Chapter 1 Preface: "Intellectual Fantasies" Chapter 2 Chapter 1. Intelligenti Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Stargazers Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Civilization the Movie Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Civilization the Movie Noir Chapter 6 Chapter 5. Unseen Melodies/Reel Time Chapter 7 Chapter 6. Pov Pandora Chapter 8 Conclusion: Checking the Gate
James D. Bloom is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Gravity Fails: The Jewish Shaping of Modern America, Literary Bent: In Search of High Art in Contemporary American Writing, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Jospeh Freeman, and The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman.
James D. Bloom has written a stimulating and important account of
Hollywood and its history, showing how movies think, and think in
systematic and complex ways. Rather than mirrors on the world or
images of ourselves, movies, especially classic Hollywood movies,
create sites of reflection and dispute about the very things they
seem only to describe—wealth, power, glamor, and all the
idealizations to which human desire succumbs. Buttressed by a very
considerable use of star biography and studio history, Bloom's
argument is neither speculative nor nebulous. It is specific, and
it is deadly—it shows how implicated we all are in the kind of
critical thinking that the School of Hollywood has taught us
unawares.
*Perry Meisel, New York University*
James Bloom is an incomparable guide to—and peacemaker between—the
high and the low in American culture. In Hollywood Intellect, he
gives us a breathtakingly comprehensive vision of what the movies
really have in mind. Bloom’s frame of reference is wider than
Cinerama.
*James Kaplan, author of Two Guys From Verona and co-author, with
Jerry Lewis, of Dean & Me?A Love Story*
Just when I thought that serious, enlightening criticism was dead,
along comes James Bloom's Hollywood Intellect to help me see
poetry, poets, movies, movie-makers, American culture—and myself—in
a new illuminating way. Poetry and movies? Who would have thought
it? Tarzan, Shirley Temple, and John Milton all in the same book?
But that's the wonderful thing about fine minds at work on old
subects—they make us see things differently.
*Alan Cheuse, George Mason University*
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