Scholarship
Leo Braudy's books cover topics spanning literature, film, and cultural studies, often with an eye toward understanding the impact of history on artistic form and social construction. His books have been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and have been included among the Los Angeles Times' "Best of the Best Books of the Year" and the New York Times' "Outstanding Books of the Year." He is best known for two recent books on contemporary preoccupations: The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (Oxford, 1986); and From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Knopf, 2003). Both books address changing cultural definitions and fascinations by analyzing historical figures and archetypes to unpack what they tell us about the periods in which they emerge.
Along with Marshall Cohen, he co-edits the widely-used anthology Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford, 7th ed. 2008).
His 2006 book, On the Waterfront (British Film Institute), is a study of the film's production, the post-war values it reflects, and the controversy surrounding Elia Kazan's testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. In 2011 "The Hollywood Sign" appeared in Yale University Press's American Icons series. It traces the intertwined history of Hollywood and the Sign from the founding of the city as a prohibitionist enclave in the 1880s through the beginnings of the movies, the construction of the Sign in the 1920s as a real estate advertisement, and the mixed fortunes of both the Sign and the film business down to the present.
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Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)