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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Description: âWhen I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.â This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a characte...