21st century
A01=Robert Polito
Author_Robert Polito
Category=DCF
cinema
cinematic
contemporary
cultural
detective
disturbing
elvis
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
essay
faith
figurative
film
genre
hallucination
historical
horror
impersonation
impersonator
interdisciplinary
language
lyric
memoir
movies
new york school
noir
opera
paris hilton
poet
poetic
poetics
poetry
poets
pop culture
religion
scary
silver screen
social studies
society
Product details
- ISBN 9780226673394
- Weight: 284g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2009
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid - hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, "Hollywood & God" is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.
Robert Polito is director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing and professor of writing at the New School. He is the author of Doubles, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
