Genre and Hollywood provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of genre. In this important new book, Steve Neale discusses all the major concepts, theories and accounts of Hollywood and genre, as well as the key genres which theorists have written about, from horror to the Western. He also puts forward new arguments about the importance of genre in understanding Hollywood cinema.Neale takes issue with much genre criticism and genre theory, which has provided only a partial and misleading account of Hollywood's output. He calls for broader and more flexible conceptions of genre and genres, for more attention to be paid to the discourses and practices of Hollywood itself, for the nature and range of Hollywood's films to be looked at in more detail, and for any assessment of the social and cultural significance of Hollywood's genres to take account of industrial factors.In detailed, revisionist accounts of two major genres - film noir and melodrama - Neale argues that genre remains an important and productive means of thinking about both New and old Hollywood, its history, its audiences and its films.

Genre and Hollywood

In the years following the end of World War Q, a new kind of landscape emerged in the United States, one that would immeasurably alter the way Americans think about place. Critics and commentators greeted the emergence of the environment we know as “suburbia” with a mixed reaction: for some, the suburbs represented the material embodiment of the “American Dream”: for others, architectural and environmental homogeneity marked the new suburbs as an alienating, even dangerous terrain. In the half-century since the onset of mass-suburbanization, the United States — which has, by now, become a primarily suburban nation — has continued to struggle with the image and cultural meanings of suburbia. Our vexed cultural relationship to the suburban landscape, evident even before the onset of postwar masssuburbanization, has characterized a small but compelling body of fictional and cinematic works set in the suburbs. This dissertation examines the representations of suburban life and landscape in fictional works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Updike, Ann Beattie, and Gloria Naylor, and in films by Frank Capra, Frank Perry, Mike Nichols, Bryan Forbes, and Reginald Hudlin. I argue that these writers and filmmakers self-consciously explore the dynamics of the suburban environment in their works, revealing the cultural aspirations and anxieties undergirding our relationship to suburbia as a lived environment and an idea(l). Their works present contrasting visions of the suburbs, reflecting America’s troubled and increasingly complex relationship to an environment that, ultimately, mirrors the fantasies and phobias of the culture at

Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Film

This essay explores the ways in which Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers employs familiar postwar discourses of difference, namely racial masquerade, alien immigration, and sexual deviance, in its hyperbolic dramatization of the potential social, political, and personal disenfranchisement of postwar America's hegemonic white patriarchy.

"You're Next!": Postwar Hegemony Besieged in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Title of Dissertation: THE FEELING AMERICAN: EMOTION MANAGEMENT AND THE STANDARDIZATION OF DEMOCRACY IN COLD WAR LITERATURE AND FILM Kelly A. Singleton, Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jonathan Auerbach, Department of English This project examines how strategies of emotion management influenced the development of American literature and film during the Cold War period. Focusing primarily on the High Cold War Period of 1949 to 1962, it argues that a governmentfunded postwar boom in the psychological and social sciences resulted in a “psychological turn” in American culture that sought to solve social problems by teaching Americans to manage their emotions in keeping with scientificallyestablished standards for democratic behavior. Proponents of emotion management believed it could accomplish the Soviet goal of creating a harmonious, classless society without requiring radical social revolution or totalitarian forms of control that would violate American principles of freedom and democracy. To that end, American policymakers used the findings of social scientists to develop narratives that: 1) modeled how to behave in the event of a nuclear attack, 2) equated happiness with the American standard of living, 3) made emotional malleability the foundation for a democratic personality, and 4) linked racism to deviation from the norms of liberal white psychology. The works of several mid-century American authors and filmmakers provide an important counterpoint to the optimism of this official emotion management narrative as they: 1) challenge the government’s sanitized representation of nuclear war, 2) document the unhappy effects of middle-class organization culture, 3) express anxiety over the alienating effects of emotional labor, and 4) reject the equation of mental health and American identity with specifically white cultural standards and forms. In contrast to emotion management’s conservative emphasis on individual psychological adjustment, these works suggest that only systemic structural changes can resolve the problems of American democracy. This historicist approach analyzes propaganda films, government bulletins, popular magazine articles, and period sociological studies alongside close readings of novels (Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)), films (Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962)), and the story collections of African American authors Langston Hughes and Alice Childress. THE FEELING AMERICAN: EMOTION MANAGEMENT AND THE STANDARDIZATION OF DEMOCRACY IN COLD WAR LITERATURE AND FILM

The Feeling American: Emotion Management and the Standardization of Democracy in Cold War Literature and Film

This essay addresses the troubling and uncanny figure of Mother in feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, and real life. Readings of feminist literary criticism and the films Alien and Aliens explore the liminality of Mother and the consequences for feminist thought and practice of the persistent narrative modes (the sentimental and the gothic) locatable in all of these discourses on/of Motherhood.

Blood Relations: Feminist Theory Meets the Uncanny Alien Bug Mother

����� ers (1956), Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—are all marked by a common element: the presence of at least one moment of startling misogyny These moments are startling in part because they involve either a narrative digression or superfluity, a stylistic deviation, or a violation of their films' prior encodings of the female More importantly, each of them expresses an unanticipated level of male fear of or violence towaid women, in response to a threat to men's powers of representation and control What follows attempts to read in these moments of textual excess both the instability of male identity and the vulnerability of male hegemony This reading is part of the stream of response to Laura Mulvey's watershed essay on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," with its crucial analysis of "Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look" Since Mulvey, a good deal of writing on film and gender has focused on trying to undermine the seemingly monolithic structure of the classic pattiatchal Hollywood system, and paiticulatly on theorizing women's relation—and opposition—to a cinema that seems systematically to exclude them as subjects Hence critics have taken up such matters as the "return of the gaze" on the part of the female image/object, the problem of "women's cinema," and the positions of actual female spectatots, in vatious histotical moments, as they watch classic Hollywood

Thomas B. Byers

Papers

Kissing Becky: Masculine Fears and Misogynist Moments in Science Fiction Films