Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1993"
TL;DR: The authenticity of country music has been a hot topic in the last few decades as discussed by the authors, and it is still rather scandalous for an intellectual to admit to liking it, even if he or she is a country music fan.
Abstract: Country music has the fastest-growing audience in America but it is still rather scandalous for an intellectual to admit to liking it. Contemporary cultural theory—which is to say cultural studies—has thus had practically nothing to say about it. At first glance, it may seem that everything has already been said. I know well enough that many people find country music to be dumb, reactionary, sentimental, maudlin, primitive, etc. Still others, perhaps influenced one way or another by the Frankfurt school, sneer at what they feel is the contrived, hokey, convention-bound nature of the music: they hear a commodification and cheapening of the same supposed folksy authenticity that so disgusts the first type of critic. But the issue is not just authenticity. Behind this issue lies the more sensitive and distinctly contemporary question of sophistication. Put bluntly, whether people question the authenticity of country music, or whether they feel the authenticity of it is too powerfully crude for them, they are often imagining some pitiful (but perhaps good-hearted) rube who happily sings along. And their bemused or puzzled reaction to intellectuals who actually like country music indicates that they want to preserve that image of the rural unsophisticate. The authenticity of the music, then, is seen as either impossibly degraded or impossibly innocent, but this double-binding condemnation never questions the authentic, uncultured \"nature\" of country music's benighted listeners. As such, they are either innocent pawns being debased or preserved by their music. Either way, \"sophisti-
32 citations
TL;DR: The Loophole of Retreat as mentioned in this paper is a passage in the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Shve Girl, where Jacobs hides for seven years in an effort to escape her master's persecution and the peculiar institution of slavery which authorizes that persecution.
Abstract: Located in the exact center of Harriet Jacobs' i86r slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Shve Girl, is a chapter entitled \"The Loophole of Retreat. \" The chapter's title refers to the tiny crawlspace above her grandmother's shed, where Jacobs hides for seven years in an effort to escape her master's persecution and the \"peculiar institution\" of slavery which authorizes that persecution. This chapter's central location, whether the result of accident or design, would seem to suggest its structural significance within Jacobs' narrative. Yet its central location is by no means obvious, for \"The Loophole of Retreat\" goes just as easily unnoticed in the middle of forty-one unnumbered chapters as it becomes—after careful enumeration—potentially quite prominent, as the hinge which balances twenty chapters on either side. It is almost as though this chapter is hidden in plain sight, much like the body of Harriet Jacobs herself, who finally discovers the safest hiding place to be the most obvious one imaginable: in her own grandmother's house and in the center of her master Dr. Flint's domain. What Jacobs calls her \"loophole of retreat\" thus provides a strategic site for concealment even as it masks its own location. This spatial loophole becomes for Jacobs a means for escape from slaveiy, and her manipulation of textual loopholes in dominant discourse allows her narrative to escape, as well, from the constraints which her culture necessarily imposes on it. It is this tactical operation of the loophole which I intend to explore not only in Jacobs' narrative but, through her
17 citations
TL;DR: The Gates Ajar as discussed by the authors was one of the most popular books of the post-Civil War period and attracted more than 100,000 buyers in its first few years of circulation and continued to draw readers for at least thirty more.
Abstract: LTHOUGH largely forgotten today, The Gates Ajar holds a .place in American literary history as of one of the most popular books of the post-Civil War period.1 Published in 1868, the novel attracted more than 100,000 buyers in its first few years of circulation and continued to draw readers for at least thirty more. So successful was the novel that it spawned a number of imitations as well as an industry of 'Gates Ajar' products, including a patent medicine, collar and tippet, floral arrangement, and a cigar. Yet, while central to the popular imagination of its own time, the novel has failed to earn the intellectual respect of critics, who have been appalled by the philosophically debased nature of the novel's central trope— a material vision of heaven scaled to the dimensions of middle-class life. Only recently have a handful of cultural historians and feminist critics begun to reconsider the sources of this vision's once-felt textual and cultural power. Written by twenty-year-old Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar was openly concerned with addressing the suffering of women whose lives were irrevocably affected by the Civil War and its unprecedented casualties. Cast in the form of a personal journal, the novel records the emotional and spiritual crisis that overwhelms the novel's twenty-fouryear-old protagonist, Mary, when she learns of her brother's death one week before the war's end. In the diary Phelps traces the stages of Mary's mourning and the failure of the available channels of sympathy—minis-
9 citations
TL;DR: Faulkner attempted to create a narrative in which the printed form of the narrative itself spoke as mentioned in this paper, and the contradictory nature of the novel derives from Faulkner's attempt to create reality, as other modernist artists did, rather than simply represent one.
