Eric D Smith: Figuring the Contemporary in Us Popular Cinema, 1967-2022, Gebunden

Klappentext

Figuring the Contemporary in US Popular Cinema: Genre, History, Event explores how popular film offers us frameworks to work through the political stakes of how we understand our histories, and imagine our futures, in the contemporary moment.

This book offers an original way to interpret the contemporary as form, presenting the idea of contemporary as concept, not just as periodization. It asks: how can we historize our current critical preoccupation with the contemporary? The book responds to this question within a nuanced set of theoretical interventions, tracking how a dominant cultural logic has shifted, and revealing that while plots might be similar, meanings are not.

In a 'postmodern,' 'posthistorical' present, the representation of history must assume the forms of inherited plots and familiar genres-periodized formalizations from another time that must ultimately fail to address our own but through which failures and disjunctures the Real of history nonetheless appears in negative relief. This book is therefore about how we might (and must) figurethe elusive history of the contemporary by way of such reified, secondhand cultural forms in their spaces of overlap or hybridization or in their failed generic closure.