Seems Like Old Times
Postmodern Nostalgia in Woody Allen's Work
by Britta Feyerabend
Hardback (Published)
(January 2009)
ISBN: 9783825353889
5.28 x 8.27 inches
Price: $57.00
On back order
Woody Allen is one of America’s most prolific authors, actors, and auteur film directors. His oeuvre, which spans five decades, has always been marked by a postmodern play with conventions, experimental techniques, and explorations of the status quo of modern urban lives. Yet, Woody Allen is also a nostalgic who makes the history of his nation, his people, and his individual subjects the constant theme of his work. Whether cryogenically frozen Miles Monroe wakes up in the future only to misinform scientists about the past; whether stand-up comedian Alvy Singer reminisces his relationship to Annie Hall; or, whether ophtalmologist Judah Rosenthal is tormented by his memory of his Jewish rabbinical father after having had his girlfriend killed; the past, whether personal or communal, is always an integral part of Allen’s characterizations and plots. Contrary to the assumption that postmodernity is necessarily linked to the future only and negates all history, the present study argues that postmodern subjects very much depend on an active evaluation of the past and that, through the lens of history, present crises and traumata can be overcome. In this way, nostalgia manages to bring history back into postmodernism.
- By (author) Britta Feyerabend
Other Titles in this Series
A River of ‘Han’: Eastern Tragedy in a Western Land
A Study of Korean American Literature
Volume 259
Modernist Authenticities
The Material Body and the Poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams
Volume 245
Transatlantic Crossings Between Paris and New York
Pan-Africanism, Cultural Difference and the Arts in the Interwar Years
Volume 133
Authentizitat und Inszenierung
Die Vermittlung von Geschichte in amerikanischen 'historic sites'
Volume 112
Time(s) of Lives
(Non-)Normative Temporalities, Age(ing), and Kinship Narratives in Contemporary U.S. American Culture
Volume 310
New England Forefathers’ Day Orations, 1770-1865
An Annotated Edition of Selected Plymouth Anniversary Addresses
Volume 240
The American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s
Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives
Volume 186
Differenz und Gesellschaft
Ethnische Dramen im Englischunterricht am Beispiel von Israel Zangwills 'The Melting Pot' und Angelina Weld Grimkes 'Rachel'
Volume 154
The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period
Volume 78
Reshaping the Maze – Rewriting the Minotaur
Transformationen des Labyrinthmythos in der zeitgenossischen amerikanischen Erzahlliteratur
Volume 235
Cultural Criticism in Woman’s Experimental Writing
The Poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe
Volume 128
Faces of Fiction
Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity
Volume 92
Writing during the Disasters
Modes of Rendering Suffering in Contemporary Experimental American Poetry
Volume 320
Framing Spaces in Motion
Tracing Visualizations of Earthquakes into Twentieth-Century San Francisco
Volume 255
America and the Americans in Postwar British Fiction
An Imagological Study of Selected Novels
Volume 138
Similar Books
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
Cahiers de littérature française
Les Métamorphoses du texte. Enjeux intertextuels et transpositions visuelles
Volume 25
European Drama and Performance Studies
Dramatisations politiques. Théâtre, politique et idéologie au XIXe siècle (1806-1914)
Volume 27
LiCArC
Trauma et création artistique : l’engagement des artistes arabes dans des dynamiques de résiliences
Volume 14