Abstract: Critics have recognized the division between the subject matter and the sophisticated narrative form in William Faulkner's As Í Lay Dying, but have failed to explore the division and the reasons behind it.1 The contradictory nature of the novel derives from Faulkner's attempt to create a reality— as other modernist artists did—rather than simply represent one.2 Making a reality instead of representing it, as Wendy Steiner points out, creates a tension between the work as a representation and the materials used— in the case of the novel, printed language— to represent reality. Faulkner attempted to create a narrative in which the printed form of the narrative itself speaks. The iconic space of the novel (the physical form of print and paper) becomes almost simultaneous with its narrative space, the \"place\" of the narrative events.3 Paginal space coincides with the \"parallel\" space of the narrative as the text enacts or mirrors narrative events. Consequently, the novel continually exposes itself as a fabricated, print body, constructed of interchangeable stamped bits of language. Faulkner's modernist esthetic, however, conflicted with the subject matter of the tale, and he feared the effect that the literary, print form would have on his subject matter, coming as it did from the oral tradition and context of the South, the stories and tales heard from stableboys and cooks. As he wrote in the \"Yale preface\" to As Í Lay Dying, the novelist could only offer \"a kernel or a leaf, to indicate a lost forest\" or \"the evocative skeleton of the desiccated leaf that was the world (quoted in Putzel 296). His figure attentuates from leaf to skeleton of the leaf, suggesting his concerns about what print would be able to
8 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this paper pointed out that the traditional "apology" conventionally located outside the artifact will be gathered up inside the American poem, allowing the text itself to become its own medium ofauthorization and legitimation.
Abstract: writer-as-critic or the critic-as-writer is likely to be inherently a more available one than in other literatures. This is due in no small part to the fact that American literature, as Kenneth Dauber pointed out several years ago, "is a literature whose primary concern has always been its own nature," and whose object, even in the classic period ofAmerican letters, "[is] its own process," the "act of writing" in other words, "into which all forms of the written are returned" (53, 62). American literature, therefore, will repeatedly sensitize us to a historical moment in the writing of its poetry in which the traditional "apology" conventionally located outside the artifact—one thinks, for instance, of the classic statements of poets such as Sidney, Shelley, and Wilde—will be gathered up inside the American poem, allowing the text itself to become its own medium ofauthorization and legitimation. From the autoaffection of "Song of Myself," through to "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the romance in American poetry for self-reflexivity is given without apology—at least, without any kind offormal apology. Writing continually turning back upon itself in such a manner thus elides any clear separation between introspection and retrospection in the poet's art. "The Philosophy of Composition" then, as "Composition as Explanation" now, both seem somewhat beside the point when it is actually the practice that constitutes the theory (and the theory constituting the practice) that forms the basis of America's longstanding romance with text. In this regard, Gerald Graff has therefore been quite correct to
6 citations
TL;DR: For instance, television history repeats itself as discussed by the authors, with two stories, one televised within a year of the other, both aiming at viewers who would like to consider themselves highbrow (one appealing through major network chic, the other through a more titillating than usual pbs Anglophilia), both converging on a heroine's violation.
