Crossmappings

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and her books in psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic; The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents; Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film; Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, and Mad Men, Death and the American Dream.

• Introduction. Crossmappings. Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural ImaginaryPart I. Travelling Image FormulasChapter 1. Facing Defacement. Degas' Portraits of WomenChapter 2. Naked Touch. Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female NudeChapter 3. Leaving an Imprint. Francesca Woodman's Photographic tableaux vivantsChapter 4. Pop Cinema. Hollywood's Critical Engagement with America's Culture of ConsumptionChapter 5. Hitler Goes Pop. Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood EntertainmentChapter 6. Simulations of the Real. Paul McCarthy's Performance DisastersChapter 7. Wagner's Isolde in HollywoodChapter 8. Shakespeare's WireChapter 9. Queen of Chess. On Serial ReadingPart II: Gendering the Uncanny, Imaging DeathChapter 10. The Horror of the Familiar. Freud's Thoughts on Femininity and the UncannyChapter 11. Gendering Curiosity. The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie CalleChapter 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical PerformanceChapter 13. Eva Hesse's Spectral Bride and her Uncanny DoubleChapter 14. Wounds of Wonder. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi ArakiChapter 15. The Fragility of the Quotidien. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Work with Death Chapter 16. Picasso's War WomenChapter 17. Contending with the Father. Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of ReparationNotesIndex

Brilliant essays on the female nude, on images not just of chess games but of chess queens in recent film and television ... full of marvelous and disturbing ideas ... Summing Up: Recommended.