Edward P. Comentale

Aaron Jaffe

A massive underground sensation, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the internet age. In this book, 21 fans and scholars address the film's influences--westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus--and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies contains neither arid analyses nor lectures for the late-night crowd, but new ways of thinking and writing about film culture.

The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies

Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-garde

Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms. Tracking the evolution of popular regional genres such as blues, country, folk, and rockabilly in relation to the growth of industry and consumer culture, Edward P. Comentale shows how this music became a vital means of exploring the new and often overwhelming feelings brought on by modern life. Comentale examines these rural genres as they translated the traumas of local experience--the racial violence of the Delta, the mass exodus from the South, the Dust Bowl of the Texas panhandle--into sonic form. Considering the accessibility of these popular music forms, he asserts the value of music as a source of progressive cultural investment, linking poor, rural performers and audiences to an increasingly vast network of commerce, transportation, and technology.

Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song

Sweet Air

Stephen Watt

Adjunct Professor of Theatre and Drama Stephen Watt

Skip Willman

Shaken, not stirred--cultural critics look at the many faces of 007 and his creator.

Edward P. Comentale

Books

Your next favorite book is out there