high modernism. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationship between control and contingency within film aesthetics in the digital age. I will also discuss the aesthetics of Oulipo writers like George Perec and Raymond Queneau, and artists like Jackson Pollock and John Cage as exponents of what can be called an aesthetics of contingency. (shrink)

Includes facsim. and text of the letter from Bauer.

The films of Lars von Trier offer unique opportunities for thinking deeply about how Philosophy and Cinema speak to one another. The book addresses von Trier’s films in order of their release. The earlier chapters discuss his Golden Heart trilogy and USA: Land of Opportunities series by addressing issues of potential misogyny, ethical critique, and racial justice. The later chapters focus on his Depression Trilogy and address the undermining of gender binaries, the psychoanalytic meaning of the sacrifice of (...) children and depression, and philosophical questions provoked by the depiction of the end of the world. Taken together, the volume explores the topics of Philosophical Psychology, Social Theory, Political Theory, Theories of the Self, Philosophy of Race, and Feminist Thought, and opens a conversation about von Trier’s important work. (shrink)

In October 1941 about 512 Jews from Luxembourg and Trier were deported to the ghetto in Litzmannstadt. They were part of a total of 20.000 Jews brought there from the ‘German Reich’, joining the horrible living conditions of some hundred thousand Polish Jews. This article aims to show the fate of these Western­European Jews in the ghetto by examining an exemplary group of 120 persons among those deported from Trier. After short descriptions of the ghetto’s role during the (...) extermination of the European Jews and the persecution of Jews in the ‘German Reich’ and Trier before autumn 1941, the focus is on the integration of the Jews from western Europe in the existing ghetto society as well as on their living and working conditions. After this how and when the Jews from Trier died in the ghetto and the extermination camp at Chelmno will be described. This article is a short version of my master thesis from Trier University. It features several new findings about the fate of the Jews from Trier. Moreover it is meant to be an exemplary study about the Jews from western Europe in the ghetto in Litzmannstadt and their coexistence with Polish Jews. (shrink)