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Description
In a culture that often understands formal experimentation or theoretical argument to be antithetical to pleasure, Atom Egoyan has nevertheless consistently appealed to wide audiences around the world. If films like The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter have ensured him international cult status as one of the most revered of all contemporary directors, Egoyan’s forays into installation art and opera have provided evidence of his versatility and confirmed his talents.
Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan is both scholarly and accessible. Indispensable for the scholar, student, and fan, this collection of new essays and interviews from leading film and media scholars unpacks the central arguments, tensions, and paradoxes of his work and traces their evolution. It also locates his work within larger intellectual and artistic currents in order to consider how he takes up and answers critical debates in politics, philosophy, and aesthetics. Most importantly, it addresses how his work is both intellectually engaging and emotionally moving.
Contributor Notes
Monique Tschofen is an associate professor in the English department at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is editor of Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Work, and the author of articles and book chapters on Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage, Anne Carson, and other Canadian artists. She is currently working on a monograph about early Canadian torture narratives.|Jennifer Burwell is an associate professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University and author of Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation. Burwell’s current research explores the relationships among discursive logics, communications technologies, and the historical development of a market economy.
Editorial Reviews
Editors Tschofen and Burwell have divided their book into four sections ... each preceded by a thoughtful introduction by the co-editors, and concluding with the most complete Egoyan filmography yet published in a non-bibliographical study. This is an impressively thoughtful assemblage of texts.... Tschofen and Burwell also deserve credit for relying almost exclusively on Canadian critics for input.... Atom Egoyan is nor more generically North American than Ingmar Bergman is generically European.... Image and Territory is both useful and impressive, and belongs on the shelf of any cinephile interested in the work of the king of Armenian Canadian directors.
— Mark Harris, Canadian Literature, 196, Spring 2008, 2008 August
The editors' introductions to each section are particularly smart and insightful, identifying Egoyan's chief preoccupations as an artist in terms of trauma, absence, substitution, displacement, denial, inversion, and negation.
— J. Belton, Rutgers, CHOICE, July 2007, 2007 May
