Author: Matthew Westphal

Why Do The Covers Of Novels Always Have The Phrase ‘A Novel’ On Them?

“Books have used the ‘XYZ: A Novel’ format since the 17th century, when realistic fiction started getting popular. The term ‘novel’ was a way to distinguish these more down-to-earth stories from the fanciful ‘romances’ that came before … Then, as now, it was a tag that identified the kind of literature you were getting yourself into.” – Vox

Salvaging Alan Jay Lerner’s Biggest Flop, A Musical ‘Lolita’

Think that’s a ghastly idea for a Broadway show? So did audiences in 1971, when try-out audiences in Philadelphia and Boston hated Lolita, My Love so much that the Broadway run was called off. But the producers of an upcoming staged reading in New York, with a revised book and a new framing device, aim to find out if audiences are finally ready for the show (with the changes, at least). – The New York Times

Blackface Minstrelsy, America’s First Cultural Export

While other nations have had traditions of blackening the face to portray a particular character (e.g., Holland’s Zwarte Piet), “a man named Thomas Dartmouth Rice first brought American minstrel shows to Europe in 1836 in which white performers portrayed African American slaves in tattered clothes, dancing and singing songs such as ‘Jump Jim Crow.’ … [Subsequently,] blackface minstrels toured Australia, India, South America, South Africa and other places in the world. They were seen as American and therefore exotic” — and their imagery was absorbed into other cultures.” – Public Radio International

‘Queen Of The Soundies’, Tap Dancer Mable Lee, Dead At 97

“Soundies” were three-minute musical films meant to be played on jukeboxes, and Lee starred in more than 100 of them. In a career that stretched from the age of nine to this past summer, she achieved dance stardom after graduating from the Apollo Theater’s chorus line, was part of the first all-black USO tour, starred in the national tour of Bubbling Brown Sugar, and took part in the tap-dance revival that started in the 1980s, teaching the likes of Michelle Dorrance. – The New York Times

What Comedy Tells Us About Ourselves — And How We’re Changing

Scholar of comedy Matthew McMahan: “Just as Michel Foucault encourages historians to look to moments of rupture and discontinuity when trying to decipher how a culture thinks and acts, I suggest students of comedy look to the moments when a successful joke simply stops landing with its audience. The moment when a loud guffaw quickly shifts to an appalled gasp can tell us a lot about how a culture is changing.” – HowlRound