Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance: A Book Talk by Justin Owen Rawlins. The event will take place on Thursday, November 7, at 5:00 PM in the Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.
Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Owen Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.
Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Owen Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.
Justin Owen Rawlins, Ph.D., is a Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa, and the author of Imagining the Method (University of Texas Press, 2024). His research peels back the layers of screen cultures to elucidate the ideological work that screen texts (e.g., films, TV programs, performers, famous figures) do as they radiate out of the culture industries and circulate through social networks formal (e.g., Hollywood studio exhibition and promotion) and informal (e.g., audience practices). Professor Rawlins is interested in how people—from producers to fans—make use of media in their everyday lives, their sense of the world and the communities around them, and their sense of themselves. Read more about his work.
Read more about Imagining the Method.
