David Savran

Rachel Adams

The Masculinity Studies Reader brings together widely-read and -cited work by key theorists in a new context that is intended simultaneously to establish the contours of and to raise questions about masculinity as a field of academic inquiry.

The Masculinity Studies Reader

Includes: Lee Breuer, Christopher Durang, Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Charles Fuller, John Guare, Joan Holden, David Henry Hwang, David Mamet, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Sondheim, Megan Terry, Luis Valdez, Michael Weller, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson.

Contemporary American Playwrights

In Their Own Words

Through interviews and descriptions of methodology, Breaking the Rules captures the essence of major works by the internationally acclaimed avant-garde company.

The Wooster Group

Breaking the Rules

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture

Taking It Like a Man

An eclectic collection of essays on theater and its decline as highbrow culture, under the influence of theme parks and blockbuster movies

Recontextualizing American Theater

A Queer Sort of Materialism

Highbrow/Lowdown explores the twentieth century's first culture war and the forces that permanently transformed American theater into the art form we know today. The arrival of jazz in the 1920s sparked a cultural revolution that was impossible to contain. The music affected every stratum of U.S. society and culture, confusing and challenging long-entrenched hierarchies based on class, race, and ethnicity. Jazz was considered the first distinctively American art form, and its dissemination across the globe served to launch the United States as a cultural force to be reckoned with. The Jazz Age was also the era of vaudeville, burlesque, and musical comedy, popular entertainments that were quick to cash in on the jazz craze. But jazz was much more than the music. It was also a powerful cultural force that brought African American, Jewish, and working-class culture into the white Protestant mainstream. When the influence of jazz spread to legitimate theater, playwrights, producers, and critics rushed to distinguish the newly emerging literary theater from its illegitimate cousins. The efforts to defeat the democratizing influences of jazz and to canonize playwrights like Eugene O'Neill triumphed, giving birth to American theater as we know it today. David Savran is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. "An important book that raises crucial questions about how and why a literary 'art theatre' came to be seen among tastemakers and canonizers as 'legitimate.' Savran makes the persuasive argument that jazz needed to be defeated in order for the art theatre to take center stage, using an impressive variety of tools to make his case." ---Andrea Most, University of Toronto "Like a canny fight promoter in the perennial American culture wars, David Savran puts the reader ringside for a blow-by-blow account of the Battle of the Brows---high, middle, and low. Setting Jazz Age entertainments at one another, with 'legitimate theater' duking it out with nightclub revues and movies pummeling vaudeville, Highbrow/Lowdown tracks the rise of heavyweight Eugene O'Neill to the top of the card, but it also makes heroes of the referees---the drama critics and audiences who crowned the winners. This is performance history as an innovative 'political economy of culture,' and it's a knockout." ---Joseph Roach, Yale University "A stunningly original analysis of music and theater in the 1920s as inseparable faces of jazz. Savran grounds his social history on a huge array of primary sources while drawing, without fanfare or jargon, on theorists such as Adorno and Bourdieu. His musical analyses of Gershwin, John Alden Carpenter, and George Antheil are not just first class but pathbreaking. No student of jazz as a Western cultural phenomenon---or of any American music or theater in the 1920s---will dare miss this powerfully illuminating, unabashedly reliable, beautifully written book." ---Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University

David Savran

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