Monograph by Ben Robbins
Faulkner's Hollywood Novels: Women between Page and Screen, Aug 12, 2024
William Faulkner’s time as a Hollywood screenwriter has often been dismissed as little more than ... more William Faulkner’s time as a Hollywood screenwriter has often been dismissed as little more than an intriguing interlude in the career of one of America’s greatest novelists. Consequently, it has not received the wide-ranging critical examination it deserves. In Faulkner’s Hollywood Novels, Ben Robbins provides an overdue thematic analysis by systematically tracing a dialogue of influence between Faulkner’s literary fiction and screenwriting over a period of two decades. Among numerous insights, Robbins’s work sheds valuable new light on Faulkner’s treatment of female characters, both in his novels and in the films to which he contributed.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Robbins finds that Hollywood genre conventions and archetypes significantly influenced and reshaped Faulkner’s craft after his involvement in the studio system. His work in the film industry also produced a deep exploration of the gendered dynamics of collaborative labor, genre formulae, and cultural hierarchies that materialized in both his Hollywood screenplays and his experimental fiction.
Special issues by Ben Robbins
AmLit: American Literatures, 2024
This special issue considers queer attachments to rural space in literature, which have often bee... more This special issue considers queer attachments to rural space in literature, which have often been obscured by privileging the urban in cultural depictions of queer lives. Queer studies scholarship has worked to overcome this urban bias to reveal the diversity of queer lives within rural environments. We make a new contribution to this research by exploring literary manifestations of queer ruralism in terms of narrative form and within the contexts of transmedial and transnational exchange. To illustrate these approaches, we introduce a range of recent works from the 2020s, with deep roots in American literary culture, that have contributed to the dissemination of queer rural texts. They have achieved this, first, by reframing characters’ experiences within transnational contexts and, second, by engaging in cultural cross-pollination across diverse media. Here we focus on Genevieve Hudson’s novel Boys of Alabama (2020), contemporary queer country music and music videos by Dixon Dallas, Willy Strokem, Tyler Childers, and Silas House, as well as literary precursors to these works in the fiction of JT LeRoy (Laura Albert) and Dorothy Allison. Across the work of these artists, negotiations across borders and media are used to explode the stereotypes and limiting roles associated with queer rural lives and to reinvent genres, such as the Southern Gothic or country music, in ways that centre non-normative sexual identities.
Peer-reviewed articles by Ben Robbins
Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2024
This article will consider the ways in which season 15 of “Drag Race” has creatively responded to... more This article will consider the ways in which season 15 of “Drag Race” has creatively responded to anti-drag legislation. References to current legal developments appeared throughout the season, such as in “werk room” scenes where the queens debunked myths about the role of drag in educational contexts, a teacher’s makeover challenge where they discuss the importance of having queer figures in the classroom or the season finale’s fundraising drive for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Drag Defense Fund. In these instances, the show consistently emphasized the educative, communal, and universal aspects of drag. In this article, I will focus particularly on episode 12 of the season: “Wigloose: The Rusical!” This drag musical, a parody of 1984’s “Footloose,” is set in a small rural town that has closed down a “notorious” drag club the students had been running at the high school. The young students intervene in a council meeting, where they are planning to outlaw drag in the town, and their actions lead senior members of the community to reveal they all have past experiences of practicing drag. Such an emphasis on the universality of the art form presents drag queens as unthreatening to the existing social order in ways that support assimilationist politics. Nevertheless, I show how individual performers can overcome “Drag Race”’s wider emphasis on non-threatening integrationist politics through performances that are more challenging and demonstrate their “disidentification” from what José Esteban Muñoz calls the “majoritarian public sphere” (“Disidentifications” 4) or representatives of the hegemonic dominant culture.
