On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film
This reader-friendly and thorough study ofBrokeback Mountainenhances our enjoyment of the film and the original story, and expands our awareness of crucial social justice issues. A personal essay as well as an enlightened volume of cultural criticism, this study moves, informs, and creates a community of readers. A groundbreaking inquiry in gender studies, Eric Patterson's new work gives us language for what it means not only to be masculine, but to be human. (Marilyn Kallet, University of Tennessee and author of fourteen books, including Circe, After Hours and co-editor of Sleeping With One Eye Open:)A brilliant, powerful investigation that makes sense of the sensational reception of the 2005 Ang Lee film and traces the beauty of it back to the Annie Proulx short story it was based on, this is a book for everyone who sawBrokeback Mountainor read about it.Eric Patterson’swriting will remind you of that one inspiring English teacher whose class you wish you could take again, dazzling you with funny and intriguing insights about the political and literary contexts of both the film and fiction. Companionable with current scholarship theorizing space, regionalism, and the rural homosexual,On Brokeback Mountainis also a timely contribution to significant discussions about how gay and lesbian studies and queer theory have myopically focused on urban identities. This book is as poignant as the movie it elucidates and will be just as gratefully embraced by freshmen and farmers alike. (Carol Mason, associate professor of English and women?s studies at Oklahoma State University, and author of Killing for Life and the forthcom)Eric Patterson'snew book is at once useful and inspiring. Through attentive and insightful readings of Annie Proulx's powerful story and Ang Lee's moving film,Pattersonnot only brilliantly explicates these significant works of art, but also places them in a variety of revealing contexts. The result is cultural criticism at its finest: informative, committed, passionate, humane. (Claude J. Summers, William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at University of Michigan-Dearborn and General Editor, www.glbtq.com, an)Before reading this book, I thought I appreciated the achievements ofBrokeback Mountain. I am grateful forEric Patterson'spassionate and richly insightful illumination — of the story and film as artistic works, and of the cultural realities that informed their creation and fuel their potency. (Will Fellows, author of A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture and Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 1997.)Eric Patterson's book is a success on three levels. It can be read as a companion to understanding the film and story; it can be used as a text in studying the social impact of the film and story at the university level; and whether you are a veteran of our forum discussions or newly struck by Brokeback fever, this book will add an extra dimension to your appreciation ofBrokeback Mountainas a masterpiece of modern literature and film. (The Ultimate Brokeback Forum, March 2008)When Owen Wister invented the Western in his best-selling 1902 novel,The Virginian, he placed at the heart of the genre the love that "dare not speak its name," with an eastern narrator enamored of a stalwart ex-Virginian. A century later,Brokeback Mountaincaused a critical eruption in its frank exploration of the passion that has always been a part of cowboy life. The triumph ofEric Patterson’sstudy of both Proulx’s story and Ang Lee’s film is to show how fully the narrative of Jack and Ennis is a part of our national romance. In nuanced chapters,Pattersonexplores a series of related issues—the elegy, histories of homosexuality, Whitman’s poetry, romantic love, ranging in the process from Virgil’s Eclogues to Kinsey’s studies of sexuality—all in an effort to understand at once the triumph ofBrokeback Mountainas narrative and its separate stylistic achievements, as well as the torrent of slurs against its basic premise.Pattersonis an impassioned reader, though never intemperate, and through a careful accumulation of readings of every aspect of both story and film, makes his case simply, successfully, elegantly, that this is not only a triumph of the genre, but a masterpiece in its own right. (Lee C. Mitchell, Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres and professor of English at Princeton University and authorWesterns: Making the Man in Fi)Eric Patterson has created...[a] reader-friendly examination of the short story and the film adaptation....Brokeback fans will want to read this thorough analysis....Patterson's book is a powerful tribute to the story and film. (The Gay & Lesbian Review)Well researched and nicely written ... insightful not only into theBrokeback Mountainnarrative but also into the troubling history of sexual prejudice. (The Journal of American Culture, March 2009)