CMC Faculty Books

The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows

James Morrison — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:45:14 PST

Todd Haynes has emerged from the trenches of independent American film in the 1990s to become one of the twenty-first century's most audacious filmmakers. In a series of smart, informative essays, this book traces his career from its roots in New Queer Cinema to the Oscar-nominated Far from Heaven (2002). Along the way, it covers such landmark films as Poison (1991), Safe (1995), and Velvet Goldmine (1998). Contributors look at these films from a variety of angles, including his debts to the avant-garde and such noted precursors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder; his adventurous uses of melodrama; and his incisive portrayals of contemporary life.

Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras

Nita Kumar — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:41 PDT

This book focuses on the educational history of Banaras from 1840 to 1940. It defines the concepts of learning and education and provides a detailed picture of the social history of Banaras. The authors then describe how the various systems of education underwent changes and upheavals.

The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity: Essays on Education

Nita Kumar — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:40 PDT

This collection of essays studies the provincial and the rural, locating the sites of the community and family as producing other histories. The volume is divided into three parts: the first part engages with disabling practices of history within communities; the second part works towards producing gendered and community-oriented histories of modernity in South Asia; the third part proposes post-colonialism as an appropriate term for discussions of history and modernity and includes reflections on the scholar's particular position within the history and modernity. In addition, there are certain methodological arguments and concepts that span the whole book, such as the implication of narratives and the power of pain.

Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras

Nita Kumar — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:39 PDT

In this unusually personal, evocative account of her fieldwork experiences, Kumar tackles the dilemma of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapts to the field and builds deeply affecting relationships with strangers. She discloses what it is like to be a native researching her own culture, offering her fieldwork memoirs in all their spontaneity and candor. We see Banaras through her eyes when she first arrives: throngs of people, cramped and dark lodgings, unappetizing food, mischievous monkeys, and almost overwhelming filth. But as she establishes friendships, we are treated to her discoveries not only about the city and its people, but also about her place in this society. The familiar problems that face most anthropologists conducting fieldwork--of Self versus Other, objectivity versus bias, familiar circumstances versus new and dismaying ones--are given a surprising and complex dimension. Through a narration of her own experiences, the author demonstrates how personal locations--habits, preferences, expectations deriving from childhood memories, and areas of ignorance--impose themselves on the process of selection, observation, and interpretation in research.

Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors

James Morrison — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:37 PDT

In Passport to Hollywood, James Morrison examines a series of Hollywood films by directors from European art-cinemas. Drawing widely on current research in film theory, film history, and cultural studies, he traces the influence of European filmmakers in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1980s and illuminates the relation between modernism and mass-culture in American movies. By interpreting important American films, Morrison also shows how these films illustrate key issues of cultural hierarchy and national culture over fifty years of American cinema. In addition, he explores the complex and often contradictory ways that these Hollywood movies conceptualize ideas about "foreignness." Using insightful close viewings, Morrison demonstrates new connections among modernism, postmodernism, and American movies.

Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood

James Morrison — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:36 PDT

What are the roots of personal identity? In this collection of essays, James Morrison searches for answers within the experiences and emotional reality of his own childhood in an attempt to pinpoint the beginnings of his own gay self-identity. "Although from the vantage point of my present self, I do not remember a time in my life when I was not 'gay,' I know that the arrival at any avowed identity is always a complex process of affirmation and negation, refusal and identification." It is this process, and specifically the ways gay identity circulates before it is even spoken, that Morrison seeks to distill in specific experiences. From the beginnings of questioning his religion to exploring his first boyhood attraction, Morrison's experiences are chronicled honestly and compellingly.

The Films of Terrence Malick

James Morrison et al. — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:35 PDT

Despite overwhelming acclaim for his work, director Terrence Malick remains an under-examined figure of an era of filmmaking that also produced such notables as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven remain benchmarks of American cinema, while his recent The Thin Red Line returned him to the pantheon of American directors. In this new study, authors James Morrison and Thomas Schur examine each of his films in detail, drawing on extensive archival research to construct a portrait of his working methods as a director as well as the thematic, aesthetic, and cultural components of his work.

Moreover, aside from tracing the development of Malick's filmmaking from its beginnings to the present, the book compares his finished pictures to their original shooting scripts, and so provides a unique means of exploring the nature of his working methods and the ways in which they influence the final products. Revealing the ways in which these films connect to and depart from evolving traditions of the last 30 years, The Films of Terrence Malick provides a comprehensive and penetrating study as well as an informative and adventurous work of film criticism.

Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s

James Morrison — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:51:33 PDT

Weary from the turbulent sixties, America entered the 1970s hoping for calm. Instead, the war in Vietnam and its troubled aftermath persisted, the Watergate scandal unfolded, and continuing social unrest at home and abroad provided the backdrop for the new decade. The scene was similar in Hollywood, as it experienced greater upheaval than at any point since the coming of sound. As the studio and star systems declined, actors had more power than ever, and because many had become fiercely politicized by the temper of the times, the movies they made were often more challenging than before. Thus, just when it might have faded out, Hollywood was reborn—but what was the nature of this rebirth?

Hollywood Reborn examines this question, with contributors focusing on many of the era’s key figures—noteworthy actors such as Jane Fonda, Al Pacino, Faye Dunaway, and Warren Beatty, and unexpected artists, among them Donald Sutherland, Shelley Winters, and Divine. Each essay offers new perspectives through the lens of an important star, illuminating in the process some of the most fascinating and provocative films of the decade.

Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen

Audrey Bilger — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:34:22 PDT

Laughing Feminism focuses on comedy in the works of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, authors who scrutinized the subjected prejudices against women in order to expose their absurdity and encourage readers to laugh at the folly of sexist views. Audrey Bilger shows that these women writers employed a full arsenal of comic weapons such as satire, burlesque, and parody to combat patriarchal nonsense and make comedy out of the discrepancies between the myth and reality of womanhood. Bilger draws on current feminist criticism, comic theory, and the methodologies of literary history to provide a context for re-assessing the novels of these writers. At a time when overt feminist statements could ruin a woman's reputation, comedy enabled these authors to smuggle feminism into their writing.

Humor in Life and Letters Series.