This essay looks at the function of photography in Sebald’s literary and critical work. It focuses on the collaborative relationship between Sebald and the photographer Michael Brandon-Jones at the University of East Anglia and details the initial phase of their creative partnership from 1982. With particular attention given to the role photography in his published poetry and literary criticism published prior to Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo) in 1990 it provides an account of the development of Sebald’s early image / text montages and the role of Brandon-Jones in their creation. By documenting Sebald’s interest in collecting images of ‘Art Brut’ during the 1980s, this essay argues that rather than being something the writer incorporates into his texts, the photographic image is the creative pivot around which Sebald reorientates his entire creative practice.

Tracing the many differences made to literary and artistic production more generally by photography, photomechanical reproduction, and cinema, this chapter considers some exemplary cases in the history of the visual arts in America. Considering Alvin Langdon Coburn’s work with Henry James and Ezra Pound, it ponders how canny this photographer was in promoting the photographic arts in relation to the existing pantheon of the arts. Turning to look at the photomechanical mediation of the news, it wonders what difference it made to see mass-reproduced photographic illustrations on a daily basis, and consider it newsworthy – what this change augured for the way writers and artists understood reality itself. Josep Renau’s photomontage work is examined as one example; the work of John Dos Passos another; the photo-essay form yet another. The chapter concludes with a survey of cinematic means of representation and their disintegrative effect on older aesthetic notions of unity, organicism, and consistency.

What does it mean to be a person, a persona, a knowing subject? When a philosopher of bygone age like Suhrawardi puts his own knowing subject at the epicenter of his unknowing world, I find in that moment a moral and philosophical momentum in which I too can locate my own knowing subject at the epicenter of my own unknowing world. I therefore begin this book with a reading of Suhrawardi’s allegorical prose, where we see him telling us when the Former of Truth (Musavver-e beh Haghighat) wanted to create him; let us just say God wanted to create him. Suhrawardi is an Illuminationist philosopher and he speaks his own peculiar language. He created Suhrawardi as a falcon. Have you ever heard anything stranger, more astonishing, more beautiful, more miraculous? Who is talking here? By what authority, what audacity, does he talk this way? A falcon? Really? What happened to that authorial voice, that agential power with which philosophers like Suhrawardi talked? How did we get from there to here, when we are afraid of our own shadow, as my late mother used to say – may she rest in peace? I write as a product of a colonial world, with a postcolonial claim to my subjectivity, reclaiming the moment when I was de-subjected to re-subject myself, at the receiving end of a brutal history of domestic tyranny and foreign domination, who has still managed to stand up and say “I” and place a meaningful sentence in front of that authorial “I.” I wish to find out how did that happen. The fact that Suhrawardi said “I” long before I did has something to do with my “I” too – even or particularly when I write “I” in English in the shadow of his Persian “Man/I.” This book is about “Man/I.”

Surrealist collage, favouring immediacy over sustained diegetic developments, would seem to contradict the possibility of coherent or cohesive narratives. Yet the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, which replaces in collage the (con)sequential links of conventional narratives, tantalizes the viewer-reader into searching for new links between disparate elements, recalling past stories or imagining potential scenarios. The chapter explores various key examples of surrealist collage narrative in both the verbal and visual fields: the micro-narratives suggested in André Breton’s early collage poems; Benjamin Péret’s collage poems made up of newspaper fragments; Giorgio de Chirico’s or René Magritte’s painted collages of enigmatic encounters; or Czech surrealist Jindřich Štyrský’s erotic scenarios. Focusing in particular on the parodic rewriting of the codes of melodrama in Max Ernst’s collage-novels, the chapter examines how fragments of popular nineteenth-century illustrated novels are recycled into new narratives. Finally, the study proposes a critique of psychoanalytical or alchemical interpretations, hermeneutic models that erase local disruptions in favour of a global coherence.

This chapter traces the history of the essay film from its origins in D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein (and theorizations by writers such as Hans Richter and Alexandre Astruc) to its manifestations in contemporary experimental cinema and video art installations such as John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. The author argues that the essay film is uniquely positioned to incorporate and respond to political and social crisis.

