Open Access Books - Arts - 2023
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PublicationThe Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture( 2023)In this book, Monika Amsler explores the historical contexts in which the Babylonian Talmud was formed in an effort to determine whether it was the result of oral transmission. Scholars have posited that the rulings and stories we find in the Talmud were passed on from one generation to the next, each generation adding their opinions and interpretations of a given subject. Yet, such an oral formation process is unheard of in late antiquity. Moreover, the model exoticizes the Talmud and disregards the intellectual world of Sassanid Persia. Rather than taking the Talmud's discursive structure as a sign for orality, Amsler interrogates the intellectual and material prerequisites of composers of such complex works, and their education and methods of large-scale data management. She also traces and highlights the marks that their working methods inevitably left in the text. Detailing how intellectual innovation was generated, Amsler's book also sheds new light on the content of the Talmud.
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PublicationWorld Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War( 2023)A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.
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PublicationTransnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett( 2023)A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. At the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were singular actors: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett. Talented and formidable women with global ambitions, these performers forged connections with audiences across the world while pioneering the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema traces how these women emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars. Building upon extensive archival research in France, England, and the United States, Victoria Duckett argues that, through intrepid business prowess and the use of early multimedia to cultivate their celebrity image, these three artists strengthened ties between countries, continents, and cultures during pivotal years of change.
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PublicationTelling Sounds: Tracing Music History in Digital Media Archives( 2023)How are music and sound involved in the creation of audiovisual documents? What kind of quantitative and qualitative research permits the examination of music and, more generally, sound for Austrian (music) history on the basis of digitized audiovisual sources? These questions were approached in the interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project “Telling Sounds" at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna.This volume consists of various case studies conducted by the members of the team. The project’s main task was the conception and development of a Digital Humanities research tool: LAMA – Linked Annotations for Media Analysis. It was designed for the purpose of using machine-readable open data to annotate and link the ways in which music has been used and contextualized in different audio and audiovisual media texts in different times throughout Austrian history. Each of the case studies is dedicated to different genres of music, media texts, and events or timespans in history.Contributions by Aylin Basaran Elias Berner Paul Gulewycz Birgit Haberpeuntner Julia Jaklin Birgit Michlmayr Peter Provaznik Cornelia Szabó-Knotik Meike Wilfing-Albrecht
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PublicationRock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy( 2023)Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works-cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs-to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.