Books by Kaja Silverman

This provocative book undertakes a new and challenging reading of recent semiotic and structuralist theory, arguing that films, novels, and poems cannot be studied in isolation from their viewers and readers.

Through a wide-ranging discussion, that extends from Ovid and Leonardo da Vinci to Gerhard Richter, and from philosophy and literature to time-based art, Kaja Silverman shows that the master myth of Western subjectivity is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, not that of Oedipus, and this Janus-faced myth has the capacity both to destroy and to save us.

This book is the first of a two-volume study of photography that challenges both how photography has been theorized and how it has been historicized.

Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and existence that has been in place since Plato's parable of the cave.

Through the examination of a range of literary and cinematic texts, from William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives to the novels of Henry James, Silverman offers a bold new look at masculinities which deviate from the social norm.

Probably the prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. This title conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries.

The topic of love is consistantly neglected within literary theory. Here, Silverman argues that love has a political role to play as well as a role within the psychic domain.