An electroencephalogram (EEG) reflects the summation of electrical activity arising from excitatory and inhibitory post-synaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons. EEG electrodes are traditionally placed on the scalp according to the International 10–20 system of electrode placement to reproducibly record cortical electrical activity. There are a number of different montages that may be used to best analyze an EEG, and allow for interpretation of the spatial distribution and localization of the EEG activity across the cortex. Neonates may require a reduced montage. Raw EEG data remain the gold standard of neurophysiological monitoring; however, reduced-montage and quantitative EEG techniques have allowed providers, particularly in the neonatal and pediatric intensive care units, to have supplementary data to interpret, in real time, at the patient’s bedside or via remote access. This chapter reviews the technical aspects of neurophysiological monitoring, including the practice and underlying principles of initiating, recording, displaying, and interpreting EEG. Quantitative trends, including CDSA and aEEG, are included.

This essay develops from the hypothesis that the relationship between Marx and cinema is mediated by a shared investment in the revolutionary subject, a collective being capable of abolishing capitalism, insofar as its liberation necessitates total demolition of the standing social order, from which an egalitarian organization of society might then develop. Beginning in Russia after 1917, when cinema was used as a material force to organize workers and peasants, the essay’s first half tracks the way that a cinematic emphasis on the industrial proletariat has been replaced, or superseded, by an emphasis on what Marx and Engels described as a relative surplus population. The essay’s second half illustrates this shift with reference to two popular films, released into the apparent fall of American economic hegemony, approaching them as ensigns of an economy in terminal crisis wherein revolutionary subjectivities might be forged out of the otherwise disaggregate members of the surplus population.

This chapter considers how, in six successful Shakespeare films, exclusively cinematic formal methods of depicting battle serve to interpret and transform the plays’ perspectives on warfare. Special emphasis is placed on the concept (and deployment) of dialectical montage first developed by Sergei Eisenstein in his seminal 1929 essay, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Though Eisenstein’s relatively rigid theory of montage has been endlessly appropriated, expanded and, at times, openly rejected by filmmakers and scholars alike, it remains ground zero for realist cinematic treatments of warfare and a key of sorts for deciphering individual filmmakers’ ideological orientations to their subject matter. The chapter argues that even the least overtly political film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays tend to reveal a certain preoccupation with the ethical, ideological, and, of course, hermeneutic implications of representing battle scenes in a medium that all but demands their representation.

The chapter argues that John Dos Passos in his novel Manhattan Transferappropriates cinematic immediacy effects and documentary aesthetics for the sake of literary innovation and cultural intervention. His formal innovations—the narrative’s montage structure, shifting focalization, and sampling of mass media item—allow the novel to convey the complexity of modern city life while opening up a critical perspective on mass media discourse and urban consumer culture. The chief strategy Dos Passos uses to critically refract popular mass culture is the creation and subsequent dissolution of immediacy effects that encourage the readers to grapple self-reflexively with the text, their reading strategies, and the represented social realities. The novel’s documentary style creates an urban world that seems recorded rather than imagined. Yet the novel continually disrupts this impression of immediacy: its disjunctive structure and surprising narrative shifts confront the readers with their interpretive routines and push them to develop new ways of reading that enable them to cope with both the novel’s experimental form and the depicted cultural practices.

“Paris Compounded” argues that the text of Finnegans Wake prompts readers to engage in sentient thinking. Joyce’s last work stages a heterogeneous and potentially limitless profusion that resists any preconceived order and disallows the passive reception associated with the commodity and with authoritarian discourse. The chapter situates the Wake’s textual assemblages within the literary practices of Paris of 1910 and 1920, showing that Joyce’s problematization of value and meaning are indebted to Apollinaire’s verbal montages but also, and more particularly, to Alfred Jarry, whose pataphysics deploys scatology, Lucretian materialism, and coincidentia oppositorum in an avant-garde mode. The chapter draws on the aesthetic theories of Benjamin, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas to argue that, as the Wake compounds the city under capitalism, it calls for ideal communities that respond to its material features with imagination, spontaneity, and joy.