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Anne Morey

Professor
Areas of Speciality
  • Film Studies
  • Cultural Studies
  • American Literature and Culture
  • Popular Culture
Contact
  • (979) 458-0709
  • amorey@tamu.edu
  • LAAH 555
Professional Links

Education

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1998

M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1993

A.B., Bryn Mawr College, 1983

Research Interests

Dr. Morey’s Scholars@TAMU Profile

Dr. Morey’s major research interests are American silent and early sound film. She has published on aspects of British film history, American women screenwriters and commentators on film during the silent period, children’s film, and genre film. She has taught courses in film history, film noir, the woman’s film, British cinema, Italian cinema, Japanese cinema, Hollywood in the 1930s and in the 1950s.

Honors and Awards

  • Winner, Association of Former Students Teaching Award for the College of Liberal Arts, 2013

Publications

Morey, Anne and Nelson, Claudia. Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals. Oxford University Press, 2019.

This book draws upon cognitive poetics and uses an assortment of works written in Britain and the US for preteen and adolescent readers from 1906 to 2018 to argue that authors typically employ a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors to organize the classical past for young readers. Popular models include palimpsest texts, which see the past as a collection of strata in which each new era forms a layer superimposed upon a foundation laid earlier; map texts, which use the metaphor of the mappable journey to represent a protagonist’s process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world; and fractal texts, in which small parts of the narrative are thematically identical to the whole in a way that implies that history is infinitely repeatable. While a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, we argue for associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook. Map texts highlight problem-solving and arrival at one’s planned destination; they model an assertive, confident outlook. Palimpsest texts position character and reader as occupying one among many equally important temporal layers; they emphasize the landscape’s continuity but the individual’s impermanence, modeling a more modest vision of one’s place in time. Fractal texts work by analogy, denying difference between past and present and inviting readers to conclude that significant change may be impossible. Thus each model uses the classical past to urge and thus perhaps to develop a particular approach to life.


Genre-Reception-and-Adaption - MoreyMorey, AnneGenre, Reception, and Adaptation in the “Twilight” Series.  Routledge, 2012.

Much of the criticism on Stephenie Meyer’s immensely popular ‘Twilight’ novels has underrated or even disparaged the books while belittling the questionable taste of an audience that many believe is being inculcated with anti-feminist values. Avoiding a repetition of such reductive critiques of the series’s purported shortcomings with respect to literary merit and political correctness, this volume adopts a cultural studies framework to explore the range of scholarly concerns awakened by the ‘Twilight novels and their filmic adaptations.

 

 


Hollywood-Outsiders - MoreyMorey, Anne.  Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry 1913-1934.
University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood sought to establish new connections between audience and industry, suggesting means by which outsiders could become insiders. Hollywood Outsiders looks at how disparate entities conceived of these connections, and combines discussions of cultural politics with a broader argument about how outsiders viewed the film industry as a vehicle of self-validation and of democratic ideals.