The persistence of nightmares in the dream factory: Evolutions of the "Hollywood story" genre.
Item
-
Title
-
The persistence of nightmares in the dream factory: Evolutions of the "Hollywood story" genre.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9605628
-
identifier
-
9605628
-
Creator
-
Mascuch, Peter John.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Morris Dickstein
-
Date
-
1995
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Cinema | Literature, American | American Studies
-
Abstract
-
The dissertation focuses on the genre of the "Hollywood story," specifically "Hollywood novels" and "Hollywood-on-Hollywood films" which use the American commercial film capital and/or film industry as their principal setting and focal point. The endurance of the Hollywood story genre indicates a wide variety of responses to the mythic realm in which American movies have been made--a "Persistence of Nightmares in the Dream Factory" with a challenging complexity of stances toward its subject.;Following this genre's development and the emergence of its "classical" literary and cinematic texts during the years before World War II, the period after the war, from 1945 to 1960, proved to be a defining moment for the Hollywood story's evolution. Narratives which focused on the film capital had the opportunity to reflect and comment upon this turbulent era, in which classical Hollywood was experiencing the wrenching final years of its traditional studio system of production and the U.S. was undergoing the troubling transition from a postwar to a cold war culture.;This study aims to closely examine the ways certain Hollywood story narratives of the '50s engage with the extraordinary historical conjuncture of external cultural influences and internal industrial factors that was besetting the American commercial film industry and its creative community during the decade. The dissertation's first chapter summarizes the Hollywood story genre's evolutions prior to 1945; this is followed by a second chapter that comprehensively examines several economic, political, and cultural matters that are important to the historical circumstances of Hollywood and America, and thus to the Hollywood story genre's development, during the '50s. These two chapters provide the framework for individual analyses of four films: The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Knife, In a Lonely Place, Sunset Boulevard; and three novels: The Deer Park, The Disenchanted, A Season of Fear. These narratives represent a cross-section of responses to the demands of genre and cultural context. The purpose of the study's explorations of them is to extend their significance to issues of power and resistance in the cold war cultural structures of Hollywood and America.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