Abstract: I ? television history repeats itself. Consider these two stories, one televised within a year of the other, both aiming at viewers who would like to consider themselves highbrow (one appealing through major network chic, the other through a more titillating than usual pbs Anglophilia) , both converging on a heroine's violation. One narrative, that of David Lynch's \"Twin Peaks,\" begins with the discovery of the raped and murdered body of Laura Palmer, paragon of fifties high school virtue, and through a series of impossibly convoluted and seemingly disconnected detours, proceeds to expose that virtue is not what it appeared to be. The other, that of the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Samuel Richardson's \"million word\" (as Alastair Cook so frequently informed us in his armchair introductions) epistolary novel, Clarissa, recounts \"how Clarissa, in resisting parental pressure to marry a loathsome man for his money, falls prey to Lovelace, is raped and dies.\" This summary from the back cover of the Penguin edition is, as
6 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the authors pointed out that the powers of readerly sympathy the novel conjures emanate from a different, and an unlikely, place: the framing discourse of Rowson's narrator, a symbolic mother figure who seizes hold of and dominates the novel world with remarkable authority.
Abstract: o critic of the early American novel has explained in any convincing way the enduring popularity of Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), a seemingly conventional eighteenth-century tale of seduction and abandonment that unfolds against the backdrop of transatlantic emigration and the coming of the American revolution. From its first American printing in 1794 well into the twentieth century, readers have wept, grieved, and purchased copies of Rowson's novel at astonishing rates.1 Scholars as various as Herbert Ross Brown, writing on the American sentimental novel of the 1940s, and Jay Fliegelman and Cathy N. Davidson, whose recent studies of the early American period and its fiction have transformed our understanding of the genre, all classify Charlotte Temple as the first American bestseller, and all three remark upon Charlotte's deep and enduring appeal.2 Despite this sustained attention to Rowson's story, the source of Charlotte's capacity to provoke affective response in an audience whose constitution has changed significantly over two hundred years remains curiously elusive.3 By focusing exclusively on the inner story of Charlotte's woe, scholars have failed to recognize that the powers of readerly sympathy the novel conjures emanate from a different, and an unlikely, place: the framing discourse of Rowson's narrator, a symbolic mother figure who seizes hold of and dominates the novel world with remarkable authority.
5 citations
TL;DR: It is a priceless historical joke that the one poet we accept as the National Bard should lack all the accredited national virtues as discussed by the authors, and if one sometimes feels that Whitman's critics serve him right, one may also indulge the feeling that Whitman serves American right.
Abstract: It is a priceless historical joke that the one poet we accept as the National Bard should lack all the accredited national virtues. . . . Whitman speaks for the national ethos, the divine average, the En Masse, but he is actually a solitary, a secretive watcher ... It is all a comedy of errors, and if one sometimes feels that Whitman's critics serve him right, one may also indulge the feeling that Whitman serves American right. Irving Howe
5 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the satire's early ground of critique in local life suddenly gives way and unexpectedly validates a mode of wide-reaching causation at work in the economy, which jars local understandings and unbalances the stance of the individual subject.
Abstract: UCH of the humor in Mark Twain's and Charles Dudley „Warner's The Gilded Age plays in the gap between a populist expectation that the \"real\" cause of events resides in individual and local life and a growing recognition that some other mode of causation, embedded in global capitalism, strains against what individuals in the local milieu might know. While the novel sets much of its satire (the chapters on Washington graft, for example) in a populist idiom, it also begins to recognize and explore a mode of causation-over-distance that jars local understandings and unbalances the stance of the individual subject. When Colonel Betiah Sellers touts his great invention—his Imperial Eye Water— the satire's early ground of critique in local life suddenly gives way and unexpectedly validates a mode of wide-reaching causation at work in the economy. At the beginning, Sellets' speech is a populist satire that lampoons the Colonel's wild economic speculations precisely because they violate local assumptions about the ground of value and events:
5 citations
5 citations
TL;DR: It may safely be put down as a general rule that the more faithful a dialect is to folklore, the more completely it represents the actual speech of a group of people, the less effective it will be from the literary point of view as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It may safely be put down as a general rule that the more faithful a dialect is to folklore, the more completely it represents the actual speech of a group of people, the less effective it will be from the literary point of view. A genuinely adequate representation of a living dialect could be made only with the help of a phonetic alphabet, and such a record would contain an enormous amount of detail which would merely distract and often puzzle the literary reader. The writer of literary dialect is not concerned with giving an exact picture of the folklore of speech. As an artist he must always keep his eye on the effect, and must select and reject what the scientific observation of his material reveals to him according as it suits or does not suit his purposes. George Philip Krapp, \"The Psychology of Dialect Writing\" (24)
TL;DR: The concept of the Author was introduced by the Republic of Letters, a rhetorical field which existed apatt from the rest of culture as mentioned in this paper, where the author was defined as a "genius" and the new field he occupied an imaginary one variously called "the Republic of letters, the literary world, or simply "the cultural sphere".
