Panel. Economies of Entertainment and Play

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

24-7-2017 3:30 PM

Description

  • “Innocents” at Rinkside and on the Gridiron: Faulkner, Sports, and Professionalism / Daniel Anderson, Dominican University
    This paper will examine Faulkner’s treatment of sports in an era of encroaching professionalism, focusing primarily on his depiction of a team-sport athlete (Labove in The Hamlet). This analysis will be developed in the context of Faulkner’s social and philosophical observations on sports as expressed in his Sports Illustrated essay on a National Hockey League game in 1955. The material goals of Labove’s athletic pursuits circumscribe his feeling of freedom and climax, underscored by the fact that he is doing something he contends he doesn’t enjoy or even “like”; this joyless determination prefigures the more plainspoken critique Faulkner would level at professional sports in his later Sports Illustrated essay.
  • The “Girl in the Picture”: Joan Crawford, William Faulkner, and Hollywood Money / James I. Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution
    This paper explores the relationship between William Faulkner and Joan Crawford in Hollywood when their paths crossed in the making of Today We Live (1933). The film was based on Faulkner’s short story, “Turn About” (1932), about male friendship during World War I. There was no “girl in the picture” until Crawford—one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top stars, who was earning roughly nine times what Faulkner was making as a screenwriter—expressed an interest in the film. The film was released at a time when the 1930s Depression was at one of its lowest levels. Money was very much on everyone’s mind—not least of all Faulkner, who had to decide if he would remain in Hollywood for the money, even if it meant writing more screenplays for stars like Joan Crawford, or if he would declare his independence and return to Mississippi.
  • The “Girl in the Picture”: Joan Crawford, William Faulkner, and Hollywood Money / James I. Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution
    This paper explores the relationship between William Faulkner and Joan Crawford in Hollywood when their paths crossed in the making of Today We Live (1933). The film was based on Faulkner’s short story, “Turn About” (1932), about male friendship during World War I. There was no “girl in the picture” until Crawford—one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top stars, who was earning roughly nine times what Faulkner was making as a screenwriter—expressed an interest in the film. The film was released at a time when the 1930s Depression was at one of its lowest levels. Money was very much on everyone’s mind—not least of all Faulkner, who had to decide if he would remain in Hollywood for the money, even if it meant writing more screenplays for stars like Joan Crawford, or if he would declare his independence and return to Mississippi.
  • “Honey, you’ve got your account in the wrong bank”: Money and Female Desire in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) / D. Matthew Ramsey, Salve Regina University
    The Long, Hot Summer (1958) transplants characters from The Hamlet into the 1950s and, in doing so, evokes and then converts the decline of the “Southern economy” and the suspicion of capitalism/commercialism found in Faulkner’s novel into a more mainstream Hollywood (and middle-American) framework for melodrama. Though sex and money are, as might be expected, central concerns of the steamy Southern melodrama, this adaptation illuminates the way the social/sexual economies of the source text have been reworked well beyond transforming impotent con-man Flem Snopes into virile, misunderstood Ben Quick. The more interesting shift has to do with female consumers of Hollywood film. The power of the feminine purse produces an altered economy of love and money, wherein male potency is truly potent (or relevant) when aligned with the ability to make money (not just to have it). Women in The Long, Hot Summer are, in a sense, savvy consumers of love, refusing to be bought/sold/exchanged in the ways they arguably are in The Hamlet.

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Jul 24th, 3:30 PM

Panel. Economies of Entertainment and Play

Nutt Auditorium

  • “Innocents” at Rinkside and on the Gridiron: Faulkner, Sports, and Professionalism / Daniel Anderson, Dominican University
    This paper will examine Faulkner’s treatment of sports in an era of encroaching professionalism, focusing primarily on his depiction of a team-sport athlete (Labove in The Hamlet). This analysis will be developed in the context of Faulkner’s social and philosophical observations on sports as expressed in his Sports Illustrated essay on a National Hockey League game in 1955. The material goals of Labove’s athletic pursuits circumscribe his feeling of freedom and climax, underscored by the fact that he is doing something he contends he doesn’t enjoy or even “like”; this joyless determination prefigures the more plainspoken critique Faulkner would level at professional sports in his later Sports Illustrated essay.
  • The “Girl in the Picture”: Joan Crawford, William Faulkner, and Hollywood Money / James I. Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution
    This paper explores the relationship between William Faulkner and Joan Crawford in Hollywood when their paths crossed in the making of Today We Live (1933). The film was based on Faulkner’s short story, “Turn About” (1932), about male friendship during World War I. There was no “girl in the picture” until Crawford—one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top stars, who was earning roughly nine times what Faulkner was making as a screenwriter—expressed an interest in the film. The film was released at a time when the 1930s Depression was at one of its lowest levels. Money was very much on everyone’s mind—not least of all Faulkner, who had to decide if he would remain in Hollywood for the money, even if it meant writing more screenplays for stars like Joan Crawford, or if he would declare his independence and return to Mississippi.
  • The “Girl in the Picture”: Joan Crawford, William Faulkner, and Hollywood Money / James I. Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution
    This paper explores the relationship between William Faulkner and Joan Crawford in Hollywood when their paths crossed in the making of Today We Live (1933). The film was based on Faulkner’s short story, “Turn About” (1932), about male friendship during World War I. There was no “girl in the picture” until Crawford—one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top stars, who was earning roughly nine times what Faulkner was making as a screenwriter—expressed an interest in the film. The film was released at a time when the 1930s Depression was at one of its lowest levels. Money was very much on everyone’s mind—not least of all Faulkner, who had to decide if he would remain in Hollywood for the money, even if it meant writing more screenplays for stars like Joan Crawford, or if he would declare his independence and return to Mississippi.
  • “Honey, you’ve got your account in the wrong bank”: Money and Female Desire in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) / D. Matthew Ramsey, Salve Regina University
    The Long, Hot Summer (1958) transplants characters from The Hamlet into the 1950s and, in doing so, evokes and then converts the decline of the “Southern economy” and the suspicion of capitalism/commercialism found in Faulkner’s novel into a more mainstream Hollywood (and middle-American) framework for melodrama. Though sex and money are, as might be expected, central concerns of the steamy Southern melodrama, this adaptation illuminates the way the social/sexual economies of the source text have been reworked well beyond transforming impotent con-man Flem Snopes into virile, misunderstood Ben Quick. The more interesting shift has to do with female consumers of Hollywood film. The power of the feminine purse produces an altered economy of love and money, wherein male potency is truly potent (or relevant) when aligned with the ability to make money (not just to have it). Women in The Long, Hot Summer are, in a sense, savvy consumers of love, refusing to be bought/sold/exchanged in the ways they arguably are in The Hamlet.