Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation addresses a conceptual form of negativity in the literature, film, and criticism of the United States during the period just following World War II. Finding in postwar U.S. media and culture a preoccupation with void, or what Melville called a “dumb blankness full of meaning,” it locates such formal and thematic motifs of blackness, blankness, refusal, exclusion, and death as fill the novels and films of the period. And it concludes that aesthetic of social and political negativity, when it has exploited the divide between film and literature, has long been an interruption in the rhetorical formation known as “Cold War consensus.” Chapters focus upon political modernists of the U.S. at mid-century, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Paul Goodman, Orson Welles, Douglas Sirk, Jonas Mekas, and the actor Sterling Hayden, as well as the cultural formalists who founded the Melville revival and the discipline of cinema studies. These figures bear upon the past by continually shifting our reading of the cultural objects that preceded them and that underpin national identity. They also bear upon the present by providing critical and artistic tools for a continued critique of the totalizing determinisms exerted by “mass media” in an “information society.” By historicizing the void in the work of these figures, and by finding there the ways to re-theorize a conceptual language of “medium,” this dissertation moves toward a theory of reading: an ironic relation to material negativity and rhetorical openness through which film and literature can, without expectations, offer up the possibilities of collective identification and societal transformation.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2012)
Access Conditions
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- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Tierney, Matthew A.,
"The Projector Rests on a Pile of Books: Void and Medium in Postwar U.S. Culture"
(2012).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z02V2DFV
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....