The Year S Work In Lebowski Studies

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.

“Playful and (un)deadly serious . . . chew[s] through a near-exhaustive array of films, television, literature, culture, music and even cocktails.”—Times Literary Supplement They have stalked the horizons of our culture, wreaked havoc on moribund concepts of dead and not dead, threatened our sense of identity, and endangered our personal safety. Now zombies have emerged from the lurking shadows of society’s fringes to wander the sacred halls of the academy, feasting on tender minds and hurling rot across our intellectual landscape. It is time to unite in common cause, to shore up defenses, firm up critical and analytical resources, and fortify crumbling lines of inquiry. Responding to this call, Brain Workers from the Zombie Research Center poke and prod the rotting corpus of zombie culture trying to make sense of cult classics and the unstoppable growth of new and even more disturbing work. They exhume “zombie theory” and decaying historical documents from America, Europe, and the Caribbean in order to unearth the zombie world and arm readers with the brain tools necessary for everyday survival. Readers will see that zombie culture today “lives” in shapes as mutable as a zombie horde—and is often just as violent. “An intelligent and highly engaging collection that will appeal to legions of zombie fans, to students in the humanities, and to scholars working in fields that have already been affected by or are now preparing for the zombie apocalypse. It blends entertaining, illuminating, and accessible readings of zombies and zombie culture with unique interventions made from authoritative positions of expertise.”—Julian Murphet, author of Faulkner’s Media Romance

Whether contending with nihilists, botching a kidnapping pay-off, watching as his beloved rug is micturated upon, or simply bowling and drinking Caucasians, the Dude—or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing—abides. As embodied by Jeff Bridges, the main character of the 1998 Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski is a modern hero who has inspired festivals, burlesque interpretations, and even a religion (Dudeism). Film author and curator Jenny M. Jones tells the full story of the Dude, from how the Coen brothers came up with the idea for a modern LA noir to never-been-told anecdotes about the film’s production, its critical and commercial reception, and, finally, how it came to be such an international cult hit. Achievers, as Lebowski fans call themselves, will discover many hidden truths, including why it is that Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) is so obsessed with Vietnam, what makes Theodore Donald “Donny” Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi) so confused all the time, how the film defies genre, and what unexpected surprise Bridges got during filming of the Gutterballs dream sequence. (Hint: it involved curly wigs and a gurney.) Interspersed throughout are sidebars, interviews with members of the film’s cast and crew, scene breakdowns, guest essays by prominent experts on Lebowski language, music, filmmaking techniques, and more, and hundreds of photographs—including many of artwork inspired by the film.

The popularity of cable news, satire, documentaries, and political blogs suggest that people are often absorbing and dissecting direct political messages from informational media. But entertainment media also discusses the important political issues of our time, though not as overtly. Nonetheless, consumers still learn, debate, and form opinions on important political issues through their relationship with entertainment media. While many scholarly books examine these political messages found in popular culture, very few examine how actual audiences read these messages. Parasocial Politics explores how consumers form complex relationships with media texts and characters, and how these readings exist in the nexus between real and fictional worlds. This collection of empirical studies uses various methodologies, including surveys, experiments, focus groups, and mixed methods, to analyze how actual consumers interpret the texts and the overt and covert political messages encoded in popular culture.

During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America's other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply "maintaining its empty frame." Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films--including Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men--reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself. Campbell suggests that post-Westerns are in fact "ghost-Westerns," haunted by the earlier form's devices and styles in ways that at once acknowledge and call into question the West, both as such and in its persistent ideological framing of the national identity and values.

Celebrate the Dude with an abiding look at the philosophy behind The Big Lebowski Is the Dude a bowling-loving stoner or a philosophical genius living the good life? Naturally, it's the latter, and The Big Lebowski and Philosophy explains why. Enlisting the help of great thinkers like Plato and Nietzsche, the book explores the movie's hidden philosophical layers, cultural reflection, and political commentary. It also answers key questions, including: The Dude abides, but is abiding a virtue? Is the Dude an Americanized version of the Taoist way of life? How does The Big Lebowski illustrate the Just War Theory? How does bowling help Donny, Walter, and the Dude oppose nihilism? Yes, the Dude is deep, and so is this book. Don't watch the movie—or go to Lebowski Fest—without it. Explores many of The Big Lebowski's key themes, such as nihilism, war and politics, money and materialism, idealism and morality, history, and more Gives you new perspective on the movie's characters—the Dude, the Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak, Donny, Maude Lebowski, Bunny Lebowski, and others Helps you appreciate the Coen Brothers classic even more with the insights of Aristotle, Epicurus, Kant, Derrida, and other philosophical heavyweights

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. The concept of “work” has several definitions, but they all share the idea of a purposeful, conscious activity. The notion generally refers to the expending of energy and effort through a set of coordinated activities aimed at producing something useful or to achieve the objectives it pursues. The book takes the reader to a journey across the evolving meanings of work and the influence of these new meanings over the labour market over the years. The reader can find there descriptions of concepts and trends in work. The adopted research and analytical perspectives allow the exploration of multiple approaches to this issue. The particular attention is put on the work-family relations, because regardless of the geography, all people operate in these two main life dimensions. The issues related to values and ethics in work are also presented in this book.

Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era. In doing so, it identifies the emergence of a specific cinematic figure – the 'intervallic' noir protagonist exposed to the redemptive force of his or her own passion. Significantly, the book contextualises the iconography of film noir in relation to prior art-historical visual traditions, in particular earlier representations of melancholia and the saturnine, locating noir against a much broader canvas than has been the norm. Examining central noir films of the classic and modern era (The Killers, The Man Who Wasn't There) as well as films at the peripheries of noir (from Jacques Tourneur's Cat People to Wong Kar Wai's 2046), the book locates a series of iconographic gestures, performance traditions and affective tonalities at once specific to noir and yet resonant with a deeper cultural and philosophical heritage. It is a meditation that uniquely grapples with the look and the feel of noir, and which dares to detect a unique quality of 'beatitude' that runs through a certain strain of noir films. In doing so, it illuminates why film noir remains one of the most provocative and affecting visual milieus of our time.