We are very pleased to announce that next CHSS Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop will take place on Thursday, March 24, 2022, 4pm EST
Professor Jordan Brower of the Department of English will discuss Hollywood Signs: Scenes from a Literary History of the Studio System with Catherine Jurca, Professor of English and Visual Culture at California Institute of Technology
Karen Petrone (History) will serve as moderator.
The book introduction is attached. Please do not cite without author's permission.
Hollywood Signs has two distinct goals corresponding to the fields of literary and film and media studies. On one hand, this study follows the arc of the Hollywood studio system from 1912 to 1952—its genesis, consolidation, global extension, and self-understood demise—by way of its attitude toward and engagement with the concept of the “literary”. “Literary” describes my objects of study in three distinct but overlapping ways: as forms of writing produced within the studio system, principally prose fiction; as intellectual property; and, most abstractly, as the “other” of entertainment. The poles of this period are set at a confluence of economic, legal, and aesthetic circumstances that defined the art and industry of Hollywood: from the moment when Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players company spearheaded the development of the studio era by producing pictures based on copyrighted literary properties to the moment just after the Paramount antitrust decision mandated the disintegration of the vertically integrated oligopoly. On the other hand, Hollywood Signs describes the permutations of primarily United States-based literary modernism as they occur within an increasingly commodified, increasingly multi- and transmedial culture. This book posits the studio system as a dynamic set of conditions among which literary experimentation occurred alongside of and dialectically engaged with popular literature (and especially the genre of Hollywood fiction).
Please use the Zoom link below to join the meeting:
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, or mobile device: https://uky.zoom.us/j/82184454304
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Meeting ID: 821 8445 4304
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In Spring 2021, the Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences awarded its first round of grants to allow UK faculty members to invite an expert in their field to review their book manuscripts before submitting the manuscript to the publisher. We congratulate all four winners. See https://chss.as.uky.edu/grant-recipients
Karen Petrone
Director, A&S Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor of History
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
Tel: 859-257-4345
petrone@uky.edu
