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\"From up close and far away, things can look so different. Can you guess what animals you're looking at as they zoom in, then zoom back out?\"--Provided by publisher.

This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world. The book proposes that we think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new ‘space of the cinematic subject’. Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume opens up new areas of critical enquiry in the expanding interdisciplinary field of space studies. It will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working not only in film studies and film philosophy, but also in French/Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, gender and cultural studies.Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http://bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser)

This article introduces a methodological framework for the qualitative analysis of immersive non-fiction virtual reality (VR) storyworlds, focusing on the unique features of VR as a medium for storyliving. In VR, users are not merely watching a story unfold on a screen—they are inside the experience, actively engaging with and storyliving the immersive narrative as it unfolds around them. VR is a spatial, embodied, interactive, multisensory, perceptually rich, affective, and user-oriented medium. The proposed methodology addresses key elements of VR storyworld analysis, such as spatial and temporal design, user roles and perspectives, relationality, emotional engagement, and multisensory embodiment. The framework highlights the importance of examining how VR constructs distance and proximity across multiple experiential domains. Distance and proximity are not just spatial concepts; they are, rather, intricately connected to the domains of temporality, relationality, emotional engagement, and multisensory perceptual inputs. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, including visual narrative studies, haptic media studies, and embodied narrative inquiry, this methodology provides a structured approach to analyzing how VR storyliving is constructed and experienced.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative by Ruth Mackay traces the figures of flight, grievous falls, and collapsing towers, all of which haunt American narratives before and after 9/11. Mackay examines how these events prefigure 9/11, exploring the narrative residue left by the \"end\" of horizontal space-when settlers reached America's Pacific Coast, leaving nowhere westward on the continent to go. She then continues into the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. This period of time marks an era of verticality: an age that offers a transformed concept of the limits of space, entwined with a sense of anxiety and trepidation. With this study, Mackay asks: In what oblique ways has verticality leaked into American narrative? Why do metaphors of up and down recur across the twentieth century? With close readings of Jonathan Safran Foer'sExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Winsor McCay's comic stripLittle Nemo in Slumberland, Upton Sinclair'sOil! and its film rendering There Will Be Blood, Allen Ginsberg's poetic dissections of the nuclear bomb, and Leslie Marmon Silko's imagining of flight inAlmanac of the Dead, this interdisciplinary study culminates with a discussion of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.Waiting for the Sky to Fall examines how vertical representation cleaves to, and often transforms the associations of, specific events that are physically and visually disorienting, disquieting, or even traumatic.

This book addresses the intersections between gender and identity by critically examining female spaces. It has famously been argued that men and women are made in culture. As such, this volume explores how spaces—social, political, cultural, historical, and even cyber—affect the creative, personal, urban and global identities of women. The scholarly approaches of the contributors here probe into these spaces and analyze the problematic of gender identities as they are constructed, reconstruc.

Crossing through Chueca examines how lesbian literary culture fared in Madrid from the end of the countercultural movement in 1988 until the gay marriage march in 2005. In examining how women’s sexual identities have become visible in and through the Chueca phenomenon, this work is a revealing example of transnational queer studies within the broader Western discussion on gender and sexuality.

This paper proposes a novel, low cost, and portable 360-degree cylindrical interactive autostereoscopic 3D display system. The proposed system consists of three parts: the optical architecture (for back-projecting image correctly on the cylindrical screen), the projection image transformation workflow (for image rectifying and generating multi-view images), and the 360-degree motion detection module (for identifying viewers’ locations and providing the corresponding views). Based on the proposed design, only one commercial micro projector is employed for the proposed cylindrical screen. The proposed display offers great depth perception (stereoacuity) with a special designed thick barrier sheet attached to the screen. The viewers are not required to wear special glasses and within appropriate range (< 5 m ) the viewers can view the screen at any distance and angle. The user study verified that the proposed display offers satisfactory depth perception (binocular parallax, shading distribution, and linear perspective) for various viewing distances and angles without noticeable discomfort. The production cost of the current prototype is about USD$ 300. With mass production, the unit cost is expected to decline to within USD$60. The proposed display system has the advantages of ease of use, low production cost, high portability and mobility. The proposed system is suitable for application such as museum virtual exhibition, remote meeting, multi-user online game, etc. We believe that the proposed system is very promising for the market of low-cost portable 360-degree interactive autosereoscopic displays.

Cultural theorists interrogating the appropriation of 9/11 through nationalist, capitalist, and media forces have tended to deauthorize the general public's embodied and affective responses to that event. Instead of disavowing claims of mourning unsupported by geographic proximity or material connection, this essay situates such responses in contemporary screen culture to consider how the shifting grounds of materiality complicate the experience of bodily location at every level from the perceptual to the political. Using photographs, fiction, museum exhibits, and survivor accounts, the essay explores how the transformed relation between subjects and objects defines our apprehension of 9/11 in material, technological, and phenomenological terms. The complex dynamics of perception and embodiment unveiled through these representations suggest the need to rethink categories of experience and affect to accommodate new paradigms of proximity and connectedness increasingly liberated from the measures of geography and the borders of the body.

The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span all periods of German and German-speaking lands and cultures from the local to the global, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines - history, musicology, art history, anthropology, religious studies, media studies, political theory, literary and cultural studies, among others - and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies broadly. All works are in English. Three to four new titles will be published annually.

In Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey famously describes the mind as a palimpsest upon which inscribed memories are never truly lost to the passage of time. These memories, especially of childhood, lurk under the conscious surface of the mind, waiting to be rediscovered during intervals of intensified desultory memory that are made possible for De Quincey by opium-induced dreaming. Opium is utilized during these dreams as a perception-altering technology; memories of childhood are not only recalled while under the influence of the drug, but are revivified in a way that extends beyond the dreamer's normal mental capacity. The formulation of dreaming as a state in which memories buried under the palimpsest of time were retrieved and “relived” was important to a wide array of philosophers, medical doctors, and psychologists over the course of the long nineteenth century, culminating in Freud's seminal The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Alongside the theorization of ‘dream science’ in psychological and medical contexts, the Victorian literati provided their own contributions in both sensation novels and realist fiction. Reciprocally, as has been discussed in much recent work within Victorian studies, well-known characters and scenes from contemporary literature were often used to illustrate dream theories, neurological conditions, and philosophical conceptions of the self in scholarly journals and medical textbooks. The most fantastical literary treatment of dream space as a wholly separate realm within which the dreaming subject can fully recover and even surpass the sensations associated with earlier memories occurs in George Du Maurier's oft-overlooked Peter Ibbetson (1891). Over the course of the novel, the titular narrator reveals (inconsistently and in sometimes contradictory ways) dream space to be a world in which the habitual reliving of childhood events is an endlessly satisfying, novel, and strangely embodied experience for the protagonist and his lover, while also possessing connections to human evolutionary precursors and the afterlife. In Peter Ibbetson, habit is not the deadening enemy of novelty and experience that is so often portrayed in contemporary interpretations of Victorian literature. Rather, habit qua the mental technology of “dreaming true,” a form of intense, consciously-directed dreaming practiced by the novel's central characters, is paradoxically portrayed as a method by which the freshness of sensation associated with an original event can be endlessly recreated and even surpassed within a dream of that event. Contrary to twenty-first century depictions of dreams as events that help the subject to become habituated to emotional stresses, Du Maurier presents dreaming true as a practice that intensifies rather than inures the dreaming subject's emotional relationship to vivid or traumatic childhood events (Hartmann 2). Inherent in this reading is a radical formulation of the relationship between habit and novelty as understood in the late Victorian novel, revealing the generative power of habit that is disclosed within dream space.