Catherine Jurca

Associate Professor of English

Research interests

Twentieth-century American literature and film.

Research Statement

Research areas include twentieth-century American literature and film. My first book, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, 2001), argued for the central role of the suburban novel, with its focus on spiritual impoverishment and self-pity as well as the material advantages of suburban life, in creating an enduring portrait of the white middle class as victimized by its success.

My research on classical Hollywood film combines close textual interpretation of individual films with analysis of industry history and broader currents of American social and cultural history. I am completing a book on Motion Pictures' Greatest Year, an unprecedented, industry-wide public relations campaign in the fall of 1938, which tried to sell a deeply disenchanted public on the centrality of "the movies" to their lives and communities. A sensational amalgam of publicity and public relations, ballyhoo and restraint, the Motion Pictures' Greatest Year campaign was an epochal event in the history of Hollywood, one that points to an ongoing shift in the film industry's efforts to analyze, influence, and communicate with the public and to enlist motion pictures in that cause.

Publications

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, Princeton University Press, 2001.

Motion Pictures' Greatest Year: Hollywood and Public Relations in the Late Thirties, under contract, University of California Press.

What the Public Wanted: Hollywood, 1937-1942. Cinema Journal 46 (Winter 2008): 3--25.

Ordinary People. American Quarterly 58 (March 2006): 221--27.

Dreiser, Class, and the Home," The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Eds. Lenny Cassuto and Clare Eby (Cambridge University Press, 2004): 100--111.

Mildred Pierce, Warner Bros., and the Corporate Family. Representations, 77 (Winter 2002): 30--51.

Twentieth-Century Literature in the New Century: A Symposium. College English 64 (September 2001): 22--24.

The Sanctimonious Suburbanite: Sloan Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." American Literary History 11 (1999): 82--106.

Hollywood, the Dream House Factory. Cinema Journal 37 (Spring 1998): 19--36.

Tarzan, Lord of the Suburbs. Modern Language Quarterly 57 (September 1996): 479--504.