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August 2007, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Terri Ginsberg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:47:40 -0500
Content-Type:
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[please forward widely; kindly excuse cross-postings]

Dear Colleagues:

I am pleased to announce the publication of my monograph, HOLOCAUST FILM:
THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY, a link to which is copied below.  I do
hope you will order a copy and encourage your institution and/or local
library to do the same.  I look forward to your comments and critique.

http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Holocaust-Film--The-Political-Aesthetics-of-Ideo
logy.htm

Kind regards,
Terri Ginsberg

Advance praise for HOLOCAUST FILM:

"What Norman Finkelstein has done in exposing the political foregrounding of
the Holocaust Industry, what Giorgio Agamben has done in extrapolating the
contemporary implications of 'homo sacer' from the horrors of the
concentration camps, Terri Ginsberg is doing with astonishing command and
competence about Holocaust cinema. Ginsberg's voice is clear, concise,
liberating, and the harbinger of an entire new generation of scholarship in
cinema studies. Groundbreaking, challenging, judicious, theoretically
ambitious, and analytically lucid, HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS
OF IDEOLOGY begins from the ground zero of the unspeakable and works its way
meticulously up towards the long shot of a take that will remain definitive
to generations of scholarship it anticipates.	           --Hamid Dabashi,
Columbia University;
                               Editor, DREAMS OF A NATION: ON PALESTINIAN CINEMA

"Terri Ginsberg's HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY is a
much needed intervention in the field of Holocaust Studies in general and in
Holocaust Cinema Studies in particular. What Ginsberg has fashioned is a
reading of the Holocaust that is both immanent and materialist and much
needed in these times when Holocaust scholarship is being shanghaighed by
both ends of the political spectrum. It is Ginsberg's achievement that
Holocaust cinematic texts are here restored to their historical moment in a
way that must be accomplished if there is ever to be an understanding of how
these texts might grasp the original moment of the tragedy. Her
painstakingly thorough scholarship and theoretical rigor ensures that her
work at least will not serve to promote the type of easy, knee-jerk response
that simply adds flame to the fire and in the name of scholarship
contributes to the perpetuation of other tragedies in the present
Israeli-Palestinian situation." 			 
                                    --Dennis Broe, Graduate Program Coordinator,
                                   Media Arts Department, Long Island University

"Ginsberg ably demonstrates how the subgenre known as 'Holocaust cinema' has
been co-opted by the culture industry. Bypassing the usual Hollywood
touchstones, she focuses on four relatively neglected films that illuminate
several key motifs that permeate many films on the subject: the
'Christianization' of Jewish oppression, the commodification of genocide by
both commercial and art house cinema, and the ethnocentric appropriation of
the Holocaust by filmmakers with reactionary agendas. Eschewing the
conformist platitudes of previous studies, Ginsberg's book is a salutary and
necessary provocation."
                                          --Richard Porton, co-editor, CINEASTE;
                                      Author, FILM AND THE ANARCHIST IMAGINATION

"Hollywood has produced more than 175 films on the Holocaust since the
1980s, and in fact by now the category is considered by some to constitute a
virtual genre. Ginsberg challenges the under-examined status of these films
and analyzes the work they perform to construct a revisionist discourse.
Ginsberg's astute understanding of cinematic strategies in addition to her
confidence in distilling and unpacking even the most fraught of ideological
discourses promise a groundbreaking and eminently useful study. Hers are
important contributions which we very much need."
                            --B. Ruby Rich, University of California-Santa Cruz;
            Author, CHICK FLICKS: THEORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

"The importance of the Holocaust is beyond doubt. The importance of
continuing the analysis and wide-ranging discussion of it is, at least in
some circles.  Here, in response, is an extremely scholarly and insightful
treatment of Holocaust films and the aesthetic ideology that informs them.
Sheds much light on several controversial problems connected to these
horrific events.  
Highly Recommended.
--Bertell Ollman, New York University;
                                                  Author, DANCE OF THE DIALECTIC

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