Michael Szalay
Biographic Data
| ID | 998633 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Szalay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Szalay |
| SIGNATURE | SZALAY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6310-0610 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Endless Hustle; or, Saul Goodman Out of Time
This essay argues that the alternating rhythms with which AMC's Better Call Saul moves though time, and the alternating temporal frames of reference with which it represents Saul Goodman's "hustling" specifically, represent self-conscious efforts to clarify the narrative affordances of the serial television medium. These temporal experiments also elucidate the felt endlessness of waged work in the context of go-nowhere careers. In both capacities…
Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV
L'or flexible de HBO
Ce document a t gnr automatiquement le 2 mai 2019
Story Work
Based on interviews with three dozen working writers in American television, this paper argues that TV writers assert their status as labor to guarantee their shared craft identity with novelists, dramatists, and authors of other conventional literary material. The tension between writers’ desire for literary prestige on one hand, and their recognition that they create at the behest of company executives, on the other, emerges, alternately, in th…
The bodies in the bubble
While predominantly concerned with the transformation of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during the 1980s, David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011) represents signal contradictions in the nature of money, from 1971 (when Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold) to the events of the 2008 financial crisis (when derivative trading dominated global financial markets). As unstable admixtures of abstraction and concreteness…
HBO's Flexible Gold
Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck, and The Newsroom do more than generate HBO brand equity-they quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently financial dramas are futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as…
Eerie Serenity”
Research Article| May 01 2009 “Eerie Serenity”: A Response to John McClure Sean McCann; Sean McCann Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Michael Szalay Michael Szalay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2009) 36 (2): 145–153. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2009-008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sean McCann, Michael Szalay…
Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left
Toward the end of the 1960s, the New Left and the counterculture developed a libertarian theory of politics that emphasized symbolic action and self-realization. A concomitant suspicion of formal political institutions and a turn to cultural politics have since become common to intellectual discourse within the humanities. This essay argues against these attitudes, while tracing them from the protest movements of the late sixties to contemporary …
Introduction
In 1965, Paul Potter designated "the system" as the principle antagonist of the fledgling New Left. This term, and the assumptions behind it, capaciously synthesized the many ills that Potter and others hoped to redress; it also revealed, the authors suggest, a conception of power particularly congenial to the description and analysis of culture. The authors introduce each of the following essays with this in mind, detailing their shared interest…
All the King's Men; or, the Primal Crime
In January of 1964, Robert Penn Warren left his office in the English Department at Yale and set out for Mississippi and Alabama, where he would interview black leaders of the Civil Rights movement. A compilation of these interviews, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) is Warren's most comprehensive rumination both on racial inequality and his long and often ambivalent relation to it. At the start of his literary career, this unrepentant Southern Ag…
Gumshoe America
As the titles of these two excellent books suggest, they explore the interrelationships between literary production and the political and economic revolution wrought by the New Deal. Whereas numerous studies have focused on the proletarian and radical literature or, as does Michael Denning's monumental The Cultural Front (1996), on the “laboring”of depression-era America, Sean McCann and Michael Szalay convincingly demonstrate that the various st…
Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock
MLN - Volume 110, Number 4, September 1995 (Comparative Literature Issue)
HBO's Flexible Gold
Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck, and The Newsroom do more than generate HBO brand equity-they quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently financial dramas are futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as…
Story Work
Based on interviews with three dozen working writers in American television, this paper argues that TV writers assert their status as labor to guarantee their shared craft identity with novelists, dramatists, and authors of other conventional literary material. The tension between writers’ desire for literary prestige on one hand, and their recognition that they create at the behest of company executives, on the other, emerges, alternately, in th…
Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock
MLN - Volume 110, Number 4, September 1995 (Comparative Literature Issue)
All the King's Men; or, the Primal Crime
In January of 1964, Robert Penn Warren left his office in the English Department at Yale and set out for Mississippi and Alabama, where he would interview black leaders of the Civil Rights movement. A compilation of these interviews, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) is Warren's most comprehensive rumination both on racial inequality and his long and often ambivalent relation to it. At the start of his literary career, this unrepentant Southern Ag…
Gumshoe America
As the titles of these two excellent books suggest, they explore the interrelationships between literary production and the political and economic revolution wrought by the New Deal. Whereas numerous studies have focused on the proletarian and radical literature or, as does Michael Denning's monumental The Cultural Front (1996), on the “laboring”of depression-era America, Sean McCann and Michael Szalay convincingly demonstrate that the various st…
Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left
Toward the end of the 1960s, the New Left and the counterculture developed a libertarian theory of politics that emphasized symbolic action and self-realization. A concomitant suspicion of formal political institutions and a turn to cultural politics have since become common to intellectual discourse within the humanities. This essay argues against these attitudes, while tracing them from the protest movements of the late sixties to contemporary …
Introduction
In 1965, Paul Potter designated "the system" as the principle antagonist of the fledgling New Left. This term, and the assumptions behind it, capaciously synthesized the many ills that Potter and others hoped to redress; it also revealed, the authors suggest, a conception of power particularly congenial to the description and analysis of culture. The authors introduce each of the following essays with this in mind, detailing their shared interest…
Eerie Serenity”
Research Article| May 01 2009 “Eerie Serenity”: A Response to John McClure Sean McCann; Sean McCann Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Michael Szalay Michael Szalay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2009) 36 (2): 145–153. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2009-008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sean McCann, Michael Szalay…
The bodies in the bubble
While predominantly concerned with the transformation of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during the 1980s, David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011) represents signal contradictions in the nature of money, from 1971 (when Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold) to the events of the 2008 financial crisis (when derivative trading dominated global financial markets). As unstable admixtures of abstraction and concreteness…
HBO's Flexible Gold
Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck, and The Newsroom do more than generate HBO brand equity-they quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently financial dramas are futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as…
Story Work
Based on interviews with three dozen working writers in American television, this paper argues that TV writers assert their status as labor to guarantee their shared craft identity with novelists, dramatists, and authors of other conventional literary material. The tension between writers’ desire for literary prestige on one hand, and their recognition that they create at the behest of company executives, on the other, emerges, alternately, in th…
Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV
L'or flexible de HBO
Ce document a t gnr automatiquement le 2 mai 2019
The Endless Hustle; or, Saul Goodman Out of Time
This essay argues that the alternating rhythms with which AMC's Better Call Saul moves though time, and the alternating temporal frames of reference with which it represents Saul Goodman's "hustling" specifically, represent self-conscious efforts to clarify the narrative affordances of the serial television medium. These temporal experiments also elucidate the felt endlessness of waged work in the context of go-nowhere careers. In both capacities…
Philosophy (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Literature (4 works) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism (3 works) · History (3 works)