ENGLISH

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

By Wayne Koestenbaum

Book information

Publisher
University of California Press
Year
2012
ISBN
9780520951983
DOI
10.1525/9780520951983
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
5 MB (5636535 bytes)
Pages
336\310
Library
degruyter.com
Time added
2023-08-21 12:36:34

Description

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx’s physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo’s chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute—his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo’s body—its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum’s text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.

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