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Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream

Autor Grant Wiedenfeld
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 8 iul 2022
Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs an unexpected current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and therefore represent the nation to itself in idealized form. Once considered mere credos for Reaganism's fantasies of an atomized society, movies from Rocky (1976) to Ali (2001) dream of democratic participation and recognition more than individual success, for in every case, off-field relationships take precedence over on-field competition. Arranged chronologically, Hollywood Sports Films and the American Dream is a critical study of six major sports films that re-tells the story of multiculturalism's gradual adoption in the latter third of the 20th century and rewrites contemporary understandings of the sports film. For author Grant Wiedenfeld, the mainstream's first minority heroes are paradoxically white ethnic, rural, working-class men, exemplified by Rocky, Slap Shot (1977) and The Natural (1984) and Black, brown, and women characters follow in White Men Can't Jump (1992), A League of Their Own (1992), and Ali. But despite their insistence on community and diversity these popular dramas show limited faith in civic institutions and point to the limits of inclusion and participation in the post-Civil Rights era. Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Alexander, and others inform Wiedenfeld's original analysis and commentary on the political significance of popular culture as he insists on the cinema's capabilities as an engine for democracy untethered from more conventional 'democratic' institutions. Reading these familiar movies from another angle paints a fresh picture of how the United States has imagined democracy since its bicentennial and renews the political efficacy of one of the most popular genres in film history.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780197624937
ISBN-10: 0197624936
Pagini: 296
Ilustrații: 118 halftones; 20 color
Dimensiuni: 226 x 152 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Recenzii

Wiedenfeld has produced a sustained, provocative reestimation of the Hollywood sports movie. From his rediscovery of the progressivism of Rocky's underdog status to his tour-de-force readings of League of their Own and Ali, he strives to think alongside—not against—these films and their politics, rallying with them and their heroes. For Wiedenfeld the sports movie is not merely a genre but a mode of civic participation, and this book amounts to the opening salvo of an Arendtian film criticism.
Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream would create considerable discussion in a graduate school classroom, could be parsed for use as chapter examples in an undergraduate course, and may reach a broader readership due to the important topics of film for the public sphere.
The monograph is quite engrossing and offers great fodder for the classic of all academic roles, debate.
It is remarkable that Wiedenfeld vividly elaborates how the sports-film genre fascinatingly nests what the American people have come to embody...this book's ultimate significance lies in that it reconsiders this ideology through the lens of sports movies and in doing so, reveals their progressive potential.
Wiedenfeld's work is a well-written, engaging read with a rich philosophical foundation.

Notă biografică

Grant Wiedenfeld earned a PhD from Yale University in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies. He taught courses on sports and cinema in Yale's English Department and Film Studies Program before being hired at Sam Houston State University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Media and Culture. Previous publications include studies of Gustave Flaubert, D.W. Griffith, and André Bazin.