Not by a Long Shot”
John Sayles’s Lone Star , the Future, and the Bildungsroman
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8894784 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William Warren Bartley (corresponding author), William Bartley |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 165-191 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-16 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras.2019.004 |
| OpenAlex | W2999842686 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
In Lone Star, John Sayles connects free agency with the power to imagine a future life for oneself in a story, drawing on the metaphor of composing a life as if it were a story. Sam and Pilar, as lovers who discover they are half-siblings, embrace that power when they resolve to “start from scratch” and thereby reject the counter-narrative that holds that their future lives are already authored by history and culture. Critics hold that the film settles on this dichotomy: either we are sovereign self-authors or our destinies are already scripted. However, the film discovers a middle way that reconciles history and freedom, which resonates with Bakhtin’s analysis of the relationship between free agency and social change as it is understood in the Bildungsroman
Agency (philosophy · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Power (physics · Shot (pellet · Sociology · Star (game theory · Theology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|