A critical overview of the work of Fredric Jameson, with an emphasis on his notoriously difficult writing style.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this fast-paced ride through the postmodern landscape of American popular culture explores how our responses to headline events and popular films help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us.

Addresses the theoretical and pedagogical implications of redefining French Studies as an interdisciplinary field, while providing practical examples of the kind of criticism that such a shift would entail.

Investigates the cultural and social constructions of issues related to war, the armed forces, and national security in Israel.

Explores how historical, artistic, and technological developments and cross-cultural exchange have altered our conceptions of creativity.

Offers a multidisciplinary examination of Star Trek, religion, and American culture.

Explores the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison, examining how it functions archetypally as both a cultural metaphor and a poetic image.

Offers a new interpretation of “sympathy” as an instrument for investigating contemporary culture, gender, and visual technique.

Examines performance art and the powerful implications it holds for teaching in the schools.

Examines the psychological, cultural, and political implications of Gothic fiction, and helps to explain why horror writers and filmmakers have found such large and receptive audiences eager for the experience of being scared out of their wits.

An erudite and wide-ranging discussion of postmodernism and romanticism in twentieth-century art and philosophy.

Explores Paris as a desired and imagined place in Latin American postcolonial identity, uncovering the city's class, gender, political, and aesthetic resonances for Latin America

Examines the work and aspirations of women filmmakers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as in marginalized communities within the United States, with particular attention to issues of gender, race, nation, and aesthetics.

Combining case studies and critical analysis, this book examines how the electronic and print media's representation of cultural groups such as African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Chicanos contribute to the understanding (and misunderstanding) of this country's cultural experience.

Traces Western ideas of corporeal bodies from Plato to contemporary feminist and postructuralist writings, with the purpose of reexamining the good, identified in Plato as that which gives authority to knowledge and truth.

Focusing on the political movements of the 1950s and 1960s, this book argues that the arts can strengthen democracy by politically educating citizens.

Considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.

Moves from the discourses of dialectical negation to cultural-populist affirmation--that is, from Hegel to Madonna Studies--in order to envision a mode of critique that can persuasively describe and explain the cultural contradictions of late capitalism.

A comparative analysis of one of the most devastating social problems of the contemporary world. Focuses not only on acts of terrorism by terrorists, but with their portrayal and manipulation by others, ...

Explores the work of lesser-known American experimental filmmakers whose films, though well-received and influential, have been excluded from the dominant film canon.

Presents a powerful thesis on the nature and significance of violence and its mythos in Western culture, and offers an alternative interactive mythos that bridges the mind/body split inherent to most theories of violence.

Challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence.

Follows the work of a range of public intellectuals like Aronowitz, Giroux, hooks, Mouffe, and West, and argues for a 'radical democracy' capable of subverting traditional divisions of 'left' and'right. '

Discusses the impact of inner city redevelopment programs and policies on the homeless and shows the methods used (civil protests, squatting, and legal advocacy) by the homeless to organize a tactical resistance to restructuring efforts. Presents case studies of two different types of homeless organized resistance groups in Chicago and San Jose.

A generously illustrated overview of, and introduction to, the entirety of Godard's work as a filmmaker and video artist.