Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction and Popular Culture - Hardcover

Braudy, Leo

9780195052749: Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction and Popular Culture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195052749 ISBN 13: 9780195052749

Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, 1991

Native Informant is Leo Braudy's first book after his widely acclaimed and award-winning history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown. With a verve that breaks down the boundaries between film, literature, and popular culture, Braudy discusses writers and filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Daniel Defoe, Ernst Lubitsch, Emile Zola, Susan Sontag, and Richard Condon. His subjects include madness in the eighteenth century, the Hollywood blacklist, westerns, and pornography. Throughout this lively and insightful collection, his perspective is not that of the critic as a detached voice of professional authority but as a member of a particular culture--a native informant--whose gaze looks simultaneously inward and outward, subjective but self-aware. Like the wide-ranging Frenzy of Renown, Native Informant will appeal to specialist and interested reader alike.

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Review:

"[The collection's] merit lies in Braudy's unusual and interdisciplinary perspective, as when he enthuses over the interpretive possibilities of the 18th-century epistolary novel....He is particularly lucid on the subject of film."--Library Journal"The pieces are consistently intelligent and readable."--Michigan Quarterly Review"Here is that rare thing, a collection of essays that really works. The disparate subjects of Native Informant--film, popular culture, 18th-century literature, contemporary fiction--are held together by a personal voice, a probing, aphoristic style, and a critical sensibility that crosses borders, makes unexpected connections, and see the arts and their cultural contexts as part of a single fascinating continuum. This is a rich, stimulating, and necessary book."--Morris Dickstein, Queens College, CUNY"At a time when the humanities are in crisis, when educators in the liberal arts are bitterly debating about the proper objects of their study, it is especially refreshing to encounter Leo Braudy's intelligence about a remarkable variety of topics....A generous, curious, and democratic critic, he is keenly sensitive to the relationship between artists and audiences, and to the ever-changing, 'performed' nature of the self. Several of his essays deserve to be called classics."--James Naremore, Indiana University"Braudy doesn't stay boxed in 'English Literature' or 'Popular Culture'. Equally important, unlike a lot of interdisciplinary work done these days, Braudy's book is personal, given shape by his own unique blend of experiences rather than dictated by an ideological agenda."--Magill Book Review "[The collection's] merit lies in Braudy's unusual and interdisciplinary perspective, as when he enthuses over the interpretive possibilities of the 18th-century epistolary novel....He is particularly lucid on the subject of film."--Library Journal "The pieces are consistently intelligent and readable."--Michigan Quarterly Review "Here is that rare thing, a collection of essays that really works. The disparate subjects of Native Informant--film, popular culture, 18th-century literature, contemporary fiction--are held together by a personal voice, a probing, aphoristic style, and a critical sensibility that crosses borders, makes unexpected connections, and see the arts and their cultural contexts as part of a single fascinating continuum. This is a rich, stimulating, and necessary book."--Morris Dickstein, Queens College, CUNY "At a time when the humanities are in crisis, when educators in the liberal arts are bitterly debating about the proper objects of their study, it is especially refreshing to encounter Leo Braudy's intelligence about a remarkable variety of topics....A generous, curious, and democratic critic, he is keenly sensitive to the relationship between artists and audiences, and to the ever-changing, 'performed' nature of the self. Several of his essays deserve to be called classics."--James Naremore, Indiana University "Braudy doesn't stay boxed in 'English Literature' or 'Popular Culture'. Equally important, unlike a lot of interdisciplinary work done these days, Braudy's book is personal, given shape by his own unique blend of experiences rather than dictated by an ideological agenda."--Magill Book Review "[The collection's] merit lies in Braudy's unusual and interdisciplinary perspective, as when he enthuses over the interpretive possibilities of the 18th-century epistolary novel....He is particularly lucid on the subject of film."--Library Journal "The pieces are consistently intelligent and readable."