AmLit: American Literatures, 2024
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This specia... more This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This special issue considers queer attachments to rural space in literature, which have often been obscured by privileging the urban in cultural depictions of queer lives. Queer studies scholarship has worked to overcome this urban bias to reveal the diversity of queer lives within rural environments. We make a new contribution to this research by exploring literary manifestations of queer ruralism in terms of narrative form and within the contexts of transmedial and transnational exchange. To illustrate these approaches, we introduce a range of recent works from the 2020s, with deep roots in American literary culture, that have contributed to the dissemination of queer rural texts. They have achieved this, first, by reframing characters' experiences within transnational contexts and, second, by engaging in cultural cross-pollination across diverse media. Here we focus on Genevieve Hudson's novel Boys of Alabama (2020), contemporary queer country music and music videos by Dixon Dallas, Willy Strokem, Tyler Childers, and Silas House, as well as literary precursors to these works in the fiction of JT LeRoy (Laura Albert) and Dorothy Allison. Across the work of these artists, negotiations across borders and media are used to explode the stereotypes and limiting roles associated with queer rural lives and to reinvent genres, such as the Southern Gothic or country music, in ways that centre non-normative sexual identities.
Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 2023
In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. W... more In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. Within these arrangements, a gay man and lesbian woman typically enter a marriage to expedite immigration processes or to placate conservative family members. Most commonly, these relationships do not produce children, and they consequently call into question the pronatalism that is often associated with hetero-normative conceptions of marriage. This article explores the complex dynamics of these relationship structures through an analysis of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. In Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (1943), a US-American upper middle-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, journey to Panama, where Mrs. Copperfield begins an affair with a female sex worker called Pacifica and refuses to return to the United States with her husband. In Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground (1970), the union between the US-American Tom Ripley and the French heiress Heloise Plisson provides a cover for Tom's ambiguous sexuality, as well as his diverse criminal activities, and allows Heloise to enjoy a life of aimless pleasure. In both these novels, queer marriages of convenience permit transnational mobility within unions that are markedly non-procreative and thereby occupy non-future oriented temporalities. This article demonstrates how these writers used the alternative temporal organization of the marriage of convenience plot to undermine the conventional structures of patriarchal genres, including the modernist quest narrative and suspense or crime fiction.
Appalachian Journal, 2021
This article analyzes William Faulkner’s 1951 prose drama hybrid narrative Requiem for a Nun as a... more This article analyzes William Faulkner’s 1951 prose drama hybrid narrative Requiem for a Nun as an adaptation of two “women’s films” that he worked on as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s, The Damned Don’t Cry (completed in 1941, released in 1950) and Mildred Pierce (completed in 1944, released in 1945). These melodramatic films explore themes of maternal sacrifice and reproduce a formula wherein female transgression beyond the strict boundaries of the home and the nuclear family is met with severe punishment. At the advent of the Cold War, Faulkner witnessed the repurposing of these films’ tropes in new Hollywood melodramas where the American family was upheld as a key component of national strength and integrity in combating the threat of Communist infiltration. Following this ideology, women were urged to embrace normative gender roles as wives and mothers in a system of “domestic containment.” In Requiem for a Nun Faulkner returned to the themes of the woman’s film in his ow...
Journal of Screenwriting, 2014
This article analyzes the screenplays and treatments for two highly popular and critically acclai... more This article analyzes the screenplays and treatments for two highly popular and critically acclaimed films, To Have and Have Not (1944) and Mildred Pierce (1945), on which Faulkner worked as a salaried screenwriter for Warner Brothers. Faulkner's collaborative writing for To Have and Have Not demonstrates his ability to participate in and extend the construction of the cinematic archetype of the Hawksian woman on the level of action and language, a portrayal that both develops and transcends the portrayal of women within his own fiction. The article also illuminates the process through which Faulkner recycled content across the high-low cultural divide, borrowing from himself to include a hybrid scene from his modernist masterwork Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in Mildred Pierce, a noir melodrama starring Joan Crawford. The article further illustrates how Faulkner reconciled himself to the narrative mode of Hollywood through his use of 'charged realism'. As such, Faulkner's work for the screen would seem to confound a number of presumed modernist imperatives for artistic practice: autonomy, organic production, breaking with the past, formal innovation and disdain for objective realism. The article concludes by suggesting a way to reconcile the divergent skill bases of Faulkner's screenwriting and modernist fiction by showing how he was able to imaginatively adapt his craft to inhabit and revisualize the structures of both genres.
