Perpetual Carnival Essays on Film and Literature

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. His previous books include Tracking the Signifier (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (FSG-Faber & Faber, 2004), and True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (OUP, 2011).

Table of Contents

Preface by Terry Eagleton

Introduction: Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film and Literature

Modernism
A Modernist Manifesto
Cinema and Modernism
Modernism as Realism

Shakespeare

Review of Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language
Review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World
Review of Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography
Tanner and Shakespeare

Language, Literacy and literature

Television and Literacy
Compacted Doctrines: William Empson and the Meaning of Words (with Alan Durant)
Why are the Arabs not free?
Frank Kermode: The Greatest Literary Critic
In Words We Are Made Flesh: Towards a New Cambridge Philology

Theory

A Defense of Criticism
Barthes and Bazin: The Ontology of the Image
Bataille and Eroticism
The Schreber case: How Queer was Freud?

Film

Godard: The Commerce of Cinema
Film Essays from Criterion:
Polanski: The Truest Tess
Pasolini's Trilogy of Life
The Decameron: The Past is the Present
The Canterbury Tales: Sex and Death
Arabian Nights: Brave Old World
Rossellini's The Taking of Power by Louis X1V
Sound, Image and Every Man for Himself
Kieslowski's Three Colors
Sudden Death: Asseyas's Carlos
Report from Cannes 2015: Lazlo Nenes's Son of Saul
Derek Jarman: A Lost Leader
Watching Films to Mourn the Death of Empire: Introduction to a website

Politics and Culture

An Interview with Stuart Hall
Our Fenian Dead: The Inheritance of Martyrdom (with Jennifer Keating)