Why Harry met Sally : subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian power, and the rhetoric of modern love / Joshua Louis Moss.

• Introduction. Sally's orgasm -- The first wave : the mouse-mountains of modernity (1905/1934) -- Disraeli's page -- Kafka's ape -- Abie's Irish Rose -- The second wave : erotic Schlemiels of the counterculture (1967/1980) -- Benjamin's cross -- Portnoy's monkey -- Katie's typewriter -- The third wave : global Fockers at the millennium (1993/2007) -- Spiegelman's frog -- Seinfeld's mailman -- Gaylord's tulip -- Conclusion. Plato's retweet.

• 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. 

Ämnesord

Jews in motion pictures.  (LCSH)

Jews on television.  (LCSH)

Jews in popular culture  -- United States. (LCSH)

Love in motion pictures.  (LCSH)

Judaism  -- Relations -- Christianity. (LCSH)

Interpersonal relations  -- Social aspects. (LCSH)

Judar på film, USA  (sfit)

Kärlek på film  (sfit)

Kärlekspar på film  (sfit)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

Jews in films, USA

Love in films

Romance in films

Klassifikation

PN1995.9.J46 (LCC)

791.43/6529924 (DDC)

Ima (kssb/8 (machine generated))