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The Anatomy of Harpo Marx
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Description de l'ouvrage:
The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx’s physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo’s chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute—his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo’s body—its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, “cute” pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum’s text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.
À propos de l'auteur :
Wayne Koestenbaum is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of thirteen books of criticism, poetry, and fiction, including a biography of Andy Warhol, and the acclaimed The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
Revue de Presse:
"A zesty and deeply literate joy to read. Just as his previous nonfiction work, Humiliation, seemed like an apotheosis of new literary possibility in the age of overshare, so Koestenbaum's new book reinvigorates film studies."— New Haven Review
"A charming and rigorous study."— Sight & Sound Magazine
"A fittingly zany, aphoristic, and meandering study of the great mime of Marx Brothers fame. . . . Koestenbaum’s approach to Harpo makes for highly animated reading."— Bookforum
"Through thirteen chapters—one for each of Harpo's films—including dozens of illustrative film stills, Koestenbaum provides an informed, original, and near-obsessive assessment of all things Harpo. And, just as with Harpo himself, while it isn't always clear what Koestenbaum is trying to say—his verbose play-by-play of the silent star is challenging, to say the least—it's always worth trying to figure out."— Publishers Weekly
"A Barthes-influenced, highly idiosyncratic homage to Harpo Marx, the silent, but hardly quiet member of the Marx Brothers. The form of this exhaustive book is a frame-by-frame read of scenes in all 13 of the Marx Brothers’ comedies, but the approach is anything but conventional. With a poetic sensibility, sensuous curiosity, and boundless intellect, Koestenbaum uses Harpo, a character who he came to know later in life, as a literary subject. . . . Comprised of dense packets of prose, this is a volume best taken as a decadent dessert course."— Fandor
"An excellent example of a type of delirious scholarship: ‘We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death.’. . . a good indicator of a truth that the whole brouhaha regarding the lyric essay suggested anyway: the best essays are very likely written today with no ambition toward anything so belletristic as the essay as such."— Frieze
"Provocative, original scholarship that lights a fire under the typically stodgy studies that we usually get from university press star biographies."— Oklahoman
"Wayne Koestenbaum is our Roland Barthes, updated, remastered, cleared for the pressure zone of American mythologies. Delicate and brave, discerning and outrageous, the meditations organized around the other Marx track unconscious byways and the remarkable turns of a highly personal investment. Startlingly original, Koestenbaum provides critical understanding with poetic acuity and breathtaking disclosure."—Avital Ronell, author of The Test Drive
"The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is an effusive and provocative celebration of the potential of nonverbal communication, lying somewhere between poetry and criticism, history and diary, polemic and self-analysis. It is also funny, smart, often revelatory, and always sharp. It is, for all its analytical depth, a great read."—Michael Long, author of Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media
"Behind that face and in Harpo’s body, Wayne Koestenbaum finds more material than existed in New York’s fabled garment district. Koestenbaum's work is compelling and surprising; his detailed explorations, gifts to readers wondering about what lies beneath our culture’s surfaces. Read Wayne Koestenbaum for his exuberant embrace of the unrecognized or ignored; for his pleasure in explaining the inexplicable, and for his delight in deciphering Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. Read him now for unveiling the most enigmatic of presences, Harpo Marx. —Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, A Comedy
Voir le site internet de l'éditeur University of California Press
Voir la filmographie complète de Harpo Marx sur le site IMDB ...
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