| FT-58154-10 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Joel Norman Dinerstein | The Mask of Cool: Jazz, Film Noir, and Existentialism in Postwar America | 5/1/2010 - 9/30/2010 | $6,000.00 | Joel | Norman | Dinerstein | | | | Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The | New Orleans | LA | 70118-5698 | USA | 2010 | U.S. History | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
This is an interdisciplinary cultural study of the origins of cool in the postwar arts. In jazz, film noir, and existential narrative, cool meant a certain stylish stoicism as projected through attitude, style, language, and artistic sensibility. Cool was a masculine pose, a response to economic trauma, a sign of African-American culture, and a password for rebellion. In the wake of the failure of collective political ideologies, the mask of cool was a physical marker for the recuperation of individualism. African-American cool signaled the rejection of "Uncle Tomming" and found its artistic form in long jazz solos and musicians' blank faces. White male cool was a working-class response to the instability of the Great Depression and found its artistic reflection in film noir. French existential cool was a response to the trauma of Nazi occupation and found its artistic form in the apotheosis of the individual in its literary and philosophical texts. |