Sam Girgus argues that Allen has consistently been on the cutting edge of contemporary critical and cultural consciousness. Allen continues to challenge notions of authorship, narrative, perspective, character, theme, ideology, gender and sexuality. This revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that examine Allen's work since 1992. Girgus thoughtfully asserts that the scandal surrounding Allen's personal life in the early 1990s has altered his image in ways that reposition moral consciousness in his work.

In this lively and original book, Sam Girgus offers a fresh look at films such as The Searchers, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, High Noon, and On the Waterfront. He shows how they are part of the cultural and historic debate that examines, structures, and questions what modern America means to its people, the world, and history.

This study examines a selection of films made in the last quarter of the twentieth century in an effort to trace how the notion of "American" has changed drastically from that portrayed in American cinema up to the 1950s. In works such as Mississippi Masala, Lone Star, Malcolm X, Raging Bull, When We Were Kings and Bugsy Sam Girgus finds a new and ethnically varied array of characters that embody American values, ideals and conflicts. He charts these changes through analysis of cinematic tensions between fiction, documentary and modernism.

Sam Girgus argues that Allen has consistently been on the cutting edge of contemporary critical and cultural consciousness. Allen continues to challenge notions of authorship, narrative, perspective, character, theme, ideology, gender and sexuality. This revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that examine Allen's work since 1992. Girgus thoughtfully asserts that the scandal surrounding Allen's personal life in the early 1990s has altered his image in ways that reposition moral consciousness in his work.

In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self.

In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "cinema of redemption" that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not...

Girgus defines the American idea as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions of democracy, equality, and republicanism and argues that writers of the New Covenant tradition challenged society to live up to its own imperatives for individual and cultural renewal. Abraham Cahan, Anzi Yezierska, Henry Roth, Johanna Kaplan, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and E. L. Doctorow formed a new poetics" to articulate a modern version of the myth and ideology of America."

Originally published in 1984.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest...

The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the "antidemocratic" image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.

The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted "law of the heart," emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other...

The steady rise of Clint Eastwood's career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona. Eastwood responds to a national yearning for a vision of individual action and initiative, personal responsibility, and potential for renewal. An iconic director and star for his westerns, urban thrillers, and adventure stories, Eastwood has taken film art to new horizons of meaning in a series of...

The steady rise of Clint Eastwood's career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona. Eastwood responds to a national yearning for a vision of individual action and initiative, personal responsibility, and potential for renewal. An iconic director and star for his westerns, urban thrillers, and adventure stories, Eastwood has taken film art to new horizons of meaning in a series of...