Search results for ""author susan l. mizruchi""

When people think about Marlon Brando, they think of the film star, the hunk and the scandals. Susan L. Mizruchi finds the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create believable characters; the man who used his fame to foster American Indian and civil rights. From Brando’s letters, audiotapes and annotated screenplays and books—many never before available—Mizruchi gives us a complex person whose intelligence belies the school dropout. She shows how Brando’s embrace of foreign cultures and outsiders led to brilliant performances in unusual roles, fostering empathy on a global scale. In portraying a fuller Brando, Mizruchi portrays a more fascinating man than the one we thought we knew.

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From ritual killings to subtle acts of self-denial, the practice and rhetoric of sacrifice has a special centrality in modern American literature. In a compelling interdisciplinary investigation, Susan Mizruchi portrays an episode in American cultural history when the literary movement of realism and the fledgling field of sociology both converged in the belief that sacrifice is basic to sociality. This is a book about the fascination that sacrifice held for writers--principally Herman Melville, Henry James, and W.E.B. Du Bois--and also for those who articulated the main tenets of modern social theory, an inquiry that eventually spans historical events such as public lynchings and the political scapegoating of immigrants a century ago. The execution in Billy Budd Sailor, the death of Du Bois's first-born son in The Souls of Black Folk, Henry James's preoccupation with renunciation and scapegoating, and the self-denying working classes of Norris and Stein all illustrate repeated stagings of sacrificial rituals from a Biblical past. For Mizruchi, the peculiar persistence of this aesthetic construct becomes a guide to a rich theological and social-scientific tradition distinctive to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and including such influential works as Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Frazer's Golden Bough, and Ross's Sin and Society. The major features of sacrifice--its original association with spiritual doubt, its function as a form of spiritual economics that sustained divisions between the fortunate and the bereft, and its role in fixing boundaries between aliens and kin--held strong symbolic value for writers struggling to reconcile faith with rationalism, and communal coherence with capitalist expansion. Mizruchi eloquently demonstrates how the conceptual power of sacrifice made it a key mediator of cultural change, from the decline of sympathy and the significance of "race" in an emerging multicultural society to the revival of maternal self-sacrifice.

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When people think about Marlon Brando, they think of the movie star, the hunk, the scandals. In Brando’s Smile, Susan L. Mizruchi reveals the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create believable characters; the man who loved Emily Dickinson’s poetry. To write this biography, Mizruchi gained unprecedented access to a vast number of annotated books from Brando’s library, hand-edited copies of screenplays, private letters, and recorded interviews that have never before been quoted in a biography. Original interviews with some of the still-living players from Brando’s life, including Ellen Adler, his one-time girlfriend and the daughter of his acting teacher Stella Adler, provide even deeper insight into the complex person whose intelligence belied the high-school dropout. Mizruchi shows how Brando’s embrace of foreign cultures and social outsiders led to his brilliant performances in unusual roles—a gay man, an Asian, a German soldier—to test himself and to foster empathy on a global scale. We also meet the political Brando: the civil rights activist, the close friend of James Baldwin, the actor who declined his Oscar to support Indian rights. More than seventy stunning—and many rare—photographs of Marlon Brando illuminate this portrait of the man who has left an astounding cultural legacy.

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An elegant introduction to one of America's most complex and influential writers. From his childhood in a family of leading American intellectuals through his mature life as a major American man of letters, Henry James (1843-1916) created a unique body of fiction that represents one of the greatest achievements in the nation's literary history. James's transnational life in the US and England and his extraordinary siblings (the philosopher William James and diarist Alice James) made his life as complicated as the fictions he produced. In this elegant introduction to the work of Henry James, Susan L. Mizruchi places the notoriously difficult and obscure writings in their historical and biographical context. As James grew in confidence as a writer, his fictions evolved accordingly. These complex accounts of human experience engage with the vital issues of both James's era and our own. Among the works treated in this introduction are Washington Square, The Europeans, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Turn of the Screw. Through his novels, as well as his journalistic and critical endeavors, James explores themes related to gender relations, human sexuality, the nature of modernity, the threat of relativism, the rise of mass culture, and the role of art. Since their creation, James's writings have been a consistent subject of both literary theory and popular culture, receiving a diverse array of theoretical treatments, from formalism, deconstruction, phenomenology, and pragmatism to Marxism, new historicism, and gender and queer theory. James's novels have been adapted into numerous films by directors including William Wyler, Peter Bogdanovich, Michael Winner, Merchant/Ivory, and Jane Campion. The impact of Henry James cannot be overstated.

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