Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)

Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)

Lippit, Akira Mizuta

Paperback

PhilosophyFilm StudiesHistory & Philosophy of Science

ISBN10: 0816646112
ISBN13: 9780816646111
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Pr
Published: Dec 1 2005
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.44 Depth: 8.92
Language: English
Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and invisible men are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the avisual as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun'ichirô and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, all under the shadow cast by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being-the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the catastrophic light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses.

With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.

Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).

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