Melodrama And Modernity

Author : Ben Singer
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231505079
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama and Modernity written by Ben Singer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement. Written with verve and panache, and illustrated with 100 striking photos and drawings, Singer's study provides an invaluable historical and conceptual map both of melodrama as a genre on stage and screen and of modernity as a pivotal idea in social theory.

Author : Ben Singer
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231113293
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama and Modernity written by Ben Singer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II. In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy. More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.

Author : Ben Singer
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780231113281
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama and Modernity written by Ben Singer and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.), Singer uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrillin popular amusement.

Author : Nancy Abelmann
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824864859
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Melodrama of Mobility written by Nancy Abelmann and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, The Melodrama of Mobility offers a rich portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in the non-West.

Author : Christine Gledhill
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231543190
Total Pages : 761 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama Unbound written by Christine Gledhill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional crises, either subversively excessive or narrowly focused on the dilemmas of women. Drawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama is a transgeneric mode that has long spoken to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Pointing to melodrama’s roots in the ancient Greek combination of melos and drama, and to medieval Christian iconography focused on the pathos of Christ as suffering human body, the volume highlights the importance to modernity of melodrama as a mode of emotional dramaturgy, the social and aesthetic conditions for which emerged long before the French Revolution. Contributors articulate new ways of thinking about melodrama that underscore its pervasiveness across national cultures and in a variety of genres. They examine how melodrama has traveled to and been transformed in India, China, Japan, and South America, whether through colonial circuits or later, globalization; how melodrama mixes with other modes such as romance, comedy, and realism; and finally how melodrama has modernized the dramatic functions of gender, class, and race by orchestrating vital aesthetic and emotional experiences for diverse audiences.

Author : Scott Loren
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789089646736
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama After the Tears written by Scott Loren and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume condenses elements of theory on melodrama by bringing into focus what it recognizes to be the locus for subjective identification within melodramatic narratives: the victim.

Author : Carolyn Williams
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110709593X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama written by Carolyn Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

Author : Kathleen McHugh
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814332535
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book South Korean Golden Age Melodrama written by Kathleen McHugh and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the theoretical, historical, and contemporary impact of South Korea's Golden Age of cinema.

Author : Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822374048
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama written by Jonathan Goldberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.

Author : Rebecca Beasley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199660867
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Russia in Britain, 1880-1940 written by Rebecca Beasley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia in Britain explores the extent of British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture from the 1880s up to the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War.