Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

“Who will write the history of tears?” – Roland Barthes

Melodramas traffic in heightened emotions, stylized gestures, schmaltzy scores, and undeveloped characters.  They center on broken hearts and broken homes, and they tell stories punctuated by contrived meetings, missed encounters, sudden reversals of fortune, and sentimental scenes of revelation, recognition, reunion, rescue, and irretrievable loss.  Once dismissively labeled “women’s weepies,” melodramas have been seen more recently to represent “the dominant mode of classic Hollywood cinema.”  Often disparaged as politically out of touch and aesthetically over the top, melodramatic modes have also been called the only “realisms” capable of rendering contexts of radical inequality, and filmmakers continue to draw on melodramatic conventions in their explorations of race, gender, sexuality, and power.

What accounts for the enduring appeal of US melodrama today? Why would directors across the globe have recourse to conventions devised and perfected by an outmoded Hollywood system?  And why do film critics and historians still insist on the relevance of this system’s products, with some going so far as to suggest that melodrama crucially informs our understanding and even our experience of ongoing social conflicts?  What alternative frames remain available, and what challenges await filmmakers who try to break with melodrama’s generic codes?

This summer, we’ll work to answer these and related questions while we also undertake to write the history of tears—or rather, to write several such histories.  For as we find that there is more than one history of tears, we will have to add to Barthes’s famous question another of our own: whose tears? Pursuing answers to this last question will mean paying particular attention to melodramatic stagings of racialization, migration, and class aspiration as well as gender. Although our focus will be on classic, US- made tear-jerkers, we’ll also track the movement of melodramatic conventions from Hollywood to the postwar European art film and beyond, to the new queer cinema in the US and recent films from other continents, which will prompt us to ask what, if anything, is specifically “American” about the melodramatic tradition we’ll consider.

We’ll study films by some of the following directors:  Almodóvar, Araki, Borden, Dash, Daniels, Gerima, Haynes, Hitchcock, Llosa, Mankiewicz, Martel, Nava, Reygadas, Rivera, Sirk, Vidor, and Washington. We’ll also read literary and critical works by Berlant, Bersani and Dutoit, Brooks, Cavell, Doane, Miller, Povinelli, Sapphire, Sexton, Stockton, Thoreau, Wilderson, and Williams, among others.