University Of California Press: 1479 books
Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue
Eight Reflections on Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2011
Michelangelo Antonioni, who died in 2007, was one of cinema’s greatest modernist filmmakers. The films in his black and white trilogy of the early 1960s—L’avventura, La Notte, L‘eclisse—are justly celebrated for their influential, gorgeously austere style. But in this book, Murray Pomerance...
Malignant
How Cancer Becomes Us
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2013
Nearly half of all Americans will be diagnosed with an invasive cancer—an all-too ordinary aspect of daily life. Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the...
Poetry in Pieces
César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2011
Set against the cultural and political backdrop of interwar Europe and the Americas, Poetry in Pieces is the first major study of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892–1938) to appear in English in more than thirty years. Vallejo lived and wrote in two distinct settings—Peru and Paris—which...
The Poetics of Slumberland
Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit
Language: English
Release Date: March 26, 2012
In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful,...
The Garden in the Machine
A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2001
The Garden in the Machine explores the evocations of place, and particularly American place, that have become so central to the representational and narrative strategies of alternative and mainstream film and video. Scott MacDonald contextualizes his discussion with a wide-ranging and deeply informed...
Imperial Heights
Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2011
Intended as a reminder of Europe for soldiers and clerks of the empire, the city of Dalat, located in the hills of Southern Vietnam, was built by the French in an alpine locale that reminded them of home. This book uncovers the strange 100-year history of a colonial city that was conceived as a center...
by Marc Myers
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2012
Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters,...
The Amazing Bud Powell
Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2013
Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship, riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians...
The Castrato
Reflections on Natures and Kinds
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2015
The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of...
Experimentalism Otherwise
The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2011
In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time—New York City, 1964—Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic’s disastrous performance of John Cage’s...
Frontier Figures
American Music and the Mythology of the American West
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2012
Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions...
Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature
Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2015
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new...
Grand Opera
The Story of the Met
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2014
The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first...
Sovereign Feminine
Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2013
In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics...