Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong?

281 Pages·2004·1.54 MB·English

by  Aeon J. Skoble

Table of Contents

Popular Culture and Philosophy™
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Act I - Morality, Interpretation, and the Meaning of Life
Chapter 1 - God, Suicide, and the Meaning of Life in the Films of Woody Allen
Meaning and Permanence
Depression and Suicide
God and Meaning
Distractions
The Failure of Our Attempts at Meaning
Chapter 2 - Integrity in Woody Allen’s Manhattan
The Hobgoblin
Parts and Wholes
One of the Beautiful People
Why Not to Buy the Porsche
Chapter 3 - Does Morality Have to Be Blind? A Kantian Analysis of Crimes and
Misdemeanors
Two Visions of Life
Conflicting Conclusions
From Knowledge to Faith
Chapter 4 - Arguing Interpretation: The Pragmatic Optimism of Woody Allen
Dramatizing versus Arguing
Depicting Pessimism
Secret Knowledge
Husbands, Wives, and Harry
Interpretation and Its Problems
Justice, Crime, and Pessimism
Criteria for Interpretation
Hope and Despair

Act II - Woody’s Craft
Chapter 5 - The Mousetrap: Reading Woody Allen
Woody’s Mousetraps
The Bait
The Trap
The Mechanism
Avoiding the Trap: Reader Response Criticism
The Gap Is the Meaning
Interpretive Communities
Chapter 6 - Woody on Aesthetic Appreciation
A Marvelous Negative Capability
I Love Songs about Extra-Terrestrial Life, Don’t You?
The Brain Is My Second Favorite Organ
Don’t Speak
Chapter 7 - Art and Voyeurism in the Films of Woody Allen
The Problem of Surveillance in Philosophy
The Problem of Surveillance in Woody Allen: The ‘Eyes of Film’ Are On
Us Always
Unlimited Voyeurism and Aesthetic Self-Fashioning
And There Is No Escape
Chapter 8 - “You Don’t Deserve Cole Porter”: Love and Music According to
Woody Allen
“He Loves and She Loves”
“I’m in Love Again”
“You Made Me Love You”
“I’m in Love Again”
“I’m Thru with Love”
“Just What They Say It for I Never Knew”
Chapter 9 - Dead Sharks and Dynamite Ham: The Philosophical Use of Humor
in ...
Schopenhauer’s Theory of Humor
The Philosophical Value of Humor
Woody Allen and Social Analysis
The Nature of Romantic Love
Woody Allen and Cultural Analysis
The Provincial New Yorker
Humor and Philosophy
Chapter 10 - Reconstructing Ingmar: The Aesthetic Purging of the Great Model
Comparing Allen and Bergman
Allusion
Modernism and Irony
Art and Pretension
Art and Life

Act III - Five Films
Chapter 11 - The Dangers of Hedonism: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Philosophical Sources
Analytic Philosophy and Hedonism
Cinematic Antecedents
The Sartrean “Perfect Moment”
Trying to Recapture a Lost Moment
A Second Perfect Moment
Primitive Passions
The Dangers of Hedonism
Chapter 12 - Inauthenticity and Personal Identity in Zelig
The Problem of Personal Identity
Existentialism
Inauthenticity
Inauthenticity and Fascism
Chapter 13 - It’s All Darkness: Plato, The Ring of Gyges, and Crimes and
Misdemeanors
The Issues
Plato’s Gyges Story
Virtue Its Own Reward?
Crime Does Pay
Cliff
Judah and Aunt May
Pushing the Button
The End: Is It All Darkness?
Chapter 14 - Self-Knowledge in Another Woman
The Self-Seeing Eye
Marion
Marion and Her Brother
A Passionate Lover
Ken’s Daughter
A Childhood Friend
“Be Honest with Me, Paul”
Marion’s Influence on Others
Another Woman
The Dream
Two Women Meet
Hope
Chapter 15 - Woody Allen’s Film Noir Light: Crime, Love, and Self-Knowledge
in ...
The Criminal World of The Maltese Falcon
The Criminal World of the Jade Scorpion
The Stuff Dreams are Made Of
The Power of the Jade Scorpion
Opposites Attract?
The Limits of Hypnosis
More Than Hope
Criminals, Lovers, and Friends
Love and Self-Discovery

Entertainment for Intellectuals: A Woody Allen Filmography
All These Great Minds . . .
Index
ALSO FROM OPEN COURT
Copyright Page
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