Aftershocks of the New

The beginning of the 21st century has brought with it a host of assumptions about the newness of our technologies, globalized economies, and transnational media practices. The essays in this volume are joined by a common concern to chart another side to modernity – precisely after the shock of the new – when the new ceases to be shocking, and when the extraordinary and the sensational become linked to the boring and the everyday. The text explores how the mechanisms of modernism, German cinema and feminist film theory have evolved, and discusses the directions in which they are headed. Patrice Petro raises such questions as: What roles do television and other media play in film studies? and How is German film theory situated within international film theory? The book aims to locate the debate over the place of cinema within modernity in a more complex matrix of contending sensibilities, voices and impulses.

Author Biography

Patrice Petro teaches film studies in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is also the director of the Center for International Education. She is the author of Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, and the editor of Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video.