Southerners on film

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Stanley Cavell

What is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness. With Contesting Tears, Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies. Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman; Gaslight; Now, Voyager; and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility.

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Edward Schiappa

"Edward Schiappa argues that the norms of representational correctness can cause critics to miss the positive work shows perform in reducing prejudice. He contends that too many critics focus on isolated scenes or interactions that perpetuate a stereotype without considering the larger work that films and television shows can accomplish. Schiappa concludes that pop culture critics need to engage in more audience research, draw from relevant research in social psychology, praise positive representations and programming, and promote critical media literacy in both classroom and public pedagogy."--Jacket.

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Leonard Orr

"On the surface, James Joyce's work is largely apolitical. Through most of the twentieth century he was the proud embodiment of the rootless intellectual. However, perspectives on the colonial history of Ireland have proliferated in recent years, yielding a subtle and complex conception of the Irish postcolonial experience that has become a major theme in current Joyce scholarship. In this volume Leonard Orr brings together a diverse collection of essays situating Joyce in the debates generated by postcolonial theory and discourse."--BOOK JACKET.

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Catherine Hnatov

Black-and-white illustrations and simple text on board pages introduce children to a bird that sing, a rabbit that jumps, a dog that barks, and more.