Abstract: s Donald pease has noted recently, around the turn of the nine.teenth centuty \"the concept of the 'author' underwent a fundamental change.\"1 Previously designating if not the equal of other cultural members, at least a figure who \"developed within the culture he helped to develop,\" the authot at this juncture was singled out, renamed, and enlisted as a concept in a new rhetorical field which existed apatt from the rest of culture. The name he was given (and as Nina Baym has made clear, this author was nearly always a \"he\")2 was \"genius,\" and the new field he occupied an imaginary one variously called \"The Republic of Letters,\" \"the literary world,\" or simply \"the cultural sphere,\" presumably distinct from the political and economic spheres.
TL;DR: A Boy's Town as mentioned in this paper is an example of a sub-genre of popular fiction that arose in the late 1860s and remained popular in the United States through the end of the century.
Abstract: If the pleasures of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are the pleasures of identifying with a boy, the novel found its ideal reader in William Dean Howells. Howells identified with Tom Sawyer to such an extent that fourteen years after he read Twain's novel in manuscript and reviewed it enthusiastically in the Atlantic, he wrote an entire book reimagining his own life as a version of Tom's. In A Boy's Town, Howells ascribes many of the same characteristics to his obviously autobiographical protagonist that he praised in his review of Twain's novel, narrates similar adventures, and portrays his friendship with a boy resembling Huck Finn. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and A Boy's Town are both examples of a sub-genre of popular fiction that arose in the late 1860s and remained popular in the United States through the end of the century. Known as the \"bad-boy book, \" the cycle can be said to originate with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy and continue through Stephen Crane's Whihmville Stories, although it has antecedents in B. P. Shillaber's Ike Partington tales, the Peck's Bad Boy series, and antebellum sensational-adventure novels by writers such as Ned Buntline, Tom Sawyer's favorite author.1 As an instance of a popular genre, Tom Sawyer's intended readership should be easily identifiable, even if we did not have Howells' responses. After all, a glance at the signs organizing any mass-market bookstore is enough to demonstrate that the main purpose of mass-cultural genre divisions is to address and delineate specific audiences and to allow each reader repeatedly to find the products he or she desires. Genre divisions had already begun to serve such a function by the middle of the nineteenth century: witness the sentimental novel's extremely suc-
TL;DR: The South of the Slot (1909/1914) is an ideal model with which to examine some of London's protagonists and narratives illustrate the dualities implied in the title of Conn's book, The Divided Mind as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Towards the end of Jack London's life, when his fame was at its peak, he was plagued by a succession of doubles. The price of a reputation as a hard-drinking ladies' man was the regular appearance of the author's name in the yellow press, which was always eager to spread gossip maligning the socialist landowner. Journalists seized upon the succession of dope fiends, poisoners, drunkards, and adulterers who claimed to be "Jack London," gleefully overlooking what even London would recognize as the impossibility of his being in different parts of the world simultaneously. ' Although these incidents were a source of considerable embarrassment to London, they do seem curiously appropriate: Peter Conn describes the era 1898191 7 as "one of acutely divided allegiances and sensibilities," and claims that London "so completely exemplifies" these divisions that "he practically disappears beneath his contradictions."2 Certainly, many of London's protagonists and narratives illustrate the dualities implied in the title ofConn's book, The Divided Mind. Oppositions between rich and poor, physical and cerebral, white and black, male and female, present and past or future abound. "South of the Slot" (1909/1914),3 to which Conn briefly refers, is an ideal model with which to examine some of these oppositions, their reasons, and their limits. The story concerns one Freddie Drummond, a young professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California. Drummond regularly disguises himself in workingman's
TL;DR: Noel Carroll's "King Kong: Ape and Essence" as discussed by the authors is perhaps the best overall essay on the 1933 film, which combines a recognition of King Kong's several entwined discourses while thoroughly exposing what the film's predominant ideological basis.
