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What do midcentury “confessional” poets have in common with today’s reality TV stars? An inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, but also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity, now, was a kind of work—always ongoing, never complete—to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or Romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and ’60s, performance art in the ’70s, theater in the ’80s, television in the ’90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed—with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Grobe argues that a tradition of confessional performance unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors—and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts.

Because it is impossible to create an unfiltered mirror to reality, the news media selectively rely on particular pictures and words to shape our understanding of world events. The construction of news is never a random process, and photojournalism is far more than a mechanical undertaking. Because photographs literally craft boundaries, systematically hiding one reality while illuminating another, this book extensively examines how pictures represent tragedy, uncovering surprising editorial forces that persistently structure the way the news media cover death. Some deaths are concealed, while others are illustrated in great detail, and this book develops formulas predicting these fates. We see how deep political cleavages, especially those powered by nationalism, create remarkable patterns of visibility and invisibility. The patterns are striking, but they overturn long-held assumptions about which deaths are newsworthy, raising fundamental questions about the role of news images. This behind-the-scenes account shares many photographs, including images that were censored from the news. It also explores in-depth interviews with industry leaders who admit to self-censorship and industry censorship. It engages impassioned controversies over bearing witness, protecting privacy, and other sensitive topics.

Today’s franchises of fantastic media depend on visual effects for their existence, not just in their local textual homes (a feature film, a TV episode, a videogame) but across multiple screens and platforms, working transmedially to build ongoing storyworlds, imbue bodies with evidence of life, and ultimately to travel freely as spectacular subgenres in themselves. In this book’s four case studies, major fantastic franchises of the last half century—Star Trek, Star Wars, the Middle Earth films, and The Matrix—reveal themselves as busy sites of negotiation between the late analog era of the 1960s and 1970s and the digital blockbuster era that followed. Arguing that this colonization took place largely in and through the visual effects design and engineering of high-profile media properties, the chapters explore television series art direction and its relationship to an amateur “blueprint culture,” documenting the contents of media’s imaginary worlds; the previsualization practices through which visual effects rebrand complex webs of creative contributions under the sign of the techno-auteur; the animation traditions that bring special-effects-assisted performances to life; and the role of special effects in larger circuits of visual culture. Approaching special effects both as specific technological practices and discursive performances of behind-the-scenes labor, More Than Meets the Eye plumbs the analog roots of contemporary transmedia franchises to find the unexpected behaviors and impacts of special effects that hide in plain sight, constructing perceptions of narrative worlds and characters as on another level they construct our collective ways of imagining franchise cinema, digital media, and technological change.