The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.

Introduction. Crossmappings. Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural ImaginaryPart I. Travelling Image FormulasChapter 1. Facing Defacement. Degas' Portraits of WomenChapter 2. Naked Touch. Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female NudeChapter 3. Leaving an Imprint. Francesca Woodman's Photographic tableaux vivantsChapter 4. Pop Cinema. Hollywood's Critical Engagement with America's Culture of ConsumptionChapter 5. Hitler Goes Pop. Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood EntertainmentChapter 6. Simulations of the Real. Paul McCarthy's Performance DisastersChapter 7. Wagner's Isolde in HollywoodChapter 8. Shakespeare's WireChapter 9. Queen of Chess. On Serial ReadingPart II: Gendering the Uncanny, Imaging DeathChapter 10. The Horror of the Familiar. Freud's Thoughts on Femininity and the UncannyChapter 11. Gendering Curiosity. The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie CalleChapter 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical PerformanceChapter 13. Eva Hesse's Spectral Bride and her Uncanny DoubleChapter 14. Wounds of Wonder. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi ArakiChapter 15. The Fragility of the Quotidien. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Work with Death Chapter 16. Picasso's War WomenChapter 17. Contending with the Father. Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of ReparationNotesIndex