Table of Contents (PDF)

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the analysis of fictional worlds in a set of fifteen arts, including theatre, opera, figurative ballet, mime, audio drama, figurative drawing/painting, figurative sculpture, strip cartoon, animation, puppet theatre, still photography, photo-novel, silent movie, cinema and TV drama.

Due to their extreme differences, the combination of different arts in the description of a single fictional world, and the translation from one medium to another, arc considered problematic.
 

While such differences do not concern fictional creativity, which applies the same poetic and rhetoric rules whatever the medium, it is widely accepted that the problem lies in the extreme differences between the mediums of description.
 

In contrast, this study explores their common grounds.
 

These arts are iconic: in nature, and if 'iconicity' is redefined in terms of imprinting images on matter and mediation of language, and as reflecting the common roots of these mediums in a preverbal mode of imagistic thinking, therein is an explanation of their possible combination and translation from one medium to another without impairing the receivers' reading, interpreting and experiencing capacities.

Eli Rozik analyzes numerous fictional worlds in all these arts, produced during the last 2,500 years of artistic creativity, especially in theatre, art and cinema.
 

The Fictional Arts presupposes that principles underlying the generation of descriptions of fictional worlds by the theatre medium, as proposed in two earlier works {Generating Theatre Meaning and Fictional Thinking), also apply to all the iconic/fictional arts.
 

The textbook format of the volume has been purposefully designed to address the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students, suiting the structure of university courses and providing all necessary information to access the images/artistic works discussed in the volume via the web and Google.
 

This inter-art journey from theatre theory to the arts is compelling reading for all those involved and engaged in artistic creativity.

Eli Rozik is Ph.D. and professor emeritus of theatre studies. He was twice head of the Department of Theatre Studies and Dean of the Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University.
 

He specializes in theatre theory, particularly in non-verbal communication in performance analysis, and has published numerous articles in international leading journals in Europe and the US.
 

His books include The Language of Theatre (1992), The Roots of Theatre -Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin (2002), Metaphoric Thinking (2008), Generating Theatre Meaning(2008) and most recently Fictional Thinking 

Table of Contents (PDF)

With top billing at many film forums around the world, as well as a string of prestigious prizes, including consecutive nominations for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Israeli films have become one of the most visible and promising cinemas in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an intriguing and vibrant site for the representation of Israeli realities. Yet two decades have passed since the last wide-ranging scholarly overview of Israeli cinema, creating a need for a new, state-of-the-art analysis of this exciting cinematic oeuvre.

The first anthology of its kind in English, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion presents a collection of specially commissioned articles in which leading Israeli film scholars examine Israeli cinema as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities through the medium and art of motion pictures. The contributors address several broad themes: the nation imagined on film; war, conflict, and trauma; gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; religion and Judaism; discourses of place in the age of globalism; filming the Palestinian Other; and new cinematic discourses. The authors' illuminating readings of Israeli films reveal that Israeli cinema offers rare visual and narrative insights into the complex national, social, and multicultural Israeli universe, transcending the partial and superficial images of this culture in world media.

MIRI TALMON, Tel Aviv, Israel

Talmon is a scholar of Israeli cinema and culture who specializes in popular and folk Israeli culture. She has taught at the Open University of Israel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Haifa University, as well as Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Israeli Graffiti: Nostalgia, Groups, and Collective Identity in Israeli Cinema (Hebrew title Blues La-Tzabar Ha-Avood).

YARON PELEG,

A native of Israel, Peleg is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Director of the Hebrew Program at George Washington University. He is also the author of Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance, Derech Gever, and Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination

Table of Contents (PDF)

Feminist art and theoretical aspects of feminism are linked via a unique and reciprocal bond whose influence extends far beyond their own bounds into the social, cultural, political and economic realms, as well as into the personal lives of women and men alike. This linkage was forged in different places around the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It was especially influential in the United States, during a decade which witnessed the emergence and growth of the Women’s Liberation, Civil Rights, LGBT, and hippie movements and the protest against the Vietnam War. In response to these events, large numbers of women artists joined the ranks of contemporary political-feminist activists, their art directly reflecting the concerns of feminist theory and practice.

This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach through which it compares American feminist art and artists with their European counterparts. In order to elucidate the geographical divide, this book takes as a test case the work of Mary Kelly who, while born in the USA, produced much of her work while living in Britain and under the influence of European thought.

Challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries, it moves beyond an art-history survey to discuss the artistic field in relation to feminist theory and politics, revealing the continuing relevance of both areas for the contemporary reader. While concentrating upon the second wave of feminism in Europe and the USA, it also addresses aspects of the third wave and the current state of the feminist movement, particularly in respect to the Israeli art scene.

Tal Dekel lectures in the Department of Art History and in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She specializes in modern and contemporary art and visual culture, taking a particular interest in art and gender, multiculturalism and transnationalism. Her most recent work focuses on globalization and its manifestations in Israeli society and artists within two minority groups in Israel - the Ethiopian community and migrant women workers.

Table of Contents (PDF)