--Michigan Quarterly Review "Here is that rare thing, a collection of essays that really works. The disparate subjects of Native Informant--film, popular culture, 18th-century literature, contemporary fiction--are held together by a personal voice, a probing, aphoristic style, and a critical sensibility that crosses borders, makes unexpected connections, and see the arts and their cultural contexts as part of a single fascinating continuum. This is a rich, stimulating, and necessary book."--Morris Dickstein, Queens College, CUNY "At a time when the humanities are in crisis, when educators in the liberal arts are bitterly debating about the proper objects of their study, it is especially refreshing to encounter Leo Braudy's intelligence about a remarkable variety of topics....A generous, curious, and democratic critic, he is keenly sensitive to the relationship between artists and audiences, and to the ever-changing, 'performed' nature of the self. Several of his essays deserve to be called classics."--James Naremore, Indiana University "Braudy doesn't stay boxed in 'English Literature' or 'Popular Culture'. Equally important, unlike a lot of interdisciplinary work done these days, Braudy's book is personal, given shape by his own unique blend of experiences rather than dictated by an ideological agenda."--Magill BookReview "[The collection's] merit lies in Braudy's unusual and interdisciplinary perspective, as when he enthuses over the interpretive possibilities of the 18th-century epistolary novel....He is particularly lucid on the subject of film."--Library Journal"The pieces are consistently intelligent and readable."--Michigan Quarterly Review"Here is that rare thing, a collection of essays that really works. The disparate subjects of Native Informant--film, popular culture, 18th-century literature, contemporary fiction--are held together by a personal voice, a probing, aphoristic style, and a critical sensibility that crosses borders, makes unexpected connections, and see the arts and their cultural contexts as part of a single fascinating continuum. This is a rich, stimulating, and necessary book."--Morris Dickstein, Queens College, CUNY"At a time when the humanities are in crisis, when educators in the liberal arts are bitterly debating about the proper objects of their study, it is especially refreshing to encounter Leo Braudy's intelligence about a remarkable variety of topics....A generous, curious, and democratic critic, he iskeenly sensitive to the relationship between artists and audiences, and to the ever-changing, 'performed' nature of the self. Several of his essays deserve to be called classics."--James Naremore, Indiana University"Braudy doesn't stay boxed in 'English Literature' or 'Popular Culture'. Equally important, unlike a lot of interdisciplinary work done these days, Braudy's book is personal, given shape by his own unique blend of experiences rather than dictated by an ideological agenda."--Magill Book Review " The collection's merit lies in Braudy's unusual and interdisciplinary perspective, as when he enthuses over the interpretive possibilities of the 18th-century epistolary novel....He is particularly lucid on the subject of film."--Library Journal"The pieces are consistently intelligent and readable."--Michigan Quarterly Review"Here is that rare thing, a collection of essays that really works. The disparate subjects of Native Informant--film, popular culture, 18th-century literature, contemporary fiction--are held together by a personal voice, a probing, aphoristic style, and a critical sensibility that crosses borders, makes unexpected connections, and see the arts and their cultural contexts as part of a single fascinating continuum. This is a rich, stimulating, and necessary book."--Morris Dickstein, Queens College, CUNY"At a time when the humanities are in crisis, when educators in the liberal arts are bitterly debating about the proper objects of their study, it is especially refreshing to encounter Leo Braudy's intelligence about a remarkable variety of topics....A generous, curious, and democratic critic, he iskeenly sensitive to the relationship between artists and audiences, and to the ever-changing, 'performed' nature of the self. Several of his essays deserve to be called classics."--James Naremore, Indiana University"Braudy doesn't stay boxed in 'English Literature' or 'Popular Culture'. Equally important, unlike a lot of interdisciplinary work done these days, Braudy's book is personal, given shape by his own unique blend of experiences rather than dictated by an ideological agenda."--Magill Book Review

Synopsis:

This volume collects a number of articles covering the author's main areas of interest: 18th-century studies, the novel, films and the nature of popular culture.

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