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“Any Chance to Be Unrefined”: Film Narrative Modes in Anita Loos's Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Brooks E. Hefner
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Abstract

This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)

Type
Cluster on Textual Materialism
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 107 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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