The many con men, gangsters, and drug lords portrayed in popular culture are examples of the dark side of the American dream. Viewers are fascinated by these twisted versions of heroic American archetypes, like the self-made man and the entrepreneur. Applying the critical skills he developed as a Shakespeare scholar, Paul A. Cantor finds new depth in familiar landmarks of popular culture. Book
Read MoreThe standard film-noir view of American values as empty and American institutions as hollow may indeed be another strange instance of what happened when European ideas and attitudes were transported to America as a result of the convulsions in Europe.
Read MoreHow could anyone have come up with works of the magnitude of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth in the space of a few seasons writing for the London stage?
Read MoreToday the radicals are the real conservatives, contributing to the perpetuation of our dumbed-down media culture, while the conservatives are the real radicals, offering the great classics of the Western tradition as the most effective means of liberating students from the orthodoxies of our day. Book Review
Read MoreRonald Harwood's Taking Sides is a sympathetic account of what happened when the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler found himself accused of being a Nazi after World War II.
Read MoreBlake was a bit of a capitalist himself. His capital consisted chiefly of a small printing press, together with supplies of paper and engraving plates, which he and his wife dutifully lugged with them whenever they changed domiciles.
Read MoreW.C. Fields made the endless struggle to become someone else the theme of his films, as he debunked a variety of incarnations of the American Dream.
Read MoreHamlet in Purgatory in many respects serves as the culmination of Greenblatt's long-term project as a cultural historian. Book Review
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