Film music, how it is used and how it is created.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but. The Great American Songbooks is the story of this literature, at once an overview of musical and authorial practice at the century's turn, an investigation into the sensory dimensions of reading, and a meditation on the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. The writings of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Walt Whitman are heard in a new key; the performers and tunesmiths who inspired them have their stories told; and the music of the past, long out of print and fashion, is recapitulated and made available in digital form. A work of criticism situated at the crossroads of literary analysis, musicology, and cultural history, The Great American Songbooks demonstrates the importance of studying fiction and poetry from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it suggests new avenues for research in the dawning age of the digital humanities.

Introduction - Archiving America: sound technology and musical representation - Opera cut short: from the castrato to the film fragment - Selling jazz short: Hollywood and the fantasy of musical agency - Opers and jazz in the score: toward a new spectatorship - Conclusion.

In his first collection of essays, author and educator Eric B. Olsen offers the reader a wide range of analytical thought and cultural criticism. The book opens by examining the history of film in the twentieth century and then analyzing literature from ancient Greek drama to modern American poetry, as well as commenting on jazz and popular music. The final group of essays concerns topics as diverse as climate change, popular culture, religion, anti-intellectualism and politics. Drawing on a broad base of literary and social criticism, from the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle to the writings of Lionel Trilling and Richard Hofstadter, The Intellectual American is a work of confident scholarship and the herald of a new voice in American letters.

Many believe Max SteinerÕs score for King Kong (1933) was the first important attempt at integrating background music into sound film, but a closer look at the industryÕs early sound era (1926Ð1934) reveals a more extended and fascinating story. Viewing more than two hundred films from the period, Michael Slowik launches the first comprehensive study of a long-neglected phase in HollywoodÕs initial development, recasting the history of film sound and its relationship to the ÒGolden AgeÓ of film music (1935Ð1950). Slowik follows filmmakersÕ shifting combinations of sound and image, recapturing the volatility of this era and the variety of film music strategies that were tested, abandoned, and kept. He explores early film music experiments and accompaniment practices in opera, melodrama, musicals, radio, and silent films and discusses the impact of the advent of synchronized dialogue. He concludes with a reassessment of King Kong and its groundbreaking approach to film music, challenging the filmÕs place and importance in the timeline of sound achievement.

From the renowned author of Invisible Man, a classic, “elegant” (The New York Times) collection of essays that captures the breadth and complexity of his insights into racial identity, jazz and folklore, and citizenship across six decades. Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this definitive volume includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. With newly discovered essays and speeches, The Collected Essays reveals a more vulnerable, intimate side of Ellison than what we've previously seen. “Raph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”