Alan Louis Ackerman

A technological revolution has changed the way we see things. The storytelling media employed by Pixar Animation Studios, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare differ greatly, yet these creators share a collective fascination with the nebulous boundary between material objects and our imaginative selves. How do the acts of seeing and believing remain linked? Alan Ackerman charts the dynamic history of interactions between showing and knowing in Seeing Things, a richly interdisciplinary study which illuminates changing modes of perception and modern representational media. Seeing Things demonstrates that the airy nothings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Ghost in Hamlet, and soulless bodies in Beckett's media experiments, alongside Toy Story's digitally animated toys, all serve to illustrate the modern problem of visualizing, as Hamlet put it, 'that within which passes show.' Ackerman carefully analyses such ghostly appearances and disappearances across cultural forms and contexts from the early modern period to the present, investigating the tension between our distrust of shadows and our abiding desire to believe in invisible realities. Seeing Things provides a fresh and surprising cultural history through theatrical, verbal, pictorial, and cinematic representations.

From Shakespeare to Pixar

Seeing Things

Susan C. W. Abbotson

Stephen Marino

Toby Silverman Zinman

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Arthur Miller provides the essential guide to Miller's most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on five of Miller's plays: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and Broken Glass . A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers want a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid thei.

Alan Louis Ackerman

Books

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