Why Harry met Sally
Subtitle: subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian power, and the rhetoric of modern love
By: Joshua Louis Moss
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 347
ISBN-13: 9781477312827; 9781477312834
Subjects: Jews in motion pictures; Judaism; Social aspects; Relations; Christianity; Interpersonal relations; Love in motion pictures; Jews on television; Jews in popular culture
Other titles: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian power, and the rhetoric of modern love
Description: From immigrant ghetto love stories such as The Cohens and the Kellys (1926), through romantic comedies including Meet the Parents (2000) and Knocked Up (2007), to television series such as Transparent (2014-), Jewish-Christian couplings have been a staple of popular culture for over a century. In these pairings, Joshua Louis Moss argues, the unruly screen Jew is the privileged representative of progressivism, secular modernism, and the cosmopolitan sensibilities of the mass-media age. But his/her unruliness is nearly always contained through romantic union with the Anglo-Christian partner. This Jewish-Christian meta-narrative has recurred time and again as one of the most powerful and enduring, although unrecognized, mass-culture fantasies. Using the innovative framework of coupling theory, Why Harry Met Sally surveys three major waves of Jewish-Christian couplings in popular American literature, theater, film, and television. Moss explores how first-wave European and American creators in the early twentieth century used such couplings as an extension of modernist sensibilities and the American "melting pot." He then looks at how New Hollywood of the late 1960s revived these couplings as a sexually provocative response to the political conservatism and representational absences of postwar America. Finally, Moss identifies the third wave as emerging in television sitcoms, Broadway musicals, and "gross-out" film comedies to grapple with the impact of American economic globalism since the 1990s.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-332) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. Sally's orgasm; title: The first wave : the mouse-mountains of modernity (1905/1934); title: Disraeli's page; title: Kafka's ape; title: Abie's Irish Rose; title: The second wave : erotic Schlemiels of the counterculture (1967/1980); title: Benjamin's cross; title: Portnoy's monkey; title: Katie's typewriter; title: The third wave : global Fockers at the millennium (1993/2007); title: Spiegelman's frog; title: Seinfeld's mailman; title: Gaylord's tulip; title: Conclusion. Plato's retweet.