frank sinatra and american culture week 1. intro presentation topics week 2: seminars and film...
TRANSCRIPT
Frank Sinatra and American Culture
Week 1
Intro
Presentation topics
Week 2: seminars and film criticism professionalization and LFF
November 23-24 Rick Senat
Assessment and review
Culture
“[A] culture must finally be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production.” --Raymond Williams
“Everyday life is defined contradictions: illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control.” -- Henri Lefebvre
“Mickey Mouse may in fact be more important to an understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt.” --Warren Susman
Forces of modern American culture: industrialization, urbanization, immigration
Culture IndustriesFormation of national culture post 1865
Tension between middleclass and working-class cultures (folk to mass)
Racial appropriation and exclusion
Interlocking roles of advertising, publishing, theatre
Reliance on female artists and consumers; performance of gender
Motion pictures and working-class entertainment
Resistance to cultural hegemony?
High Art, Popular, and Mass Culture
Culture as adjective, 1870-
Transformation of low European culture (Opera, Shakespeare, etc.) into “high” art for wealthy American elites
Culture becomes ‘incorporated’ when small group dictates standards
Educating and spiritually uplifting aspects of culture; search for “great” literature, art: the canon
Key historical events and figures repackaged as bedrock of national culture: potential ambivalence of text and audience
Potential of popular/working-class culture vs. capitalist mass culture (1920-)
Is popular culture an alternative/form of resistance to hegemony or an acceleration of the dominant
ideology?Hobsbawm’s “optimism”: “The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures.”
Williams’s faith in the ordinariness of culture and a ‘painless’ Marxist cultural criticism: “Culture includes the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.”
Frankfurt School traditionally sees only cultural productions’ manipulation of audiences and complicity rather than agency and capacity for critique (unlike variants of classic Marx): however, globalization may prove Althusser right: one cannot escape ideology: “ideology has no history”
Gramsci: cultural hegemony of the middle-class and the revolutionary proletarian alternative
Traditional Marxist cultural criticism inadequate in handling questions of race and gender
Integration and exclusion of folk cultures
German immigrants create Tin Pan Alley and New York music industry; Ragtime (1893)
Blackface mistrelsy and vaudeville (1880s): white cultural theft
Amusement parks like Coney Island (1895) and World’s Fairs (Chi, 1893) spaces for working-class audiences
Mass-produced dime novels for working class
women’s literature dominates publishing industry
National League 1876; 1884 black Cincinnati player Moses Walker fired
Sinatra
Centenaries, canons and popular culture
Documentaries and the construction of history
Public history and museum exhibition
Middlebrow culture– decline and preservation
Hegemony reconsidered: immigration, working cultures of the Left
Issues in licensing and the reconstruction of history: http://www.sinatra.com
Italian Immigration
Settlers in America date from 17th C
650,000 Italians emigrated between 1890-1900
2 million arrived between 1900-1914
1891 11 Italian Americans lynched in New Orleans
1920-1933 Prohibition– cultural consequences
1924 Immigration Act
1927 Sacco and Vanzetti executed
Immigration product of modernist forces in America framed by exclusionary arguments about ethnic essentialism and assimilation
The Problem with Self-Made Gangsters
Sinatra and Roosevelt
The House I Live In (1945)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woZVlroHqPU
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Maggio and Critique
Prostitution another form of ‘enlisting’
Homosexuality in Army
Officer incompetence
Sadism and graft
Racism
Mixed-race unions between soldiers and Hawaiians
American military incompetence leads to Pearl Harbour
Takes place at margins of American empire
American ‘misfits’ tell their own stories
Prewitt’s failed belief in army’s romantic past
Mythmaking of Pearl Harbour
The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Establishment Style
MiddlebrowsJoan Shelley Rubin (1992) notes that cultural study focuses on either high or low, but not the median culture Middlebrow writers in 1920s at odds with Lost Generation, high-art moderns
Longstanding contempt for middlebrows (women writers) by cultural conservative Dwight MacDonald
Middlebrow culture more powerful than either—heritage of Mathew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy, 1882) and persistence of Victorian values of cultural improvement
Book-of-the-Month Club, Saturday Review of Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Alexander Wolcott’s radio show, historical films, Clifton Fadiman’s “Great Literature,” BBC Radio 4 lists all 20th-century outcroppings of “middlebrow culture.”
Contemporary middlebrow tv has masculine structures and address (Slate): Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, etc
The Path to Reagan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Gcy6JY5Rg