Buster Keaton

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Slapstick Comedy

The silent films of Buster Keaton (b. 1895–d. 1966) are among the most critically admired American motion pictures of the pre-sound era. Born to traveling medicine show performers during a stopover in a small town in Kansas, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton spent his early years on the road, and as a young child he gained star status as the linchpin of the family’s vaudeville act. He made his debut in motion pictures in 1917 as a member of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s company, Comique Films, where he first gained training as comedy filmmaker. From 1920 to 1928 Keaton worked independently and prolifically, supervising and starring in nineteen comedy shorts and ten features, a body of work that remains at the heart of his screen reputation today. Although he never enjoyed the box-office clout of rivals Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Keaton’s resilient, sober-faced persona was familiar to movie audiences around the world, and he was second only to Chaplin as the object of critical efforts to define the distinct contributions of slapstick comedy to the nascent art of the screen. Keaton’s career entered a tailspin in the early 1930s—the result of a troubled marriage, struggles with alcoholism, and the loss of control over his films—but he recovered his footing by the end of the decade and worked steadily as a performer and comic consultant in movies, television, and theater until his death. An aging Keaton was occasionally the recipient of nostalgic tributes to the “golden years” of slapstick comedy during these years. A great tide of critical reappraisals of Keaton’s work, however, followed the restoration and revival of his silent films, many of which Keaton himself thought lost, in an effort spearheaded by Raymond Rohauer, who mounted Keaton retrospectives in the 1960s, first in Europe then the United States. Showcasing Keaton’s silent film work as a whole, these screenings were accompanied by a growing critical consensus that an artist of the first rank had been rediscovered. In recent years, video and digital technologies have made Keaton’s films available to an expanding audience of fans, critics, historians, and independent researchers. The annotated bibliography that follows provides a roadmap to Keaton scholarship, including reference guides, biographies, and overviews, and the books and articles through which a critical understanding of Keaton’s cinema has taken shape.

Jack Kerouac’s Delinquent Art

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Road ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter puts the Beat writer Jack Kerouac in conversation with 1950s sociologists and psychologists interested in juvenile delinquency. These social scientists used the delinquent to develop ideas that would culminate in the class culture paradigm of the 1960s. Kerouac’s fiction prefigures this paradigm, drawing on the work of Oswald Spengler to distinguish between lower-class minority and middle-class white cultures in the United States. In autobiographical novels like Maggie Cassidy, On the Road, and Dr. Sax, Kerouac imagines the delinquent as a self-divided figure, alienated from the traditional lower class and unable to adapt to the new demands of the rising professional class. His version of process art replicates this division, offering its readers a failed synthesis of middlebrow and avant-garde literature.

scholarly journals The Rise of Uber and the [Re]construction of the North American Dream

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tori Zenko
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
The Road ◽  
The North ◽  
Road Narrative ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Road Narratives

The road – while on the surface often perceived as merely a means of allowing individuals to move from one location to another, has during recent decades become deeply intertwined with both individual and mass narratives related to the pursuit of freedom. The freedom narrative began when the United States highway system, developed during the early 1960s and thematically charged by the Beat Generation’s road-trip literature, became imbued with new meaning and new freedom-facilitating potential. The road, an architectural feat once thought of largely as a means of providing mass mobilization, came to be understood as both the road to freedom, and the road as freedom. However, today we find ourselves experiencing a new road narrative, one that still speaks to freedom but that differs vastly from the road narratives of the 1960s. Today, as individuals experience the road through sharing-economy services such as Uber, a narrative shift has occurred whereby freedom on the road is no longer experienced individualistically and/or destructively but, instead, communally and constructively.

scholarly journals The Rise of Uber and the [Re]construction of the North American Dream

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tori Zenko
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
The Road ◽  
The North ◽  
Road Narrative ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Road Narratives

The road – while on the surface often perceived as merely a means of allowing individuals to move from one location to another, has during recent decades become deeply intertwined with both individual and mass narratives related to the pursuit of freedom. The freedom narrative began when the United States highway system, developed during the early 1960s and thematically charged by the Beat Generation’s road-trip literature, became imbued with new meaning and new freedom-facilitating potential. The road, an architectural feat once thought of largely as a means of providing mass mobilization, came to be understood as both the road to freedom, and the road as freedom. However, today we find ourselves experiencing a new road narrative, one that still speaks to freedom but that differs vastly from the road narratives of the 1960s. Today, as individuals experience the road through sharing-economy services such as Uber, a narrative shift has occurred whereby freedom on the road is no longer experienced individualistically and/or destructively but, instead, communally and constructively.

scholarly journals THE PENETRATION OF ENGINEERING BY ECONOMICS: McFADDEN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROAD DEMAND ESTIMATION

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-278
Author(s):  
Ariane Dupont-Kieffer ◽  
Sylvie Rivot ◽  
Jean-Loup Madre
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Road Construction ◽  
Demand Estimation ◽  
Demand Modeling ◽  
The Road ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.

