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In the late 1950s, French film theorists argued that the director was the most important influence on a movie. Adopting these ideas, Andrew Sarris introduced the \"auteur\" theory to the United States in his seminal book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions in 1968, wherein Sarris respectfully placed the film director Cecil B. DeMille at the second-highest rank. What the French theorists and Sarris did not mention was that the central idea of the director as the driving force of the film was one that DeMille had developed consciously about himself fifty years earlier - well before the term \"auteur\" became a more common term.

Contributing to the current effort to rethink American realism, this essay concentrates on the work of second-generation realist novelists both well known (Dreiser, Wharton) and forgotten (Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington). I argue that, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, American novelists did for fiction what their contemporaries, the pragmatists, did for philosophy: they reconceive the modern subject for a new modernity. Like the philosophical tradition of the previous two centuries, earlier realist fiction understood the liberal individual as the exemplary modern subject. However, in an age characterized by “the regress of self-sufficiency and the progress of association,” as one contemporary economist had it, liberal individualism’s stock dropped among a number of thinkers-artists and academics alike. As the essay demonstrates the way in which novelists participate in this culturewide effort to transform realism and redefine modern subjectivity in the US, it also challenges the received relationship between women and consumption. To overturn the standard view that consumption was largely a solipsistic activity in women, I show the ways in which this body of fiction, together with pragmatist writings, exposes the thoroughgoing sociality of consumer culture.

Despite the passage of time and accumulated historical evidence, little is known about Indianapolis during the Gilded Age, as advancing capitalism and the rise of large factories changed the town into an industrial city. During the early twentieth century, Hoosier author, Booth Tarkington, provided a novelist’s perspective of Midwestern towns, he called “Midlands”. Many of his works became plays, and one of his most popular novels, The Magnificent Ambersons, won him a Pulitzer Prize, and became a movie. Woodruff Place and the city of Indianapolis were the models Tarkington used as the basis for his story about the Amberson Addition and “Midlands”. This study compares Tarkington’s claims in The Magnificent Ambersons against the historical record of Woodruff Place, and some of many changes occurring in the city of Indianapolis. The advantage of hindsight and historical record challenges the accuracy, uncovers the omissions, and notes the biases Tarkington wove throughout his story. The conclusion that emerges from Tarkington’s narrative is an indictment of the personal character of men, rapid change, and bigness brought about by factories, boosterism, growth, and non- native residents. This project contributes only a small piece toward the much-needed study of what really happened in Indianapolis between 1870 and 1910.

Ces données du passé ont déja, semble-t-il, besoin de séquences séparées, vu l'âge des protagonistes vingt ans avant l'intrigue au présent, l'ordre social différent, les chevaux dominant encore les toutes premieres et cahotantes voitures a essence, et autres signes visibles de l'orientation du séparé a cette époque, a savoir la splendeur des Amberson au regard du peu d'éclat des Morgan. Car la question du visible domine le cinéma, qui y exprime le temps, cependant que le roman peut injecter dans la fluidité de l'écriture un régime disparate de l'image, et imposer un tempo subjectivé hors du visible : celui de la lecture. Ce n'est pas un hasard si romans et théátre ont hanté son cinéma : c'est que la dialectique du temps et de l'espace, certes inscrite dans le maniement spatio-temporel du plan-séquence, ne pouvait etre entierement lisible et accomplie qu'avec la puissance d'anticipation et de rappel, de répétition et de surplomb, que la voix comme telle introduit, a la fois liée et séparée de l'image, dans la compréhension des contradictions qui organisent la dramaturgie, et nous forcent a admettre ce qu'il y a d'implacable dans le monde, tel que l'art de Welles nous le présente.

In this thesis, I analyze how The Brownies’ Book projected the ideals of the New Negro Movement by positioning Black children as crucial to the period’s creation of a new Negro identity. My analysis begins by exploring various examples of racist imagery of the period and how the periodical subverted those negative representations of Black children and Black life. In my examination of The Brownies’ Book’s representation of Blackness, I discuss the minstrel tradition and the racist popular cultural imagery of the 1920s. By analyzing the positive representations of Blackness within The Brownies’ Book, my study shows how the editors of the periodical asserted the humanity of Black children and promoted racial pride. The second part of my study offers examination of how the periodical’s authors utilized fairytales to appeal to a common trope in the construction of American childhood to further the mission of prominent race leaders. Lastly, part three offers analysis of the periodical as a cross-written text, meaning it addresses both child and adult readers. In each of these sections, my project presents The Brownies’ Book as an influential work that supported the New Negro Movement’s refashioning of the Black racial identity by celebrating Black children during the early twentieth century.

Radical Fantasy in its content depicts subaltern constituencies organizing on the basis of class (rather than what Ernst Laclau and Chantal Mouffe term subject positions) in their militant struggle to overcome epistemological barriers and achieve social change. In its form, Radical Fantasy offers innovative strategies for representing the ever-changing capitalist totality and the emerging presence of posthuman identity. I clarify these elements by theorizing a continuum of historical developments in fantasy over the past century or so, before discussing in detail what is in Radical Fantasy. My argument is premised on the necessity of a historical-materialist methodology in recognizing and interpreting developments in all fantasy. Radical Fantasy signals the definitive emergence of a new historical phase of cultural production which I term late postmodernism

According to The New York Times report of his death, Robertson was \"a few years ago one of the most popular writers of sea romances, but recent misfortunes had reduced him to straitened circumstances\" (25 March 1915: 1). The publication of the four-volume set was, in part, an attempt to offer him financial assistance, as the advertisement in the January 1915 Black Cat specifies that \"Upon every book we shall pay a generous royalty.\" Will you do your part?\" After Robertson's death McClure's and Metropolitan published a memorial volume, Morgan Robertson the Man, in which Conrad, along with other literary luminaries whose praise had appeared in the advertisements, including Booth Tarkington, William Dean Howell, and Finley Peter Dunne received an acknowledgement for his role in seeing \"the genius of Morgan Robertson recognized by his countrymen and to see his widow benefit by that recognition\" (1915: [ii]).