The Private Voyeur

Books about The Private Voyeur

In his new book, leading medievalist A. C. Spearing provides the only study of the many scenes of secret watching and listening in medieval love-stories, and of the way that the central importance of these scenes encourages both the poets and their readers to imagine themselves as voyeurs in relation to what they read.

From Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade to Jake Gittes, private eyes have made for some of the most memorable characters in cinema. We often view these detectives as lone wolves who confront and try to make sense of a violent and chaotic modern world. Bran Nicol challenges this stereotype in The Private Eye and offers a fresh take on this iconic character and the film noir genre. Nicol traces the history of private eye movies from the influential film noirs of the 1940s to 1970s neonoir cinema, whose slow and brilliant decline gave way to the fading of detectives into movie mythology today. Analyzing a number of classic films—including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and The Long Goodbye—he reveals that while these movies are ostensibly thrillers, they are actually occupied by issues of work and love. The private eye is not a romantic hero, Nicol argues, but a figure who investigates the concealments of others at the expense of his own private life. Combining a lucid introduction to an underexplored tradition in movie history with a new approach to the detective in film, this book casts new light on the private worlds of the private eye.

-- Amy B. Jordan, Director of the Media and the Developing Mind Sector, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania...

Books about Flash Art

Books about Narcissus and the Voyeur

Stalking is a predatory form of terrorizing people. Whether the tormenting erotomanic pursuit by the unrequited lover of his or her prey, or the secretive invasive surveillance in government-backed counterterrorism, stalker and stalkee are "coupled" in today's world of idealized yet dissociated intrapsychic, interpersonal, national and international relations. "Cyberspace," an unprecedented force for good, has become, along with more conventional venues, a fearsomely invasive stalking ground in private and public lives. Film studies and psychoanalysis converge in a close look at voyeurism in stalking and in the acts of filming and film viewing. Gender differences among stalkers round out this picture. Parallel processes in the minds, actions, and lives of stalker and stalkee are inevitable in the blurred boundaries yet ineluctable connection between victim and victimizer, whether due to merger fantasies, projective identifications or a host of other psychological links. This book extends and develops these ideas to similar relations between terrorism from within and terrorism from without in both sexual and surveillance stalking.

Books about Poetica

Library has Vol. 1-5.

Books about The Public Currency of the Private Letter