Book chapters by Ben Robbins
Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century, 2022
University Press of Mississippi
William Faulkner’s novels explore forms of social change and development from which the same auth... more William Faulkner’s novels explore forms of social change and development from which the same author publically advocated retreating. James Baldwin praised Faulkner as one of a handful of writers who had begun to engage with race in American literature in a progressive fashion. However, in his essay “Faulkner and Desegregation,” Baldwin challenges Faulkner’s statement that the process of racial integration in the South should “go slow.” In a common focus on social progress, Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and Baldwin’s Another Country explore sex and sexuality’s potential as a tool to create a new social order. In these texts, transgressive sexual and artistic practices are used to question social boundaries and limiting binaries of gender and race. These acts of transgression serve to critique the way power polices boundaries of social division, although Faulkner’s text does not share the gesture toward transcendence at the end of Baldwin’s novel.
New Media by Ben Robbins
University of Innsbruck, 2023
This project visualizes the global connections between twentieth-century LGBTQ+ exile writers by ... more This project visualizes the global connections between twentieth-century LGBTQ+ exile writers by tracing their movement and creative exchanges across space and time in a series of interactive maps, graphs, and timelines.
Reviews by Ben Robbins
Appalachian Journal, 2021
European Journal of American Studies, 2017
Consuela Francis, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin 1963–2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Wr... more Consuela Francis, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin 1963–2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Writer” Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. Pp. 165. ISBN: 1571133259. Michele Elam, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 274. ISBN: 9781107043039. Ben Robbins In the contemporary moment, James Baldwin’s works, words, and influence seem to be everywhere. The enduring relevance of his work has been surveyed and reassessed with recent prominent ...
European Journal of American Studies, Nov 14, 2012
European Journal of American Studies, Apr 26, 2012
's monograph titled From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation, seeks to offer a compr... more 's monograph titled From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation, seeks to offer a comprehensive study of the corpse as represented in American fiction of the twentieth century. Perdigao explores how novelists from a range of time periods and traditions use dead bodies as a device that is revealing of the wider formal ambitions of narrative.
European Journal of American Studies, Apr 17, 2013
Papers by Ben Robbins
European Journal of American Studies 4-2, 2024
This special issue considers queer attachments to rural space in literature, which have often b... more This special issue considers queer attachments to rural space in literature, which have often been obscured by privileging the urban in cultural depictions of queer lives. Queer studies scholarship has worked to overcome this urban bias to reveal the diversity of queer lives within rural environments. We make a new contribution to this research by exploring literary manifestations of queer ruralism in terms of narrative form and within the contexts of transmedial and transnational exchange. To illustrate these approaches, we introduce a range of recent works from the 2020s, with deep roots in American literary culture, that have contributed to the dissemination of queer rural texts. They have achieved this, first, by reframing characters’ experiences within transnational contexts and, second, by engaging in cultural cross-pollination across diverse media. Here we focus on Genevieve Hudson’s novel Boys of Alabama (2020), contemporary queer country music and music videos by Dixon Dallas, Willy Strokem, Tyler Childers, and Silas House, as well as literary precursors to these works in the fiction of JT LeRoy (Laura Albert) and Dorothy Allison. Across the work of these artists, negotiations across borders and media are used to explode the stereotypes and limiting roles associated with queer rural lives and to reinvent genres, such as the Southern Gothic or country music, in ways that centre non-normative sexual identities.
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Monograph by Ben Robbins
Drawing on extensive archival research, Robbins finds that Hollywood genre conventions and archetypes significantly influenced and reshaped Faulkner’s craft after his involvement in the studio system. His work in the film industry also produced a deep exploration of the gendered dynamics of collaborative labor, genre formulae, and cultural hierarchies that materialized in both his Hollywood screenplays and his experimental fiction.
Special issues by Ben Robbins
Peer-reviewed articles by Ben Robbins
Book chapters by Ben Robbins
New Media by Ben Robbins
Reviews by Ben Robbins
Papers by Ben Robbins
Drawing on extensive archival research, Robbins finds that Hollywood genre conventions and archetypes significantly influenced and reshaped Faulkner’s craft after his involvement in the studio system. His work in the film industry also produced a deep exploration of the gendered dynamics of collaborative labor, genre formulae, and cultural hierarchies that materialized in both his Hollywood screenplays and his experimental fiction.