Pioneering studies of the Coen brothers’ cult classic
"The essays are complex, evocative, approachable, and attentive to the film’s ironies and nuances. There is something here for the slacker as well as the scholar, for all Lebowskis, big and small, for film specialists, 90s fanatics, scholars of American studies, and the ever-growing assemblage of Lebowski cultists worldwide." —Patrick O'Donnell, Michigan State University
"This book is the Dude's joint. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies proves that academics can be very funny and even sometimes smart." —Percival Everett, author of Erasure and American Desert
"Dudely interesting. . . . Comentale and Jaffe have mixed up a provocative, truly strange cocktail of cultural studies and cultural theory." —Simon Critchley, the New School for Social Research, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers
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.
Edward P. Comentale is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. He is author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde and editor (with Stephen Watt and Skip Willman) of Ian Fleming and James Bond (IUP, 2005) and (with Andrzej Gasiorek) of T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.
Aaron Jaffe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.
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Distribution: World
Publication date: 10/26/2009
Format: paper 512 pages, 44 b&w illus., 6.125 x 7
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22136-0
