A Companion to Woody Allen

by Bailey, Peter J.; Girgus, Sam B.

• ISBN13: 9781444337235
• ISBN10: 1444337238
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-15
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Edited by two renowned Allen experts, A Companion to Woody Allen presents a collection of 26 original essays on the director's films. Contributions offer a number of divergent critical perspectives while expanding the contexts in which his work is understood. A timely companion by the authors of two of the most important books on Allen to date Illuminates the films of Woody Allen from a number of divergent critical perspectives Explores the contexts in which his work should be understood Assesses Allen's remarkable filmmaking career from its early beginnings and investigates the conflicts and contradictions that suffuse it Discusses Allen's recognition as a global cinematic figure

Author Biography

Peter Bailey is Frank P. Piskor Professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he has taught American Literature, creative writing and film studies for 32 years.  In addition to The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2001), he is the author of Reading Stanley Elkin (1986) and Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction (2006). He has also published on Frank Conroy, Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Frederick Exley, John Irving, and Ronald Sukenick, and he is secretary of the national John Updike Society.

Sam B. Girgus is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.  He is a prolific author whose publications include The Films of Woody Allen (2nd edition, 2002) and Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine (2010). He also has edited several works, including The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture (1981). He is a recipient of a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and other scholarly and teaching awards, and has lectured and taught extensively in universities throughout America and the world.

Table of Contents

Contributor Biographies and keywords
Biography/Autobiography/Auteurism

Introduction
Peter J. Bailey

1. Standup Auteur
Cecilia Sayad

2. Which Woody Allen?
Colleen Glenn

3. Woody Allen and France
Gilles Menegaldo

4. Raging in the Dark: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films
Christopher Knight

5. A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen's Exilic Period
John Macready
 
6. Comic Faith and Its Discontents: Death and the Late Woody
Robert M. Polhemus

I. Movies about the Movies

7. Critical Theory and the Cinematic World of Woody Allen
Stephen Papson

8. Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity
Gregg Bachman

9. Play it Again, Woody: Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films
Claire Sisco King

10. Hollywood Endings: Woody Allen on Hollywood, Filmmaking, and Happy Endings
Christopher Ames

II. Allen and his Sisters: Cultural Critiques

11. Here . . . It’s Not Their Cup of Tea’: Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice
Cynthia Lucia

12. ‘It’s Complicated, Really’: Women in the Films of Woody Allen
Joanna E. Rapf

13. Vicky Blanca, Cristina Blanca, Barcelona Blanca
Renee R. Curry

14. Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody
Katherine Fusco

III. Influences/Intertextualities

15. Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flaneur
William Brigham

16. Lurking in Shadows: Kleinman’s Trial and Defense
Iris Bruce

17. Woody Allen and the Literary Canon
William Hutchings

18. ’Who’s He When He’s at Home?’: A Census of Literary, Philosophical and Artistic Allusions in Woody Allen’s Films
J. Andrew Gothard

19. The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Films
Menachem Feuer

20. Barcelona: City of Refuge
Brian Bergen-Aurand

IV. Philosophy/Religion

21. Woody Allen and the (False) Dichotomy of Science and Religion
Mark  T. Conard

22. The Philosopher as Filmmaker
David Detmer

23. Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen
Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler

24. Love, Meaning, and God in the Later Films of Woody Allen
Sander Lee

25. Hollywood Rabbi: Probing the Never-Ending Questions of Woody Allen
Monica Osborne

26. Woody Allen’s Random Universe in His European Cycle: Morality, Marriage, Magic
Richard A. Blake

Afterword
Sam B. Girgus