Linda Haverty Rugg's Books

Picturing Ourselves

Photography and Autobiography

By: Linda Haverty Rugg

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Picturing Ourselves

Photography and Autobiography

By: Linda Haverty Rugg

Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.

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Page Count

293

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226731464

ISBN 13

9780226731469

Picturing Ourselves

Photography and Autobiography

By: Linda Haverty Rugg

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Picturing Ourselves

Photography and Autobiography

By: Linda Haverty Rugg

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302

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226731480

ISBN 13

9780226731483

Self-Projection

The Director’s Image in Art Cinema

By: Linda Haverty Rugg

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Self-Projection

The Director’s Image in Art Cinema

By: Linda Haverty Rugg

In 1957, a decade before Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, François Truffaut called for a new era in which films would “resemble the person who made” them and be “even more personal” than an autobiographical novel. More than five decades on, it seems that Barthes has won the argument when it comes to most film critics. The cinematic author, we are told, has been dead for a long time. Yet Linda Haverty Rugg contends not only that the art cinema auteur never died, but that the films of some of the most important auteurs are intensely, if complexly, related to the lives and self-images of their directors. Self-Projection explores how nondocumentary narrative art films create alternative forms of collaborative self-representation and selfhood. The book examines the work of celebrated directors who plant autobiographical traces in their films, including Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Herzog, Allen, Almodóvar, and von Trier. It is not simply that these directors, and many others like them, make autobiographical references or occasionally appear in their films, but that they tie their films to their life stories and communicate that link to their audiences. Projecting a new kind of selfhood, these directors encourage identifications between themselves and their work even as they disavow such connections. And because of the collaborative and technological nature of filmmaking, the director’s self-projection involves actors, audience, and the machines and institution of the cinema as well. Lively and accessible, Self-Projection sheds new light on the films of these iconic directors and on art cinema in general, ultimately showing how film can transform not only the autobiographical act but what it means to have a self.

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Page Count

284

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452941548

ISBN 13

9781452941547

Book's by Linda Haverty Rugg

Picturing Ourselves

Picturing Ourselves

Picturing Ourselves

Picturing Ourselves

Self-Projection

Self-Projection

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