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"Shumway, David R"
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Rock star : the making of musical icons from Elvis to Springsteen
The nature and meaning of rock stardom—celebrities who embody the most important social and cultural conflicts of their era.
\"All stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are stars, \" states David Shumway in the introduction to Rock Star, an informal history of rock stardom. This deceptively simple statement belies the complex definition and meaning of stardom and more specifically of rock icons. Shumway looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars in the context of popular music and culture—Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. Granted, there are many more names that fall into the rock icon category and that might rightfully appear on this list. Partly, that is the point: \"rock star\" is a familiar and desired category but also a contested one.
Shumway investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed rock stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and rock stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Because of changes in American society and the media industries, rock stars have become much more explicitly political figures than were the stars of Hollywood's studio era. Rock stars, moreover, are icons of change, though not always progressive, whose public personas read like texts produced collaboratively by the performers themselves, their managers, and record companies. These stars thrive in a variety of media, including recorded music, concert performance, dress, staging, cover art, films, television, video, print, and others.
Filled with memorable photographs, Rock Star will appeal to anyone interested in modern American popular culture or music history.
eBook
Modern love : romance, intimacy, and the marriage crisis
“My ideas of romance came from the movies,” said Woody Allen, and it is to the movies—as well as to novels, advice columns, and self-help books—that David Shumway turns for his history of modern love.
Modern Love argues that a crisis in the meaning and experience of marriage emerged when it lost its institutional function of controlling the distribution of property, and instead came to be seen as a locus for feelings of desire, togetherness, and loss. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly in response to this crisis, a new language of love—“intimacy”—emerged, not so much replacing but rather coexisting with the earlier language of “romance.”
Reading a wide range of texts, from early twentieth-century advice columns and their late twentieth-century antecedent, the relationship self-help book, to Hollywood screwball comedies, and from the “relationship films” of Woody Allen and his successors to contemporary realist novels about marriages, Shumway argues that the kinds of stories the culture has told itself have changed. Part layperson’s history of marriage and romance, part meditation on intimacy itself, Modern Love will be both amusing and interesting to almost anyone who thinks about relationships (and who doesn’t?).
eBook
John Sayles
John Sayles is the very paradigm of the contemporary independent filmmaker. By raising much of the funding for his films himself, Sayles functions more independently than most directors, and he has used his freedom to write and produce films with a distinctive personal style and often clearly expressed political positions. From The Return of the Secaucus Seven to Sunshine State, his films have consistently expressed progressive political positions on issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability._x000B__x000B_In this study, David R. Shumway examines the defining characteristic of Sayles's cinema: its realism. Positing the filmmaker as a critical realist, Shumway explores Sayles's attention to narrative in critically acclaimed and popular films such as Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star. The study also details the conditions under which Sayles's films have been produced, distributed, and exhibited, affecting the way in which these films have been understood and appreciated. In the process, Shumway presents Sayles as a teacher who tells historically accurate stories that invite audiences to consider the human world they all inhabit.
eBook
Creating American Civilization
“‘American literature’ seems by now so natural and inevitable an entity that we forget that it did not just grow organically out of American soil, much less spring full blown from the minds of a few geniuses. In this highly readable study, David Shumway recovers the forgotten social, historical, and institutional conditions that explain why the concepts both of ‘literature’ and of distinctive literary Americanness emerged together at a particular time and place and how their merger reshaped America's educational vision. Shumway has written a penetrating and provocative account of the making of American Civilization as an academic field.” --Gerald Graff, University of Chicago
eBook
How New Literary History Became a Theory Journal
[...]its size and shape back then played a crucial role in that launch… The practice of theory addressed questions concerning language, knowledge, social relations, and politics, among others. [...]theory permitted the practices of feminism, Marxism, queer theory, and race theory to emerge within English departments and literary studies as more than approaches to literature. Miller's essay seems to be about Wordsworth, but he is using Wordsworth to exemplify the deconstruction of form with which the essay begins. Since \"form\" is a key term in literary theory, the essay must be classified as both. While NLH had published numerous articles by people outside of literary studies, the publication of Derrida was different. Because Derrida was by then allied with literary studies at Yale where he had been a visiting professor, his inclusion here represents the acknowledgement of him as an insider.
Journal Article
What Is Realism?
According to Catherine Belsey in her widely assigned primer, Critical Practice, \"Classic realism,\" which is supposed to derive from nineteenth-century novels, is \"still the dominant popular mode of in literature, film and television drama,\" and character is indispensable to classic realism (1980: 67). Realist works may point toward a social whole or \"totality,\" but, like other works, they will always fall short. [...]while character types are a place where we may presume the creation of individual fictional characters begins, what makes them memorable and emotionally engaging are their peculiarities. According to Fredric Jameson, realism is \"absolutely committed to the density and solidity of what is . . . the very choice of the form itself is a professional endorsement of the status quo\" (2013: 215). Dickens's work stands out because he does often give a fuller picture of the lives of people beneath the middle class, and his claim to realism rests strongly-though not exclusively-on this fact. [...]realism, while it does move the focus of literature down the social order, continued to aim it higher than the social average.
Journal Article
The University, Neoliberalism, and the Humanities: A History
Neoliberalism has since the 1970s had a significant negative impact on higher education in the U.S., but this ideology and political program is not solely to blame for the current situation of the humanities or the university. The American university was never the autonomous institution imagined by German idealists, but it was rather always strongly connected to both the state and civil society. Many of the cultural currents and social forces that have led to the reduction in public spending on higher education and to lower enrollments in the humanities long antedate neoliberalism.
Journal Article
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Utopia, Avatar, and the Loss of Progressive Metanarrative
Besides the machine, this utopias world functions because of military organization and discipline, with labor being supplied by compulsory participation in an \"industrial army'' As John L. Thomas describes a sociological perspective novel in this era, \"Hierarchy was seen as the answer to the problems of constructing stable social systems\" (1983: 245). The then recent revolution in Russia helped to make the left as a whole seem to represent the direction in which history was moving, while the true character of Soviet Communism was not yet generally known in the West. [...]in addition to these radical political parties, the union movement included a history militancy that threatened to emerge again as economic conditions worsened. According to Warren Susman, Bellamy struggled against history and \"would have his fellows forget the past and dwell only in the future and present\" (1984: 4). [...]it is revealed that the plant life on Pandora is connected by a network more complex than that of the human brain, a network into which the Na'vi are able indirectly to tap through prayer and tactile communication.
Journal Article