Film critic David Sterritt presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with main-stream and experimental film, and the interactions of all of these with American society and the culture of the 1950s. Sterritt balances the Beat countercultural goal of rebellion through both artistic creation and everyday behavior against the mainstream values of conformity and conservatism, growing worry over cold-war hostilities, and the "rat race" toward material success.
After an introductory overview of the Beat Generation, its history, its antecedents, and its influences, Sterritt shows the importance of "visual thinking" in the lives and works of major Beat authors, most notably Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He turns to Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory to portray the Beat writers-who were inspired by jazz and other liberating influences-as carnivalesque rebels against what they perceived as a rigid and stifling social order.
Showing the Beats as social critics, Sterritt looks at the work of 1950s photographers Robert Frank and William Klein; the attack against Beat culture in the pictures and prose of Life magazine; and the counterattack in Frank's film Pull My Daisy, featuring key Beat personalities. He further explores expressions of rebelliousness in film noir, the melodramas of director Douglas Sirk, and other Hollywood films.
Finally, Sterritt shows the changing attitudes toward the Beat sensibility in Beat-related Hollywood movies like A Bucket of Blood and The Beat Generation; television programs like Route 66 and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; nonstudio films like John Cassavetes's improvisational Shadows and Shirley Clarke's experimental The Connection; and radically avant-garde works by such doggedly independent screen artists as Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Bruce Connor, and Ken Jacobs, drawing connections between their achievements and the most subversive products of their Beat contemporaries.
Contributors. Joseph A. Alvarez, Lawrence I. Berkove, Anthony J. Berret, S.J., Wesley Britton, Louis J. Budd, James E. Caron, Everett Carter, Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua, Pascal Covici Jr., Beverly R. David, Victor Doyno, Dennis W. Eddings, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, S. D. Kapoor, Michael J. Kiskis, James S. Leonard, Victoria Thorpe Miller, Stan Poole, Tom Reigstad, David E. E. Sloane, David Tomlinson
Fisher places the work of George Eliot within the great evolution that constitutes the nineteenth-century English novel. He reports not only about her work, but about an evolving complex literary form. Fisher examines Eliot’s work as responding to “the loss of society,” the breakdown between public life and individua moral history. As trust in the community as a base of moral life weakens, decisive changes occur: the English novel accommodated itself to the disappearance of society and changed from the representation of individuals as members of a social order to the description of the self surrounded by collections of unrelated others.
Contributors. Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter, Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar, Eric Sundquist
Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Bill Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s. As revealed in Crane's disavowing appropriation of an emerging mass culture--from football games and freak shows to roller coasters and early cinema--the decade reappears as an underexposed moment in the genealogy of modernism and modernity.
Brown's story begins on the Jersey Shore, in Asbury Park, where Crane became a writer in the shadow of his father, a grimly serious Methodist minister who vilified the popular amusements his son adored. The coastal resorts became the stage for debates about technology, about the body's visibility, about a black service class and the new mass access to leisure. From this snapshot of a recreational scene that would continue to inspire Crane's sensational modernism, Brown takes us to New York's Bowery. There, in the visual culture established by dime museums, minstrel shows, and the Kodak craze, he exhibits Crane dramatically obscuring the typology of race.
Along the way, Brown demonstrates how attitudes toward play transformed the image of war, the idea of childhood and nationhood, and the concept of culture itself. And by developing a new conceptual apparatus (with such notions as "recreational time," "abstract leisure," and the "amusement/knowledge system"), he provides the groundwork for a new politics of pleasure. A crucial theorization of how cultural studies can and should proceed, The Material Unconscious insists that in the very conjuncture of canonical literature and mass culture, we can best understand how proliferating and competing economies of play disrupt the so-called "logic" and "work" of culture.
The literary genres given shape by the writers of classical antiquity are central to our own thinking about the various forms literature takes. Examining those genres, the essays collected here focus on the concept and role of the author and the emergence of authorship out of performance in Greece and Rome.
In a fruitful variety of ways the contributors to this volume address the questions: what generic rules were recognized and observed by the Greeks and Romans over the centuries; what competing schemes were there for classifying genres and accounting for literary change; and what role did authors play in maintaining and developing generic contexts? Their essays look at tragedy, epigram, hymns, rhapsodic poetry, history, comedy, bucolic poetry, prophecy, Augustan poetry, commentaries, didactic poetry, and works that "mix genres."
The contributors bring to this analysis a wide range of expertise; they are, in addition to the editors, Glenn W. Most, Joseph Day, Ian Rutherford, Deborah Boedeker, Eric Csapo, Marco Fantuzzi, Stephanie West, Alessandro Barchiesi, Ineke Sluiter, Don Fowler, and Stephen Hinds. The essays are drawn from a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies.
Migration and continuity have shaped both the Chicano people and their oral and written literature. In this pathfinding study of Chicano literature, Teresa McKenna specifically explores how these works arise out of social, political, and psychological conflict and how the development of Chicano literature is inextricably embedded in this fact.
McKenna begins by appraising the evolution of Chicano literature from oral forms—including the important role of the corrido in the development of Chicano poetry. In subsequent chapters she examines the works of Richard Rodriguez and Rolando Hinojosa. She also devotes a chapter to the development of the Chicana voice in Chicano literature. Her epilogue considers the parallel development of Chicano literary theory and discusses some possible directions for research.
In McKenna's own words, "I believe that the future of this literature, as that of all literatures by people of color in the United States, rests largely on its being effectively introduced into the curricula at all levels, as well as its entrance into the critical consciousness of literary theory." This book will be an important step in that process.
The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey’s account of the novelist’s deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works—Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes—demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac’s most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac’s work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.
Mongrel Nation surveys the history of the United Kingdom’s African, Asian, and Caribbean populations from 1948 to the present, working at the juncture of cultural studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Ashley Dawson argues that during the past fifty years Asian and black intellectuals from Sam Selvon to Zadie Smith have continually challenged the United Kingdom’s exclusionary definitions of citizenship, using innovative forms of cultural expression to reconfigure definitions of belonging in the postcolonial age. By examining popular culture and exploring topics such as the nexus of race and gender, the growth of transnational politics, and the clash between first- and second-generation immigrants, Dawson broadens and enlivens the field of postcolonial studies.
Mongrel Nation gives readers a broad landscape from which to view the shifting currents of politics, literature, and culture in postcolonial Britain. At a time when the contradictions of expansionist braggadocio again dominate the world stage, Mongrel Nation usefully illuminates the legacy of imperialism and suggests that creative voices of resistance can never be silenced.Dawson
“Elegant, eloquent, and full of imaginative insight, Mongrel Nation is a refreshing, engaged, and informative addition to post-colonial and diasporic literary scholarship.”
—Hazel V. Carby, Yale University
“Eloquent and strong, insightful and historically precise, lively and engaging, Mongrel Nation is an expansive history of twentieth-century internationalist encounters that provides a broader landscape from which to understand currents, shifts, and historical junctures that shaped the international postcolonial imagination.”
—May Joseph, Pratt Institute
Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism.
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