Deconstructing Brad Pitt - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1623561795 ISBN 13: 9781623561796

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014

Synopsis

Brad Pitt is probably the most famous American actor alive today. Bloomsbury makes available for the first time an academic study of this iconic star, _Deconstructing Brad Pitt. Editors Christopher Schaberg and Robert Bennett extensively rework problems of celebrity, gender, and consumer society; question the possibilities of star personae and their consequent notions of identity and performance; and ingeniously disrupt the positions of actor and viewer in the text. The book will assist readers pro and con in coming to terms with this magnetic figure.
 
_Deconstructing Brad Pitt is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its approach. Arranged as an edited collection, with a framing personal narrative, the book simultaneously discusses Pitt's film roles and contemporary culture at large, and shows how two such seemingly distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The customary segregation of fandom and academic critique is systematically subverted. In design and content, the book calls into question 'types' of acting (Hollywood mainstream, quirky artistic), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification of heroes, and the limits of representation.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2011) and The End of Airports (2015).
 
Robert Bennett is Associate Professor of English at Montana State University-Bozeman, USA, and author of Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital (2003).

From the Back Cover

"_Deconstructing Brad Pitt, edited by Robert Bennett and Christopher Schaberg, is an anthology of multi-disciplinary, multi-perspectival engagements with the figure of Brad Pitt. The book is a strange and compelling meshwork of affect, memory and desire, as each author/artist follows a richly surprising line that leads readers to places they might never have found on their own. Some of these places are whimsical while others are more perilous and reverberate with disaster, crises, madness, and failure. It would quite miss the point to say that this collection is a celebrity study--it transverses multiple disciplines from cultural studies to psychoanalysis to new materialist feminism and queer theory. Yet, it is not bound by any of these approaches. Ranging from visual essays to personal accounts, the collection articulates "Brad Pitt" as an event that is proximate to place, industry, nature, ruin, representation, and resilience. Moving into and away from the performative features of Brad Pitt, as celebrity and as citizen who could be considered the unofficial mayor of New Orleans, _Deconstructing Brad Pitt invites us to imagine what it might be like to theorize engagement as entanglement, as a productive crash into the objects that surround us. It invites us to take seriously what others too quickly ignore or leave behind."

--Joy V. Fuqua, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Queens College/CUNY, USA, and author of Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and at Home (2012)

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1623561795
• ISBN 13: 9781623561796
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Schaberg Christopher, Bennett Robert