Spring 2012 - University of California Press

academic trade
Scott Bukatman
The Poetics of
Slumberland
Animated Spirits and the
Animating Spirit
In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott
Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility,
and the life of images in cartoons,
comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins
with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in
Slumberland to explore how and why the
emerging media of comics and cartoons
brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious
energy characterized by hyperbolic emotion,
physicality, and imagination. The
book broadens to consider similar “animated”
behaviors in seemingly disparate
media—films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo
Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical
My Fair Lady and the story of
Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of
Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic
superheroes—drawing them all together as
the purveyors of embodied utopias of
disorder.
Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media
Studies at Stanford University.
MARCH
276 pages, 6 x 9”, 32 color illustrations,
38 b/w photographs
Animation/Cinema
World
cloth 978-0-520-26571-4 $70.00tx/£48.95
paper 978-0-520-26572-1 $29.95sc/£19.95
Stephen Hinton
Weill’s Musical Theater
Stages of Reform
In the first musicological study of Kurt
Weill’s complete stage works, Stephen
Hinton charts the full range of theatrical
achievements by one of twentieth-century
musical theater’s key figures. Hinton shows
how Weill’s experiments with a range of
genres—from one-act operas and plays
with music to Broadway musicals and filmopera—became
an indispensable part of
the reforms he promoted during his brief
but intense career. Confronting the divisive
and erroneous notion of “two Weills”—one
European, the other American—Hinton
adopts a broad and inclusive perspective,
establishing criteria that allow aspects of
continuity to emerge, particularly in matters
of dramaturgy. Tracing his extraordinary
journey as a composer, the book
shows how Weill’s artistic ambitions led to
his working with a remarkably heterogeneous
collection of authors, such as Georg
Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht, Moss Hart, Alan Jay
Lerner, and Maxwell Anderson.
Stephen Hinton is Avalon Professor of the
Humanities at Stanford University and the author
of Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera.
MAY
600 pages, 6 x 9”, 7 b/w photographs, 2 tables,
78 music examples
Music/Opera/Composers
World
cloth 978-0-520-27177-7 $49.95sc/£34.95
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