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Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream
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Book Presentation:
• Reinterprets popular sports movies with in-depth analysis and contextual grounding
• Transforms theories of the relationship between cinema and politics through original applications of theories including Arendt's civic humanism, Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology, and Bellah and Gorski's study of US civil religion
• Revises accounts of US cultural politics post-1976, particularly mass cultural politics and the role of Hollywood in culture
Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs an unexpected current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and therefore represent the nation to itself in idealized form. Once considered mere credos for Reaganism's fantasies of an atomized society, movies from Rocky (1976) to Ali (2001) dream of democratic participation and recognition more than individual success, for in every case, off-field relationships take precedence over on-field competition.
Arranged chronologically, Hollywood Sports Films and the American Dream is a critical study of six major sports films that re-tells the story of multiculturalism's gradual adoption in the latter third of the 20th century and rewrites contemporary understandings of the sports film. For author Grant Wiedenfeld, the mainstream's first minority heroes are paradoxically white ethnic, rural, working-class men, exemplified by Rocky, Slap Shot (1977) and The Natural (1984) and Black, brown, and women characters follow in White Men Can't Jump (1992), A League of Their Own (1992), and Ali. But despite their insistence on community and diversity these popular dramas show limited faith in civic institutions and point to the limits of inclusion and participation in the post-Civil Rights era.
Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Alexander, and others inform Wiedenfeld's original analysis and commentary on the political significance of popular culture as he insists on the cinema's capabilities as an engine for democracy untethered from more conventional 'democratic' institutions. Reading these familiar movies from another angle paints a fresh picture of how the United States has imagined democracy since its bicentennial and renews the political efficacy of one of the most popular genres in film history.
About the Author:
Grant Wiedenfeld, Associate Professor of Media and Culture, Sam Houston State University Grant Wiedenfeld earned a PhD from Yale University in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies. He taught courses on sports and cinema in Yale's English Department and Film Studies Program before being hired at Sam Houston State University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Media and Culture. Previous publications include studies of Gustave Flaubert, D.W. Griffith, and André Bazin.
Press Reviews:
"Wiedenfeld has produced a sustained, provocative reestimation of the Hollywood sports movie. From his rediscovery of the progressivism of Rocky's underdog status to his tour-de-force readings of League of their Own and Ali, he strives to think alongside—not against—these films and their politics, rallying with them and their heroes. For Wiedenfeld the sports movie is not merely a genre but a mode of civic participation, and this book amounts to the opening salvo of an Arendtian film criticism." - J.D. Connor, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, USC School of Cinematic Arts
"Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream would create considerable discussion in a graduate school classroom, could be parsed for use as chapter examples in an undergraduate course, and may reach a broader readership due to the important topics of film for the public sphere." - Andrew James Kettler, Journal of Popular Culture
"The monograph is quite engrossing and offers great fodder for the classic of all academic roles, debate." - Andrew James Kettler, University of South Carolina
"It is remarkable that Wiedenfeld vividly elaborates how the sports-film genre fascinatingly nests what the American people have come to embody...this book's ultimate significance lies in that it reconsiders this ideology through the lens of sports movies and in doing so, reveals their progressive potential." - Film Quarterly
"Wiedenfeld's work is a well-written, engaging read with a rich philosophical foundation." - Rachel L. Carazo, European Journal of American Studies
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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