A virtuoso piece of cultural channel surfing

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	• Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares, Revised Edition: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture Richard Burt Palgrave Macmillan, 1999 - 338 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Essential Shaxxxspeare

Richard Burt's text provides the world of Shakespeare with a refreshing and invigorating overhaul. This book deconstructs the myth of Shakespeare, and how it is treated in the realm of American popular culture in an informative and highly readable fashion. Besides, where else could you read about pornograhic versions of the Bard? The relationship between traditional interpretations of Shakespeare and the modern are carefully scrutinized, placing particular emphasis on the adoptation of Shakespeare by American institutions such as Hollywood as symptomatic of latter-day American imperialisic desire. This book carefully examines many areas of Shakespeare that have until now been widely ignored. Essential for anyone studying or interested in Shakespeare in a modern context.

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A Timely, Transformative Text

Hot! Hot! Hot! This brilliant book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the current(Spring-Summer 99) spate of both teen Shakespeare movies and the "tourist class" response to them in art house theaters. Presenting a comprehensive but open-ended scholarship of the popular, Burt canvasses a range of films and television shows that allude to Shakespeare from mid-century forward, concentrating on the 70s through the late 90s. He also displays a sure hand as a reader of the plays he discusses and recent cultural criticism about Shakespeare. The book accounts for a recent phenomenon: the way in which the plays' processing by mass media totally empties them of whatever cultural values or political effectiveness current criticism of the right and left have claimed for them. Marking a major paradigm shift in masscult studies from the critic as "fan" to the critic as "loser," Burt challenges the distinction between progressive and reactionary takes on both Shakespeare and the culture industry. As losers, Shakespeare critics are closer to what's happening than they realize--and than they really want to be, despite their medium cool academic fantasies. Along the way, Burt provides strong interpretations of Dead Poet's Society, sound in porn movies, Polanski's Macbeth, Quiz Show, key TV adaptations, and much much more. Maddening, persuasive and a blast to read, this book will tax whatever preconceptions you have about Shakespeare, the mainstream and pornographic film industries, and popular media in general.

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Not your parent's Shakespeare

Richard Burt is undoubtedly a scholar ahead of his time. Unspeakable ShaXXXespeares chronicles the "Shakespeare Boom" prior to its juicy climax at this year's Academy Awards. This book takes the reader to a time before "Shakespeare in Love chic" rocked the malls and fashion runways of the world. Burt delves into the bloated underbelly of American pop culture where unknown and unarchived Shakespeare adaptations hide themselves from the critical eye of Shakespeare scholars.

It is safe to assume that until Unspeakable ShaXXXespeares, the Shakespearean work of porn stars Rick Savage and Nina Hartley went wholly unnoticed by people in academic circles. While hard core porn offers a surprising bounty of Shakespeare adaptations, Burt also explores soft core late night "Skin-a-max" movies like Skyscraper (starring the beautiful and talented Anna Nicole Smith), 70s and 80s television shows including Scooby Doo, Star Trek, Giligan's Island, and Moonlighting, and big budget mall movies like Clueless and Last Action Hero.

Burt's book is not only successful in dramatically expanding the Shakespeare archive. Using the lens of queer theory and what he calls "loser criticism" Burt illustrates that Shakespeare's reoccurring role in American pop culture is not always as a signifier of "authentic high culture". The Bard is often simultaneously "queered", assassinated, or portrayed as "the loser" in many of the films discussed in this book.

Unspeakable ShaXXXespeares is a revolutionary work which would appeal to academics, Shakespeareans, film buffs, queer theorists, losers, and anyone into HARD CORE PORNO.

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A virtuoso piece of cultural channel surfing

Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares is a virtuoso piece of cultural channel surfing. Burt boldy goes where no Shakespeare critic has gone before, to provide brilliant readings of Shakespeare's presence in recent films, television, pornography, music, web sites--and what you will. His analyses are penterating, provocative, and always fun to read. They suggest important new directions for both Shakespeare scholars and students of popular culture. This book may infuriate or delight you--but it cannnot be ignored.

To Burt or not to Burt

Shakespeare is constantly present in all our lives, in films, books and songs. However, Shakespeare is more omnipresent than you first thought, as Richard Burt's book proves. By first examining direct representations of the great Bard, such as the most recent Romeo and Juliet, he then takes us on a literary journey through Hollywood and American popular culture via Shakespeare. In the last decade Shakespeare has not only become accepted, he has almost become cool, as we have seen in the wide variety of spin-offs and adaptations. Burt examines what this not only means to our culture but what it represents about our culture. From the more obvious queering of Shakespeare (indeed his sexuality has been studied , as long as literature has been studied),to his representation in pornography, and finally to the way in which he has been bastardized (bardized) in the current spate of "teen" movies. Not only do we see what this means to the youth of today, we also see how much impact Shakespeare has on our generation. All literary scholars should agree that literature relies on re-interpretation and re-examing the work which we study. Burt brings a new and refreshing light to a subject that could well have become irrelevant to American culture. This book is both fascinating and insightful, how else would I have learnt of films such as Tromeo and Juliet, which make Shakespeare what he should be, new and exciting. So to all those who doubt the validity of such a quest, i.e. redefining Shakespeare in terms of kiddie culture or queer theory, go back to you're stuffy old librarys and let the dust settle upon you. Shakespeare is back, this is the sequel, and its better than ever.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7

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