Review: IAAS Postgraduate Conference, ‘E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One’
One of the first panels of the morning, ‘Form and Function’, was quick to establish a material basis for the theme. All speakers were concerned in some way with the (in)stability of artistic media, especially the ways in which seemingly divergent forms might converge.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Stars, Fans and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay by Sumiko Higashi
Sumiko Higashi’s Stars, Fans and Consumption in the 1950s is a book about popular imagery, namely those of the female icons of 1950s movies. Only this isn’t about the movies, rather Higashi’s text investigates the iconography of these women as it is shored up in magazines and on billboards, unveiling not only the rampant commodification of Fifties bodies, but also how and why they were so voraciously consumed.
Continue ReadingFilm Review: Trumbo (2015)
It would be naïve to expect a biopic to comprehensively cover the competing interests, shifting alliances and distinct beliefs among those blacklisted, greylisted, or progressive Hollywood more broadly. However, Trumbo comes to conclusions about courage and cowardice without context and, as such, its oversights are worth exploring. Part of the problem is that Trumbo seems uncomfortable with Dalton’s politics. How else to explain a film with such a curious lack of interest in its protagonist’s beliefs beyond that in the sanctity of the First Amendment?
Continue ReadingBook Review: Legal Realism and American Law by J. Zaremby
At a first glance, the concept of realism appears somewhat dated, belonging to a particular epoch of legal scholarship. Being essentially a movement that had emerged during 1920s “out of a fundamentally progressive mood” [1] and gradually has fallen by the wayside since, it may appear as a quaint historic notion that a few dedicated academics grew to be fond of perusing, in a way reminiscent of an interest in pennyfarthing bicycles or silent film.
Continue ReadingBook Review: An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H. L. Mencken by Hal Crowther
Facing a canonical author with an intimidating wealth of existing scholarship can, at times, beg the question: what is really left to say? Mencken certainly falls into this category, a fact acknowledged in the “Disarming Introduction to an Alarming American”. Yet, in only seventy-seven pages, Crowther manages to offer a valuable and engaging contribution to the discussion of an extensively discussed man.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘American Into Periodical Studies’, The First Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium
The Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS) was recently formed by Sue Currell and Victoria Bazin, and aims to bring together scholars working on American periodicals from any historical period. Hosted by the Eccles’ Centre for American Studies at the British Library—and supported by the British Association for American Studies, Northumbria University, and the University of Sussex—‘American into Periodical Studies’ constituted the inaugural NAPS symposium.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Hippies by W.J. Rorabaugh
Proclaiming its title against a bright, tie-dye backdrop in swirling, psychedelic font, the visual appearance of W.J. Rorabaugh’s latest work could be said to somewhat underplay the scholarly worth of its contents. This is, however, perhaps fitting given its subject matter. Where recognised at all as something separate and distinct from the era’s climate of activism, the counterculture has often been portrayed as a colourful, but ultimately frivolous sideshow within broad histories of the 1960s, and it is in this respect that the account offered by Rorabaugh differs.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature edited by Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum
American masculinity has recently been reasserting itself as a legitimate topic for study. As recently as 2013, Stony Brook University (SUNY) established the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities under the directorship of Michael Kimmel, one of the foremost voices in masculinity studies in America today.
Continue ReadingReview: SSAWW 2015 Conference: ‘Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives’
SSAWW conference participants revealed refreshingly complex critical interpretations of this year’s theme, that went beyond the post-colonial contexts where so many of us first encountered them.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz by Jennifer Fleeger
According to Fleeger, during the 1920s, many composers, hoping to create and distribute truly American music, attempted to create jazz-operas, a genre that recalled America’s European roots, as well as its ethnic and racial diversity. Although not traditionally described as jazz-operas, Fleeger considers the how The Singing Fool and Yamekraw function as jazz-operas, specifically the ways in which they advertise the Vitaphone, a new synchronous sound system.
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