The book Understanding Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - Representation and Interpretation (edited by James Fenwick and published by Intellect Books) for which I wrote the first chapter, is finally out next week! Here it is, featured in the last essay of Sight And Sound magazine.
In my chapter, titled "God, it’ll be hard topping the H-bomb": Kubrick’s search for a new obsession in the path from 'Dr. Strangelove' to '2001' I used both textual analysis and archival evidence to explore the genesis of the movie, and the search of what Stanley Kubrick called "his new obsession" after the release of Dr. Strangelove - or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in January 1964. By analyzing three lesser-known projects the director was associated with before his involvement with Arthur C. Clarke, I documented the methods behind the sometimes-uneasy development of a new Kubrick project, and the various science-fiction ideas that were muted along the way to the eventual creation of 2001.
I've read all the other chapters and they are extremely interesting; drawing inspiration from the introduction, they "offer new and interpretative approaches that examine aesthetics, performance, technological design, philosophical discourse, genre and authorial agency in 2001. Each chapter is linked by the exploration of Kubrick’s intellectual concerns as an auteur and the historicism and aesthetic representation of 2001, with the ultimate aim of bringing together a range of new scholarly perspectives from the full spectrum of Kubrick Studies. [...] Taken together, this volume represents a wide-ranging examination from a number of standpoints about one of the most important and influential films in cinema history".
