Author: Chris Kraus Publisher: Profile Books ISBN: 1782834249 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction' and 'an amateur intellectual's home video expanded to bulimic lengths' ... It's 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holocaust, while writing work described alternately as a 'radical philosophy of sadness' and 'immoral, trite, irrelevant and paradoxical' ... It's the late 90s, the millennium is approaching, and Chris Kraus is in Los Angeles, not eating, waiting for her s/m partner to reply to her emails ... It's 1943, and Simone Weil is in London, completing her project of transcendence by dying of starvation ... Filled with Chris Kraus' trademark wit and frankness, unfolding to reveal the lives of ecstatic visionaries and failed artists, Aliens & Anorexia is an audacious novel about failure, empathy and sadness.
Author: Chris Kraus Publisher: ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and Africa, her virtual S/M partner who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood movie while Kraus is chronicling the failure of her low-budget independent film Gravity and Grace.
Author: Helen Gremillion Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822385015 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Feeding Anorexia challenges prevailing assumptions regarding the notorious difficulty of curing anorexia nervosa. Through a vivid chronicle of treatments at a state-of-the-art hospital program, Helen Gremillion reveals how the therapies participate unwittingly in culturally dominant ideals of gender, individualism, physical fitness, and family life that have contributed to the dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in the United States since the 1970s. She describes how strategies including the meticulous measurement of patients' progress in terms of body weight and calories consumed ultimately feed the problem, not only reinforcing ideas about the regulation of women's bodies, but also fostering in many girls and women greater expertise in the formidable constellation of skills anorexia requires. At the same time, Gremillion shows how contradictions and struggles in treatment can help open up spaces for change. Feeding Anorexia is based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in a small inpatient unit located in a major teaching and research hospital in the western United States. Gremillion attended group, family, and individual therapy sessions and medical staff meetings; ate meals with patients; and took part in outings and recreational activities. She also conducted over one hundred interviews-with patients, parents, staff, and clinicians. Among the issues she explores are the relationship between calorie-counting and the management of consumer desire; why the "typical" anorexic patient is middle-class and white; the extent to which power differentials among clinicians, staff, and patients model "anorexic families"; and the potential of narrative therapy to constructively reframe some of the problematic assumptions underlying more mainstream treatments.
Author: Chris Kraus Publisher: Profile Books ISBN: 1782833773 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
The latest novel from the author of cult super-hit I LOVE DICK It's Summer, 1991, the dawning of the New World Order; a post-MTV, pre-AOL generation. Jerome Shafir and Sylvie Green, two former New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment, set off on a journey across the entire former Soviet Bloc with the intention of adopting a Romanian orphan. Unflinchingly dark, hilarious and moving, Torpor is at once a satire and philosophy of cultural history, social identity and failing relationships. Dipping into the trajectory of a life at different moments, Kraus interrogates convention and emotion, creating characters that are flawed, witty, and altogether true to life. Part prequel, part sequel, Torpor continues a project of life-writing: personal, unsparing, and triumphant. If I Love Dick is the book of your 20s, Torpor is the book of your 30s.
Author: Chris Kraus Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 1584351934 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
A self-described failed filmmaker falls obsessively in love with her theorist-husband's colleague: a manifesto for a new kind of feminism and the power of first-person narration. In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.
Author: Chris Kraus Publisher: Mute Publishing ISBN: 1906496641 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
This book assembles all the talks and media presented at Aliens & Anorexia: A Chris Kraus Symposium, which took place in March 2013 at the Royal College of Art, London. Since her first book, I Love Dick, published in 1997, writer and film-maker Chris Kraus has authored a further six books ranging from fiction to art criticism to political commentary, via continental philosophy, feminism, critical and queer theory. This collection begins to engage with questions Kraus’ work raises: where, if at all, is the line between ‘life’ as private and ‘practice’ as public? How, if the body is always performing one or other of these, can they be delineated? Can this map onto the relations between other ever blurring not-quite-binaries: artwork and critic, subject and object, masochist and sadist, unknown and known, embodied and disembodied, fiction and criticism? You Must Make Your Death Public features essays and media by Travis Jeppesen, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Hestia Peppé, Samira Ariadad, Beth Rose Caird, Jesse Dayan, Karolin Meunier, Linda Stupart, Lodovico Pignatti Morano, Trine Riel, Rachal Bradley, David Morris, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield and Chris Kraus.
Author: Chris Kraus Publisher: Semiotext(e) ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
"Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s art produced by high-profile graduate programs that catapulted Los Angeles into the epicenter of the international art world. Probing the programs' own art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus asks how LA art came to be so completely divorced from the city's other realities. Radicalized beyond belief, Video Green does for contemporary art what Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces did for the 20th century, mapping the persistence of peripheral culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: John Horgan Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 1949597105 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 154
Book Description
A day in the inner and outer lives of a college professor, blogger, divorced father, thinker, and yearner. What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention, a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and divorced father. This work of fact-based fiction, or "faction," follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra "Duh," commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity, and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth.
Author: David Rattray Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 1635900727 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever. —from How I Became One of the Invisible Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would. As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, “You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department.” Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.