Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries

Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries

Author: Alex Symons

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2012-08-06

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0748664483

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Which strategies has Mel Brooks used to survive, adapt and thrive in the cultural industries? How has he gained his reputation as a multimedia survivor? Alex Symons takes a unique, artist-focused approach in order to systematically identify the range of Brooks's adaptation strategies across the Hollywood film, Broadway theatre and American television industries.By combining a cultural industries approach together with that of adaptation studies, this book also identifies an important new industrial practice employed by Brooks - defined here as 'prolonged adaptation'. More significantly, Symons also employs this method to explain the so far neglected way that Brooks's adaptations have contributed towards changing production trends, changes in critical attitudes, and towards the ongoing integration of the cultural industries today. An essential read for film students and scholars researching adaptation, this refreshing new approach will also be valued by everyone studying the cultural industries.


The Political Mel Brooks

The Political Mel Brooks

Author: Samuel Boerboom

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-06-07

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1498586716

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Political Mel Brooks analyzes both Mel Brooks’s more popular films and his lesser known work to explore how his use of parody and satire, his keen sense of the history of Jewish comedic conventions, and his deep awareness of social issues encompasses a political project that, while often implicit, nonetheless speaks to the enduring political and social impact of his films. Brooks’s work often employs a nuanced political style that acts as a social commentary against those in power and in favor of oppressed and misunderstood persons. This volume emphasizes Brooks’s political legacy and his masterful use of parody and satire to craft sophisticated political critiques of dominant culture. Contributors illustrate in a practical and accessible way how to explore how comedic films and television series can employ parody and satire not just to mock generic conventions, but also dominant political ideologies. Scholars of media, film, pop culture, political science, and communication studies will find this volume especially useful.


Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts

Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts

Author: Intellect Books

Publisher: Intellect Books

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1783201584

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Increasingly, academic communities transcend national boundaries. “Collaboration between researchers across space is clearly increasing, as well as being increasingly sought after,” noted the online magazine Inside Higher Ed in a recent article about research in the social sciences and humanities. Even for those scholars who don’t work directly with international colleagues, staying up-to-date and relevant requires keeping up with international currents of thought in one’s field. But when one’s colleagues span the globe, it’s not always easy to keep track of who’s who—or what kind of research they’re conducting. That’s where Intellect’s new series comes in. A set of worldwide guides to leading academics—and their work—across the arts and humanities, Who’s Who in Research features comprehensive profiles of scholars in the areas of cultural studies, film studies, media studies, performing arts, and visual arts. Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts includes concise yet detailed listings include each academic’s name, institution, biography, and current research interests, as well as bibliographic information and a list of articles published in Intellect journals. The volumes in the Who’s Who in Research series will be updated each year, providing the most current information on the foremost thinkers in academia and making them an invaluable resource for scholars, hiring committees, academic libraries, and would-be collaborators across the arts and humanities.


Jews and Urban Life

Jews and Urban Life

Author: Leonard J. Greenspoon

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1612499031

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jews and Urban Life recognizes that throughout their long history, Jews have often inhabited cities. The reality of this urban experience ranged from ghetto restrictions to robust participation in a range of civic and social activities. Essays in this collection present relevant examples from within the Jewish community itself, moving historically from the biblical period to the modern-day State of Israel. Taking a comparative approach while recognizing the particulars of individual instances, authors examine these phenomena from a wide variety of approaches, genres, and media. Interdisciplinary and accessibly written, the articles display a multitude of instances throughout history showing the range of Jewish life in urban settings.


Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness

Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness

Author: Jack Curtis Dubowsky

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1137454210

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness uses musicology and queer theory to uncover meaning and message in canonical American cinema. This study considers how queer readings are reinforced or nuanced through analysis of musical score. Taking a broad approach to queerness that questions heteronormative and homonormative patriarchal structures, binary relationships, gender assumptions and anxieties, this book challenges existing interpretations of what is progressive and what is retrogressive in cinema. Examined films include Bride of Frankenstein, Louisiana Story, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Blazing Saddles, Edward Scissorhands, Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry, Transamerica, Thelma & Louise, Go Fish and The Living End, with special attention given to films that subvert or complicate genre. Music is analyzed with concern for composition, intertextual references, absolute musical structures, song lyrics, recording, arrangement, and performance issues. This multidisciplinary work, featuring groundbreaking research, analysis, and theory, offers new close readings and a model for future scholarship.


Trump’s Media War

Trump’s Media War

Author: Catherine Happer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-17

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 3319940694

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 seemed to catch the world napping. Like the vote for Brexit in the UK, there seemed to be a new de-synchronicity – a huge reality gap – between the unfolding of history and the mainstream news media’s interpretations of and reporting of contemporary events. Through a series of short, sharp interventions from academics and journalists, this book interrogates the emergent media war around Donald Trump. A series of interconnected themes are used to set an agenda for exploration of Trump as the lynch-pin in the fall of the liberal mainstream and the rise of the right media mainstream in the USA. By exploring topics such as Trump’s television celebrity, his presidential candidacy and data-driven election campaign, his use of social media, his press conferences and combative relationship with the mainstream media, and the question of ‘fake news’ and his administration’s defence of ‘alternative facts’, the contributors rally together to map the parallels of the seemingly momentous and continuing shifts in the wider relationship between media and politics.


Women Comedians in the Digital Age

Women Comedians in the Digital Age

Author: Alex Symons

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1000829464

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a thorough examination of digital work by women comedians in the US, exploring their use of digital media to perform jokes, engage with fans, remake their reputations, and become political activists. This book argues that despite its many adverse effects, digital work is changing comedy, empowering women to create new comic forms and negotiate the contentious political climate incited by former President Donald. J. Trump. Chapters are focused on video podcasting, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the streaming platform Netflix – each containing informative case studies on significant women comedians who use them, including Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Mindy Kaling, Colleen Ballinger, Lilly Singh, Ms. Pat, Whitney Cummings, Issa Rae, and others. To understand their strategies, this book examines the popularity of their digital content, their career outcomes in television and film, as well as the ups and downs of their critical reputations in magazines, newspapers, the trade press, and with their participatory audiences online. This insightful and timely work will appeal to scholars researching and teaching in the areas of media studies, digital communication, gender studies, and performance.


Adaptation Before Cinema

Adaptation Before Cinema

Author: Lissette Lopez Szwydky

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-19

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3031095960

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Adaptation Before Cinema highlights a range of pre-cinematic media forms, including theater, novelization, painting and illustration, transmedia art, children’s media, and other literary and visual culture. The book expands the primary scholarly audience of adaptation studies from film and media scholars to literary scholars and cultural critics working across a range of historical periods, genres, forms, and media. In doing so, it underscores the creative diversity of cultural adaptation practiced before cinema came to dominate the critical conversation on adaptation. Collectively, the chapters construct critical bridges between literary history and contemporary media studies, foregrounding diverse practices of adaptation and providing a platform for innovative critical approaches to adaptation, appropriation, or transmedia storytelling popular from the Middle Ages through the invention of cinema. At the same time, they illustrate how these forms of adaptation not only influenced the cinematic adaptation industry of the twentieth century but also continue to inform adaptation practices in the twenty-first century transmedia landscape. Written by scholars with expertise in historical, literary, and cultural scholarship ranging from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, the chapters use discourses developed in contemporary adaptation studies to shed new lights on their respective historical fields, authors, and art forms.