Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture

Native Informant is Leo Braudy's first book after his widely acclaimed and award-winning history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown. With a verve that breaks down the boundaries between film, literature, and popular culture, Braudy discusses writers and filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Daniel Defoe, Ernst Lubitsch, Emile Zola, Susan Sontag, and Richard Condon. His subjects include madness in the eighteenth century, the Hollywood blacklist, westerns, and pornography. Throughout this lively and insightful collection, his perspective is not that of the critic as a detached voice of professional authority but as a member of a particular culture--a native informant--whose gaze looks simultaneously inward and outward, subjective but self-aware. Like the wide-ranging Frenzy of Renown, Native Informant will appeal to specialist and interested reader alike.

In this collection of essays from the late 1960s through the '80s, Braudy ( The Frenzy of Renown ) again proves his importance as a leading academic critic. Believing that "the openness of texts to the world and to alternate readings makes their meaning not indeterminate but complex," he provides insightful explorations of such diverse subjects as Norman Mailer, Alfred Hitchcock, the gangster film, the philosophic roots of Fanny Hill , the twisted historical sensibility of novelists Thomas Berger and Richard Condon, and the criticism of Susan Sontag ("In pursuit of new connections she has fashioned a rhetoric of subordination that puts her forward as the humble lightning rod of culture"). But it is somewhat disingenuous for Braudy to state that his critical credentials are "roughly equivalent to those of anyone else" living in the media-saturated present day, making him a "native, if not naive, informant." The author's style is more readable than most academics, but his fondness for the moral and literary complexities of 18th-century literature also imbues his cultural and historical criticism of 20th-century works. This admirable book is both too subtle for the general reader and not radical enough for those on the critical cutting edge.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This selection of essays written between 1969 and 1989 covers an ambitious breadth of subject matter that goes beyond the subtitle into criticism and politics, resulting in a certain disjointedness unconducive to consecutive reading. Its merit lies in Braudy's unusual and interdisciplinary perspective, as when he enthuses over the interpretive possibilities of the 18th-century epistolary novel in "Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa." He is particularly lucid on the subject of film, a genuinely interdisciplinary art form with links to popular culture. Appropriate for humanities collections.
-Janice Braun, Medical Historical Lib., Yale Univ.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.