A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature

New York City during the long 1970s was a place of high crime and high glamour that still holds tremendous fascination. During this era the city careened from the hopefulness of the Lindsay years to financial default in 1975 to its reemergence, under Mayor Koch, as a center of international finance. These changes form the backdrop for a body of films in which the city itself plays a starring role. The movies picture the city's racial and ethnic populations, its elite enclaves and decaying districts, its sometimes vibrant and often violent street-life, and--by the decade's end--its emerging gentrification that would soon sweep away the vestiges of an iconic, acutely singular metropolis. The films, directed by an emerging generation of filmmakers influenced both by the Italian neo-realists and the French auteurs, sought a higher realism than that offered in conventional Hollywood productions. Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, Woody Allen, and John Schlesinger capture the excitement and volatility of the period; their films and others effectively narrate the city's changing fortunes. Starring New York examines the drama and dramas of those times, providing a reorientation to the landscape of the city, both as it was and as it is today.

Starring New York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s

Humor & Entertainment

Corkin, Stanley

Movies

Oxford University Press

This comprehensive volume of Crane's work includes the first published editions of The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, both of which were considerably toned down in subsequent editions for a genteel 1890s reading public. This volume also presents his short fiction, as well as a wealth of supplementary material, including historical and cultural contexts, essays on urban life and reform in the late 19th century (to accompany Maggie), Civil War backgrounds (to accompany The Red Badge of Courage), and Spanish-American War backgrounds (to accompany Crane's short writings on the subject).

The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Other Selected Writings (New Riverside Editions)

Literature & Fiction

CRANE, STEPHEN

Lauter, Paul

Frus, Phyllis

United States

Wadsworth Publishing

This book offers an interdisciplinary view of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the conventions of historical study, Stanley Corkin draws out the ways in which the works of writers and filmmakers from 1885 to 1925 shaped and were shaped by the business, politics, and social life of the period.
Corkin traces the entrance of the United States into the modern age by considering the historical dimension of cinema and literary aesthetics: first of realism, then naturalism, and finally modernism. He begins with the work of writer William Dean Howells and the advent of American cinema under the stewardship of Thomas Edison, arguing that realism was complexly involved in Progressive political and economic reform. Next, analyses of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie and the films of the Edison Company's star director, Edwin S. Porter, detail the relationships of naturalism to the increasingly abstract presentation of the material commodity through mass marketing. The study culminates with an examination of the parallels between Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time and the D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation. These two modernist works, Corkin contends, illustrate strategies of expression that attempt to move the material commodity away from its economic base and into a pristine, apolitical realm. These literary and cinematic works both reflect and participate in the economic, political, and social reorganization of American life from the top down. The result, Corkin concludes, is a world in which a conception of a human being is asserted as differing little from that of a machine, a tree, or an animal.

Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Literature, Cinema, and Culture

University of Georgia Press

Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (Texas Film and Media Studies Series)

Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society riven by racism and inequality.
In Connecting The Wire, Stanley Corkin presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show's depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire's creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social "givens." In The Wire's gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life, and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.

Television

University of Texas Press

Emerging from World War Two with superpower status, the United States entered a period of economic prosperity, but the stresses and contradictions of the Cold War cast a shadow over American life. Not coincidentally the same period marked the heyday of the western film. Cowboys as Cold Warriors examines many of the significant westerns released between 1946 and 1962, showing how they responded to and influenced the cultural climate of the United States. Discussing a dozen films in detail and connecting them to numerous others, author Stanley Corkin considers the ways in which these cultural productions both embellished the myth of the American frontier and commented on the developments of the era in which they were made.

Cowboys As Cold Warriors: The Western And U S History (Culture And The Moving Image)

Temple University Press

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