Picture Book: Sharon Marcus, Robert Pippin, and Walter Benjamin's THE ARCADES PROJECT
Ahead of the Oscars, Open Stacks returns with a long red carpet full of books on Hollywood, Hitchcock, Hegel and more, with scholars Sharon Marcus on The Drama of Celebrity and Robert B. Pippin’s Filmed Thought. Plus, re-viewing The Arcades Project and seeing Self-Help through the lens of Samuel Beckett. Fail better, read better on this episode of Open Stacks: The Seminary Co-op Bookstore Podcast.
Esteemed author and English Professor at Columbia University, Sharon Marcus sat down with us to discuss her new book, The Drama of Celebrity, an analysis of the evolution of concepts like celebrity over time, and some of the key figures integral to this evolution, most notably Sarah Bernhardt, whom she deems the "godmother of celebrity culture." The following online editorials from Vox, The New York Times, and LitHub explore this subject in continued depth. And you can browse more books discussed with Marcus in the stacks below.
Professor Robert B. Pippin discussed his latest book, Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form, in conversation with David Welbery December 3, 2019 at the Co-op. Accompanying his previous work on the intersection of philosophy and film, The Philosophical Hitchcok, Pippin shared a list of Critical Reads on the subject.
Related Titles
A bold new account of how celebrity works
Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply...
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk...
Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English...