Abstract: RiTics have long noted King Kong's status as a Depression film firmly embedded in the economic and political context from which it arose. Indeed, Noel Carroll's \"King Kong: Ape and Essence,\" perhaps the best overall essay on the 1933 film, admirably combines a recognition of King Kong's several entwined discourses while thoroughly exposing what it sees as the film's predominant ideological basis.1 Observing the connections between the ill-fated, desire-laden Kong and the film's Depression audience, Carroll explains both the film's sympathy for Kong as a \"tragically heroic\" victim of brutal social and economic processes while at the same time noting its concomitant purpose as a \"cautionary tale as regards social behavior\" (241). This cautionary purpose, Carroll notes, is particularly apparent when we discern in Kong a parallel to the doomed, overreaching gangsters common in films of the period:
TL;DR: The authors show that Faulkner's participation in the Modernist project of technologizing bodies reveals a Utopian desire to imagine not so much a world without power as one in which power is not gender, race, or class specific, but rather fluid.
Abstract: In faulkner's airplane tales, particularly \"Honor\" and Pylon, the bodies of barnstormers are technologized and robotized to the point of being interchangeable with the bodies of the airplanes. Both of these tales center on barnstorming air shows—peepshows in the air—and both represent moments when mechanical motion is eroticized and made organic, even as organic bodies are made mechanical. In this paper, I show that Faulkner's participation in the Modernist project of technologizing bodies reveals a Utopian desire to imagine not so much a world without power as one in which power is not gender, race, or class specific, or in which power is not fixed, but rather fluid. This Utopian element in Faulkner's fiction is not innocent of its ties to the more fascistic, sado-masochistic qualities of Modernism; despite these problems with his fantasies, however, Faulkner's utopianism can add to current theoretical debates about gender, power, and technology. Barnstorming was a fairly common public entertainment in the 1920s and early 1930s. It occurred very much in the public sphere— actually, generally just outside the city limits, where the barnstormers were certain to have enough space, and also to avoid various city laws about
TL;DR: The crisis of representation that would define the issues in which the coming war would be fought as discussed by the authors was written into the histoty of America, insofar as America was itself conceived in various efforts to rethink and define the nature and concept of representation.
Abstract: Less than five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Emerson announces a crisis in the structures of political and linguistic representation. "Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant," he writes, "Representative Government is misrepresentative; Union is a conspiracy against the Northern States which the Northern States are to have the privilege of paying for; the adding of Cuba and Central America to the slave marts is enforging the area of Freedom. Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for a ugly thing."1 He makes this statement within the context of the controversy over the KansasNebraska Act. This Act had repealed the Missouri Compromise and legislated that the question of slavery be determined by individual state constitutions rather than by a national policy of exclusion. For Emerson, that slavery is to be preserved and extended signals a contradiction in the meaning ofAmerica, a contradiction that is dissimulated within a rhetoric of representation, democracy, and freedom. Declaring the rhetorical and historical basis of the virtues upon which America was to be founded, Emerson here predicts the crisis of representation that would define the issues ovet which the coming war would be fought.2 These issues included debates over who could claim the right to representation and over the relations of power existing between state and federal governments within the system of representation. The crisis to which Emerson refers is therefore a crisis written into the histoty of America, insofar as America was itself conceived in various efforts to rethink and define the nature and concept of representation. As Emetson suggests, however, this crisis in political representation
TL;DR: If we are asked to believe that all literature is "ideology," in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of "social" or "political" meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: If we are asked to believe that all literature is "ideology," in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of "social" or "political" meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away. If we are asked to believe that all literature is "aesthetic," in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the beauty of language or form, we may stay a little longer but will still in the end turn away. Some people will lurch from one position to the other. More, in practice, will retreat to an indifferent acknowledgment of complexity, or assert the autonomy of their own (usually consensual) response. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
