Coen

Elijah Siegler is Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at The College of Charleston.

Introduction: Are the Coen Brothers Religious Filmmakers? Or How Simple Is Blood Simple? Act One: The Early Films: Reading Religion as... 1. Morality in Raising Arizona 2. Theology in Miller's Crossing 3. World Creation in Barton Fink 4. Community in The Hudsucker Proxy First Intermission: So Are the Coen Brothers Religious Filmmakers? Fargo between Christian Moralism and Post-Modern Irony Act Two: The Middle Films: Analyzing Religion and... 5. Fandom in The Big Lebowski 6. Race in O Brother, Where Art Thou? 7. Money in Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers 8. The State in Burn after Reading Second Intermission: Are the Coen Brothers Formally Coherent? No Country for Old Men between Time and Eternity Act Three: The Later Films: Theorizing... 9. Transcendence in The Man Who Wasn't There 10. Hermeneutics in A Serious Man 11. Death in True Grit 12. Absence in Inside Llewyn Davis Epilogue: Hail, Caesar?

Taken as a whole, the essays in Coen offer a lively conversation (indeed, the contributors edited one another's essays, and several of the published texts contain helpful intertextual comments) about the ways in which filmmakers, audiences, and scholars all imagine interactions between film and religion. As a compilation of criticism on the Coen filmography, the collection organizes and reframes an expansive bibliography. As works of scholarship on religion, its essays imaginatively connect critical theory of religion with cinema studies scholarship, applied in clever and illuminating readings of the Coens' oeuvre. -- Geoffrey Pollick -- The Revealer ...[ Coen ] offers an unexpected number of insights beyond the Coens and their films. -- Christian Wessely, Journal for Religion, Film and Media This immensely readable work is a stunning success of eloquent writers tackling riveting topics. Each of the Coen brothers' movies, the hilarious and the harrowing treated in chronological order, receives careful critical analysis that sheds blazing light on the dark genius of these filmmakers. -- Terry Lindvall -- Journal of the American Academy of Religion A work that sets out in search of the Coens' cinematic soul and returns with a raft of compelling insights -- Richard Goodwin -- Journal of Religion and Film