{"title":"Books by Murray Smith","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780198822752","title":"Film, Art, and the Third Culture","description":"In the mid-1950s C.P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures' - the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences, urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive presence of digital technologies, Snow's challenge is more relevant than ever. Working out how the 'scientific' and everyday images of the world 'hang' together is no simple matter. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, Smith explores this question in relation to the art, technology, and science of film in particular, and to the world of the arts and aesthetic activity more generally. In the first part of his book, Smith explores the general strategies and principles necessary to build a 'third cultural' or naturalized approach to film and art - one that roots itself in an appreciation of scientific knowledge and method. Smith then goes on to focus on the role of emotion in film and the other arts, as an extended experiment in the 'third cultural' integration of ideas on emotion spanning the arts, humanities and sciences. While acknowledging that not all of the questions we ask are scientific in nature, Smith contends that we cannot disregard the insights wrought by taking a naturalized approach to the aesthetics of film and the other arts.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56226684273013,"sku":"9780198822752","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780198822752_33858c08-2c9e-4faa-be36-5336d4bae2e7.jpg?v=1786012829"},{"product_id":"9780198871071","title":"Engaging Characters","description":"Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives.In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience.In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227020341621,"sku":"9780198871071","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780198871071_78a8f97d-ffa0-4253-9da2-04c07945d370.jpg?v=1786033297"},{"product_id":"9781839022166","title":"Trainspotting","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1996 \u003ci\u003eTrainspotting\u003c\/i\u003e was the biggest thing in British culture. Brilliantly and aggressively marketed, it crossed into the mainstream despite being a black comedy set against the backdrop of heroin addiction in Edinburgh. Produced by Andrew Macdonald, scripted by John Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle, the team behind \u003ci\u003eShallow Grave\u003c\/i\u003e (1994), \u003ci\u003eTrainspotting\u003c\/i\u003e was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s barbed novel of the same title. The film is crucial for understanding British culture in the context of devolution and the rise of ‘Cool Britannia’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Murray Smith unpicks the processes that led to \u003ci\u003eTrainspotting\u003c\/i\u003e’s enormous success. He isolates various factors – the film’s eclectic soundtrack, its depiction of Scottish identity, its attitude to deprivation, drugs and violence, its traffic with American cultural forms, its synthesis of realist and fantastic elements, and its complicated relationship to ‘heritage’ – that make \u003ci\u003eTrainspotting\u003c\/i\u003e such a vivid document of its time. Although it heralded a false dawn for British film-making,\u003ci\u003eTrainspotting\u003c\/i\u003e is, Smith concludes, both authentically vernacular and yet transnational in its influences and ambitions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn his afterword to this new edition, Murray Smith reflects on the original film 25 years after its release, and its 2017 sequel \u003ci\u003eT2: Trainspotting\u003c\/i\u003e also directed by Boyle. Smith also considers Danny Boyle's subsequent directorial career, with highlights including \u003ci\u003eSlumdog Millionaire\u003c\/i\u003e (2008) and the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308051706229,"sku":"9781839022166","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781839022166_34802965-e149-497f-b04d-12cf2ab05c91.jpg?v=1786028751"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-murray-smith.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}