Politics Desire And The Hollywood Novel

Download or read book Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel written by Chip Rhodes and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of what happens when a serious writer goes to Hollywood has become a cliché: the writer is paid well but underappreciated, treated like a factory worker, and forced to write bad, formulaic movies. Most fail, become cynical, drink to excess, and at some point write a bitter novel that attacks the film industry in the name of high art. Like many too familiar stories, this one neither holds up to the facts nor helps us understand Hollywood novels. Instead, Chip Rhodes argues, these novels tell us a great deal about the ways that Hollywood has shaped both the American political landscape and American definitions of romance and desire. Rhodes considers how novels about the film industry changed between the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s and the era of deregulated film making that has existed since the 1960s. He asserts that Americans are now driven by cultural, rather than class, differences and that our mainstream notion of love has gone from repressed desire to “abnormal desire” to, finally, strictly business. Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel pays close attention to six authors—Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, and Elmore Leonard—who have toiled in the film industry and written to tell about it. More specifically, Rhodes considers both screenplays and novels with an eye toward the different formulations of sexuality, art, and ultimately political action that exist in these two kinds of storytelling.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles written by Kevin R. McNamara and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles has a tantalizing hold on the American imagination. Its self-magnifying myths encompass Hollywood glamour, Arcadian landscapes, and endless summer, but also the apocalyptic undertow of riots, environmental depredation, and natural disaster. This Companion traces the evolution of Los Angeles as the most public staging of the American Dream - and American nightmares. The expert contributors make exciting, innovative connections among the authors and texts inspired by the city, covering the early Spanish settlers, African American writers, the British and German expatriates of the 1930s and 1940s, Latino, and Asian LA literature. The genres discussed include crime novels, science fiction, Hollywood novels, literary responses to urban rebellion, the poetry scene, nature writing, and the most influential non-fiction accounts of the region. Diverse, vibrant, and challenging as the city itself, this Companion is the definitive guide to LA in literature.

Download or read book Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging written by Nick Rumens and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed for students, academics and the general reader alike, Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging provides theoretical and empirical insights into the linkages between sexualities and forms of desire, and ways of belonging and relating to others in specific contexts and moments in time. Opening with a substantial introduction by one of the editors, this collection of thirteen essays is organised into three parts, each section making important contributions to contemporary debates regarding the sexual politics of citizenship, marriage, friendship, pornography, intimacies, eroticism and desire. As such, the essays introduce fresh perspectives for thinking about how individuals construct senses of belonging and modes of relating to others in their everyday lives, within the disciplinary frameworks of sociology, organisational analysis and cultural studies. As well, the volume analyses representations of desire and eroticism in British Pop Art, trauma and feminist fiction, polyamory self-help literature, Hollywood films, and sociological and psychoanalytic theory. Analytical insights offered within these essays will do much to stimulate debate about aspects of the socially and historically constituted relationship between desire and sexuality. Because of the diverse approaches and conclusions it contains, the volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in engaging with inter- and multidisciplinary perspectives in order to understand the dynamics between constructions of desire and belonging, and discourses of gender, sex and sexuality.

Download or read book Faulkner's Hollywood Novels written by Ben Robbins and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2024-08-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the influence of Faulkner’s screenwriting on his literary craft and depictions of women William Faulkner’s time as a Hollywood screenwriter has often been dismissed as little more than an intriguing interlude in the career of one of America’s greatest novelists. Consequently, it has not received the wide-ranging critical examination it deserves. In Faulkner’s Hollywood Novels, Ben Robbins provides an overdue thematic analysis by systematically tracing a dialogue of influence between Faulkner’s literary fiction and screenwriting over a period of two decades. Among numerous insights, Robbins’s work sheds valuable new light on Faulkner’s treatment of female characters, both in his novels and in the films to which he contributed. Drawing on extensive archival research, Robbins finds that Hollywood genre conventions and archetypes significantly influenced and reshaped Faulkner’s craft after his involvement in the studio system. His work in the film industry also produced a deep exploration of the gendered dynamics of collaborative labor, genre formulae, and cultural hierarchies that materialized in both his Hollywood screenplays and his experimental fiction.

Download or read book The Many Facets of Diamonds Are Forever written by Oliver Buckton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diamonds Are Forever—the fourth James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, published in 1956—is widely recognized as one of the most intriguing and original works in the 007 series. With its exciting settings including West Africa, Las Vegas, and the horse-racing center of Saratoga Springs, the novel explores the thrilling themes of diamond smuggling, gambling, gangsters, sex, and espionage. Moreover, the novel is unique in being set outside the conventional Cold War milieu of other Fleming novels, allowing readers to explore Fleming’s views of America without reference to its Cold War antagonist, the Soviet Union. This collection of essays is the first to explore Fleming’s novel in depth, as well as delve into the remarkable 1971 film adaptation directed by Guy Hamilton (who also directed Goldfinger), and starring Sean Connery in his final “official” appearance as 007. Updating Fleming’s novel for the post-1960s culture of sexual liberation and mass-market consumerism, Hamilton’s film departs from the novel by introducing Ernst Stavro Blofeld—the head of SPECTRE and James Bond’s nemesis—as the arch-villain. The ten original essays in this collection focus on diverse themes such as the central role of Tiffany Case—one of Fleming’s most memorable “Bond girls”—in novel and film; Fleming’s fascination with diamonds, reflected in this novels intertextual connections to the non-fiction book The Diamond Smugglers; the author’s ambivalent relationship with American culture; the literary style of Diamonds Are Forever, including its generic status as a “Hollywood novel”; and the role of homosexuality in the novel and film versions of Diamonds Are Forever. Bringing together established Bond scholars and new emerging critics, this collection offers unique insight into one of the most influential works of modern popular culture, casting new light on the many facets of Diamonds Are Forever.

Download or read book The Last Word written by Justin Gautreau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

Download or read book A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900 - 1950 written by John T. Matthews and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole. Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century