A major cultural critic rethinks Creativity & the Cultural Imaginary

The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.

This is a very important, relevant book for today's world. Bronfen is one of the very rare scholars who, in accessible prose, offers in-depth analyses of the interactions between "high" art and "popular" visual culture, focusing on the socio-political relevance of that crossover. Analysing literature, cinema, television series and other works of popular fiction, from present to past and back, Bronfen is a brilliant "image-thinker", and so makes a strong case for the urgent necessity of the Humanities in today's world.