Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy
Author: Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley File Type: epub The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radios endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the shows humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury Americas concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history. **Review By discussing in depth the ways the show was and wasnt distributed during and after its initial run (including the balance of radio stations carrying the show vs. TV stations carrying the show throughout the 50s), Fuller-Seeley makes the book itself an intermedia experience, encouraging readers to contribute to the vital work of media archiving. (Splitsider) From the Inside Flap Jack Benny built his career on letting his second bananas cut him down to size, but media scholar Kathryn Fuller-Seeley knows a giant of twentieth-century entertainment when she seesand hearsone. A meticulous researcher, sensitive critic, and unabashed fan, Fuller-Seeley examines the sonic wraparound and cultural reverberations of Bennys comic art and discovers an atmosphere thick with the buzz of ethnic, racial, and gendered staticnot to mention some seriously funny gags, wisecracks, voices, and sound effects. Like its subject, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy is tone-perfect and a delight to dial in to.Thomas Doherty, Brandeis University At last, Jack Benny gets the treatment he deserves! This lively, wonderfully detailed and meticulously researched study of Bennys contributions to twentieth-century arts and culture will delight not only those who remember him but those who have yet to discover this icon of American comedy.Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison When we think of Jack Benny, his real-life wife Mary Livingstone and his radio valet played by Eddie Anderson also come to mind. Now we have another perfect pairing, the great Benny with one of our finest cultural historians. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley examines a life and career in entertainment as well as the half-century, cross-media popularity of Bennys particular form of Jewish masculinity.Eric Smoodin, author of Regarding Frank Capra Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960
Author: E. M. Cioran
File Type: epub
In this collection of aphorisms and short essays, E.M. Cioran sets about the task of peeling off the layers of false realities with which society masks the truth. For him, real hope lies in this task, and thus, while he perceives the world darkly, he refuses to give in to despair. He hits upon this ultimate truth by developing his notion of human history and events as a procession of delusions, striking out at the so-called Fallacies of Hope. By examining the relationship between truth and action and between absolutes, unknowables, and frauds, Cioran comes out, for once, in favor of being. **
Author: Yugin Teo
File Type: pdf
Kazuo Ishiguros novels are suffused with a sense of memory, nostalgia and mourning. Memory is an area of research that continues to grow in importance within the humanities and this unique study examines the importance of memory and its representation in Ishiguros novels, filling a long-standing gap in knowledge in studies of Ishiguros work. Drawing from Paul Ricoeurs philosophical writing on memory, as well as theories on mourning, trauma and collective memory by Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Maurice Halbwachs and Walter Benjamin, Yugin Teo introduces a conceptual framework that examines the function of memory inthese novels, revealing the distinctive and cathartic work of memory that is very much a part of Ishiguros novels. This innovative study explores how Ishiguros writing both aligns itself with and challenges these established concepts of memory. **
Author: David Bialock
File Type: pdf
After The Tale of Genji (c. 1000), the greatest work of classical Japanese literature is the historical narrative The Tale of the Heike (13th-14th centuries). In addition to opening up fresh perspectives on the Heike narratives, this study also draws attention to a range of problems centered on the interrelationship between narrative, ritual space, and Japans changing views of China as they bear on depictions of the emperors authority, warriors, and marginal population going all the way back to the Nara period. By situating the Heike in this long temporal framework, the author sheds light on a hidden history of royal authority that was entangled in Daoist and yin-yang ideas in the Nara period, practices centered on defilement in the Heian period, and Buddhist doctrines pertaining to original enlightenment in the medieval period, all of which resurface and combine in Heikes narrative world. In introducing for the first time the full range of Heike narrative to students and scholars of Japanese literature, the author argues that we must also reexamine our understanding of the literature, ritual, and culture of the Heian and Nara periods. **
Author: Murray Milgate
File Type: pdf
Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. In the century after Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations the British economy was transformed. After Adam Smith looks at how politics and political economy were articulated and altered. It considers how grand ideas about the connections between individual liberty, free markets, and social and economic justice sometimes attributed to Smith are as much the product of gradual modifications and changes wrought by later writers. Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and other liberals, radicals, and reformers had a hand in conceptual transformations that culminated in the advent of neoclassical economics. The population problem, the declining importance of agriculture, the consequences of industrialization, the structural characteristics of civil society, the role of the state in economic affairs, and the possible limits to progress were questions that underwent significant readjustments as the thinkers who confronted them in different times and circumstances reworked the framework of ideas advanced by Smith--transforming the dialogue between politics and political economy. By the end of the nineteenth century an industrialized and globalized market economy had firmly established itself. By exploring how questions Smith had originally grappled with were recast as the economy and the principles of political economy altered during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that we are as much the heirs of later images of Smith as we are of Smith himself.Many writers helped shape different ways of thinking about economics and politics after Adam Smith. By ignoring their interventions we risk misreading our past--and also misusing it--when thinking about the choices at the interface of economics and politics that confront us today.ReviewThis is an important, sound analysis of the interrelation between political and economic theory in the century after Adam Smith. . . . This book exemplifies the best contemporary work on the nexus of political and economic theory. -- ChoiceMilgate and Stimson produce a very careful and detailed analysis of early economists ideas on issues shaping the modern concept of the political order, in the process displaying a rich array of competing ideas. . . . [T]his book provides a striking perspective on classical political economy. The reader will benefit from some prior familiarity with Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and J. S. Mill, along with the Utilitarians. -- Donald Frey, EH.netIn the last decade, scholars have moved away from the interpretation of Smith as a simple economic determinist who espoused lasissez-faire economics, and Milgate and Simpson have advanced their undertaking immensely with this book. -- Donald Stabile, Australian Economic History Review From the Inside Flap[M]asterful. . . . [After Adam Smith] is far more than a historical reconstruction Milgate and Stimson provide new insights about how the complex relations between liberal democratic politics and market institutions might be construed. The books deeply informed reflection on nineteenth century debates about modern capitalism is a major contribution to our understanding of political economy in the liberal democratic tradition.--from 2011 David and Elaine Spitz Prize Award citation[T]horough and stimulating . . . readers unfamiliar with these debates can glean a great deal from [Milgate and Stimson].--Gavin Kennedy, Adam Smiths Lost LegacyThis work represents the best of contemporary scholarship on the history of political, economic, and social thought. A signal contribution of this book is the demonstration of how far Smiths original vision was from the image that has been conveyed in so much of the secondary literature and which has come to inform contemporary views of markets and politics. Milgate and Stimson have provided an indispensable resource for thinking through the issues manifest in the recent revival of concerns with political economy and its significance for democratic theory.--John G. Gunnell, University at Albany, State University of New YorkAfter Adam Smith is a superior piece of scholarship, engagingly written and impressively erudite. Milgate and Stimson are first-rate historians of economic ideas.--Ian Shapiro, Yale UniversityThis is a fascinating and elegant study of the development of political economy and its relationship to political thought. It is a major contribution to economic and political theory, and to the often neglected but hugely important intersections between the two. It tells a compelling and original story, based on extensive scholarship as well as acute competence in economics.--Hannah Dawson, University of Edinburgh
Author: John Keay
File Type: mobi
Many nations define themselves in terms of territory or people China defines itself in terms of history. With the worlds longest tradition of history-writing, its extraordinary past ought to be common knowledge. China, by the eminent historian John Keay, should make it so. Informed by the latest research and enlivened by wit and anecdote, Keays narrative spans 5,000 years, from the Three Dynasties (2000220 BC) to Deng Xiaopings opening of China and the past three decades of economic growth. Broadly chronological, the book presents a history of all the Chinasincluding regions (Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria) that account for two-thirds of the Peoples Republic of China land mass but which barely feature in its conventional history. Crisp, judicious, and engaging, China is destined to become the classic single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand the past, present, and future of this immensely powerful nation.
Author: Timothy D. Taylor
File Type: pdf
In Strange Sounds, Timothy D. Taylor explains the wonder and anxiety provoked by a technological revolution that began in the 1940s and gathers steam daily. Taylor discusses the ultural role of technology, its use in making music, and the inevitable concerns about authenticity that arise from electronic music. Informative and highly entertaining for both music fans and scholars, Strange Sounds is a provocative look at how we perform, listen to, and understand music today. **