We welcome your participation in the Rust Belt Literature group.
This group will host discussions of all types of literary responses to living in the Rust Belt, defined here as industrial communities in the United States. Those ho have been affected by the rust belt go beyond simply those who have grown up these. In a class-based society, people who have never lived anywhere near the rust belt may hold media-inspired attitudes about the Rust Belt and those who live there. We offer fresh exposure those not from the Rust belt, fresh air and news to those from the Rust Belt.
We may overlap at times with eco-literature, ethnic and race studies, labor fiction, and regional literature.
Welcome home!
Files List
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Citizen Kane and How Green was my Valley trun 75 in a time of Demagogues
This essay challenges the dominant discourse on two highly controversial 1941 films Citizen Kane and How Green was my Valley.
Film critics tend to be outraged and marvel today how this miscarriage of aesthetic justice ever could have happened. Why, they cry, did How Green was my Valley ever get chosen as 1942’s Best Picture of the Year over Orson Welles’ artistic triumph Citizen Kane? Citizen Kane’s innovative cinematography and stream-of consciousness narration fit with the aesthetics of high modernism, such as breaking the frame of linear time, detailing ruptures in Kane’s psyche. But was this merely a mistake? Or is something else going on? Did "the heart" win over "the head" and a “sentimental” film about the hardships and changes over a generation in a Welsh coal mining village temporarily surpass a “timeless” masterpiece? How class-encoded are judgments about the two films?