Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Communications - Miscellaneous, grade: 2,0, University of Siegen, course: Mere Anarchy? Woody Allen Films, language: English, abstract: Woody Allen, born Allen Stewart Konigsberg , is a Jewish artist, who is mostly known as filmmaker - but he carries several faces and puts his work into several fields. Although his movies often seem to deal with the same topics, Allen never concentrates on only one genre, as we worked out during our seminar and the expert sessions. Besides his widely spread image of the intellectual and humorous filmmaker, he put his thoughts into prose and stand-up comedy, too; he wrote articles for magazines like New York Times, Playboy or The New Republic and of course he is known through his roles in his own films. By acting out his own roles he has written, Woody Allen as the private person and the public known Woody Allen, somehow melted together; so, the viewer can find more personal elements in Allen

s movies, as he or she may expect. Or better said, he by some means performed himself through the stories of his films. Besides the fact that Allen mostly acted out the role of the protagonist in his movies and barring that the topics of the movies seem to be repetitive, there are other typical elements that continuously appear in his movies, what in this paper - as it already have been in our expert session - will be depicted as "allenesque elements". These are for instance the neurotic characters, the Jewishness (that apparently refers to his private persona), the psycho-analysis, the fusion of reality and fiction, unhappy relationships, love-affairs and the element of the anxious behavior, towards special issues, of some of his characters are just a number of the main subjects that are typical of Woody Allen stories. But Allen

s audience is not only "confronted" with these topics in his movies; as already mentioned, he also developed his ideas in prose and short stories. With his book "Mere Anarchy", in 2007 Woody Allen brought out his fourth collection of short stories and the first since 27 years. During this time he was mostly occupied with his movies; nearly every year, a new Allen movie was released. His new short story collection "Mere Anarchy" contains 18 pieces of which ten have been published in the New Yorker. Furthermore the reader can encounter the well known and already mentioned "allenesque" topics that in this case are for instance the doubt or self-doubts, the fact of loving women he cannot reach and the preference for progressive topics that were part of some of his movies, too. [...]