With work that has ranged across a number of different fields, Stam has participated in a number of post-structuralist and postcolonial “turns” within film and cultural studies. Contesting the monolingual and Anglo-Americano-centric approach to these issues, the book elaborates such concepts as “the seismic shift” provoked by the decolonization of culture, the radicalization of the academic disciplines, the philosophical centrality of indigenous thought, the “left/right” convergence on identity politics, and “inter-colonial narcissism. Another field of intervention for Stam has been in cultural theory, especially in Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Johns Hopkins, 1989), the first book-length study to extrapolate for film and cultural studies Bakhtin's conceptual categories, such as “translinguistics” and “dialogism” and the “carnivalesque. Film Theory: An Introduction was published in tandem with two Blackwell anthologies co-edited with Toby Miller both from 2000: Film and Theory and A Companion to Film Theory.

Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then-dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses. One feature, which came to characterize all of the Stam-Shohat collaborations was looking at theses issues within a longue timespan by placing the various "1492s" (i. For a more comprehensive bibliography, see Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), Film and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). A remarkable synthesis, recommended to anyone who wants to understand the questions and debates that have animated film theory in the twentieth century.Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006), meanwhile, explored the “transtextual diaspora” generated by a highly literary ménage-a-trois in the 1920s that led to the books and published journals of Henri-Pierre Roche, Franz Hessel and Helen Hessel, as well as three films by Truffaut based on the life and work of Roche ( Jules and Jim, Two Englishwomen, and The Man Who Loved Women). Robert Stam, renowned for his clarity of writing, will also include studies of cinema specialists providing readers with a depth of reference not generally available outside the field of film studies itself. Stam and Shohat continued with an anthology entitled Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2003); followed by a more political polemic which excoriated the militaristic pseudo-patriotism of the George Bush/ Dick Cheney period -- Flagging Patriotism: Crises in Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006).

Still, Bakhtin is perhaps the most quoted theorist here so Stam inevitably managed to include some sections on him that I found satisfying. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Para mim, o grande diferencial do livro é que a cada capítulo e teoria, o Stam primeiro apresenta sua principal ideia, faz você achar ela brilhante, para logo em seguida mostrar as críticas a ela, fazer você pensar que as críticas tem razão, e aí ao fim ele também se posiciona sobre o assunto. Two anthologies co-edited with Alessandra Raengo (both published by Blackwell) fleshed out the project: Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005), and Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004). Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature.Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy," co-written with Ella Shohat.

It is suitable for students from any discipline but is particularly aimed at students studying film and literature as it examines issues common to both subjects such as realism, illusionism, narration, point of view, style, semiotics, psychoanalysis and multiculturalism. It is rooted (by its own admission) in the west and isn't always the snappiest read, but it gave me what I was looking for. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. I picked this book up at the campus library because I've recently become quite interested in silent cinema and this book has several brief sections on it, including a quick summary of the theories of folks like Jean Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein. At times Stam's summaries of other people's critical stances and theories was helpful (especially when so often you have to read confusing translations of the originals) but usually I would have preferred just an anthology of theory and the original articles rather than Stam's interpretations and opinions.

Stam has also been an advocate-exegete of semiotics, poststructuralism, and film theory in such books as New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond (Routledge, 1992) and Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), the first book to recount the history of film theory from its beginnings to the present within a transnational framework that included Latin America, Africa and Asia alongside Europe and North America. Stam has also been a major figure within the “transtextual turn” in adaptation and intertextuality studies.