The Beats

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
The Road ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Creative Non Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Beat Literature

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.

Hard Times

Eubie Blake ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 217-252
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin ◽  
Ken Bloom
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Big Band ◽  
The Road ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Short Run ◽  
The Creation ◽  
On The Road

This chapter explores Eubie’s collaboration with Andy Razaf for the score of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1930; difficulties of working with Leslie; the show’s poor reception and short run on Broadway; the success of Blake and Razaf’s song, “Memories of You,” and its recording by Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong; and the show’s troubled life on the road. The chapter further discusses Eubie’s return to working with Fanchon and Marco; Eubie’s breakup with Lottie Gee; his attempts to land work recording and on the radio; the formation of his own big band; the band’s recordings for the small Crown label; and Eubie’s difficulties dealing with his band members. Then the chapter examines Eubie’s appearance in the short film, Pie, Pie, Blackbird, with Nina Mae McKinney and the Nicholas Brothers; his breakup with Broadway Jones; Noble Sissle’s return to the United States and his reunion with Blake; the creation of Shuffle Along of 1933, with a new plot and new songs; and how Eubie briefly worked for W.C. Handy’s publishing company and published a few new songs and instrumentals with Handy.

U.S.-Israeli Policies: Reading the Signs for '77

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Mark A. Bruzonsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Near East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Issue ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Sense Of Urgency

The real crunch for Israel will probably come during 1977 if Ford is elected—it will be delayed by only a few months if a Democratic candidate wins.” So writes Wolf Blitzer, editor of the “Jewish lobby's” Washington publication Near East Report, in a recent issue of the Jerusalem Post.With the same sense of urgency Abba Eban insists that “Time is of the essence, and unhappily for us, time is running out. We ought to grasp the central issues now and involve the United States in resolving them.” He and a growing number of his colleagues fear that should Israel not choose to “cooperate” with the U.S., the Americans might run right over Israel on the road to Geneva and some form of imposed settlement.

scholarly journals The Twilight of the Public Intellectual: Germany

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison M. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
German Society ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Road ◽  
German States ◽  
Literary Intellectuals ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Post War ◽  
Ethical Stance

This essay focuses on the questions of whether German unification resulted in a wholesale retreat of intellectuals from politics and engagement with social issues, as the rhetoric of failure would indicate, or whether the key debates of the period can be read instead as a sign that Germany is on the road to becoming a more 'normal' European nation. Before returning to these issuesat the end of this paper I first provide a broad historical and theoretical context for my discussion of the role of the concerned intellectual in Germany, before offering an overview of the respective functions of literary intellectuals in both German states in the post-war period. I then address a series of key debates and discussions in 1989 and the early nineteen-nineties that were responsible for changing the forms of engagement in intellectual debates in post-unification German society. I argue that the 1990s and early years of the new millennium hastened the disappearance of the writer as a universal intellectual and focused attention on the writer as an individualist and a professional. Today's youngest generation of writer in Germany is a specialist intellectual who intervenes in political and social matters from time to time but who is not expected to take a moral-ethical stance on most issues of national and international concern. S/he is one who frequently writes about personal subjects, but may also occasionally, as witnessed after September 11, turn his or her pen to topics of global concern as in terrorism and Islam. More often than not, however, writers now leave the work of commenting on political affairs to writers of the older guard and to other 'senior' specialist intellectuals.

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles M. Payne
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Change Organizations

The only youth-led national civil rights organization in the 1960s in the United States, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), grew out of sit-ins, with the base of its early membership coming from Black colleges. It became one of the most militant civil rights groups, pushing older organizations to become more aggressive. Under the tutelage of the experienced activist Ella Baker, it emphasized developing leadership in “ordinary” people. Its early years were dominated by direct action campaigns against White supremacy in the urban and Upper South, while internally, SNCC strove to actualize the Beloved Community. Later it specialized in grassroots community organizing and voter registration in dangerous areas of the Deep South. Its Freedom Summer campaign played a significant role in radicalizing young activists. SNCC, in general, acted as a training ground and model for other forms of youth activism. Notwithstanding its own issues with chauvinism, SNCC was open to leadership from women in a way that few social change organizations of the time were.

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