TL;DR: For a writer so consistently labelled as a metafictionist, John Barth's work is studded with some of the most sympathetic and unforgettable characters and settings in recent American fiction as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: For a writer so consistently labelled as a \"metafictionist,\" John Barth's work is studded with some of the most sympathetic and unforgettable characters and settings in recent American fiction. Barth's work offers an opportunity to revise the way we regard literarily selfconscious texts. Too often, critics have become so preoccupied with the formal mechanisms of these works that their referential side is neglected or forgotten. Frequently, readings of Barth have used his reflexivity, the way his language cannot be \"a window on an immediately present view of the world\" (Green 232) as an excuse to ignore the details of his work that make it differ from fiction by other writers who have employed similar literary strategies, such as Nabokov or Borges. It cannot be denied that Barth's fiction, rhetorical strategies aside, features an unusual amount of realia. Among these, ironically, are, in their specificity and density, the very intertextual references that vouchsafe Barth's station as a hyper-self-conscious novelist (Lemon 48). In recent years, led by Barth himself in his 1980 article \"The Literature of Replenishment,\" critics have retrenched on this blanket attribution of exclusively metafictive ttaits to Barth. Barth intended this article as an elaboration and half-repudiation of his far more canonical 1967 piece, \"The Literature of Exhaustion,\" enshrined in its day as an augur of alienation, anomie, the death of the author, and other existentially idealistic sixties staples. When Barth, in the later essay, says of his variety of postmodernist writer that he ot she \"aspires to a fiction more democratic in appeal than such late-modernist marvels\" (Friday Book 203) as works by Beckett and Nabokov, any specter of a proliferating
TL;DR: In the best of nineteenth-century American fiction, from which Invisible Man in at least this one respect took its cue, the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious, underground aspect of human personality as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: hen ralph ellison gave his acceptance speech for the 1952 National Book Award, he defined Invisible Man against a tradition of naturalistic fiction and, more importantly, set the terms for much Ellisonian scholarship to follow. Ellison maintained that Invisible Man embodied a form that reflected its maker's \"more promising\" view of reality. \"Thus to see America,\" he concluded, \"with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom, I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many ttiumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction.\" Distinguishing Invisible Man from \"sociology and case histories,\" Ellison managed to transform the African American from social victim to social-psychological archetype. In the best of nineteenth-century American fiction, from which Invisible Man in at least this one respect took its cue, \"the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious, underground aspect of human personality.\" Hence Ellison's argument that, \"as a Negro\" and an artist, he had discovered a complex, non-mimetic form which transcended the limitations of historical time and place.1 Almost forty years of literary criticism of Invisible Man has taken Ellison at his word. In a textual landscape of nameless characters and places, of a Founder and a Brotherhood whose correspondence with Booker T Washington and the Communist Party is obfuscated,2 and a protagonist whose invisibility is not exclusively a function of race, Invisible Man's departure from social realism has been a bitterly contested artistic premise for the African-American writer. Much of the critical
TL;DR: In a pointedly unsympathetic introduction to a collection of essays on Robert Lowell, Harold Bloom names Lowell's particular contribution as the origination of the trope of vulnerability and the subsequent fostering of the Confessional school of poetry, and then argues that more than ten years after his death, Lowell's influence, due to the numbing effects of this trope, is less than one would have supposed as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In a pointedly unsympathetic introduction to a collection of essays on Robert Lowell, Harold Bloom names Lowell's particular contribution as the origination of the trope of vulnerability and the subsequent fostering of the \"Confessional\" school of poetry, and then argues that more than ten years after his death, Lowell's influence, due to the numbing effects of this trope, is less than one would have supposed:
TL;DR: The sentimental film is a tempting but troublesome place to begin any discussion of the formidable role that emotion plays in the act of movie watching as discussed by the authors, and the difficulties arise from the discomforts and uncertainties of speaking about the process of emotional identification in the first person, from a position that is unavoidably vulnerable.
Abstract: The sentimental film is a tempting but troublesome place to begin any discussion of the formidable role that emotion plays in the act of movie watching. It is tempting because this type of film so directly solicits feeling and revels in its display. The difficulties arise from the discomforts and uncertainties of speaking about the process of emotional identification in the first person, from a position that is, unavoidably, vulnerable. A familiar alternative strategy, amply explored in current film theory, is for the spectator critic to distance herself from the emotional content of the sentimental narrative and, by reconstructing a film's method of positioning an imaginary spectator within that content, demonstate how she is coerced, deceived, or otherwise taken