"This wonderful book does nothing less than to create the next stage of feminist thought." Catharine R. Stimpson

"De Lauretis provides a way of thinking about feminism that accepts rather than tries to resolve differences, that refuses fixed definitional categories and insists instead on the contradictory and changing meaning of gendered identities." The Women s Review of Books

"This is not a new collection but it is still one of the best." Exceptional Human Experience

The essays in this collection represent very recent developments in feminist research and writing in the...

"This is an important book for all students of literature and history." American Studies International

..". thoughtful and provocative.... the essays... grant complexity and contradiction to mass culture, while interrogating its objects from positions that explicitly or implicitly derive from the left and from feminism." The Independent

These innovative and politically engaged essays reflect the paradox inherent in taking a critical approach to mass culture.

The contributors, in many cases pioneers in their particular area of inquiry, include: Tania Modleski, Raymond...

"This is an amazing study, a memoir which provides insight into family abuse in 18th century America.... a significant volume which enhances our knowledge of social and religious life in New England. It is also a moving contribution to the literature of spirituality." Review and Expositor

"Students of American culture are indebted to Ann Taves for editing this fascinating and revealing document and for providing it with full annotation and an illuminating introduction." American Studies International

"This is above all an eminently teachable text, which raises important issues...

"This intellectually sexy collection features some of the best and brightest academic media analysts from Britain and the United States." --Voice Literary Supplement

"The essays in this volume rigorously engage the challenges of postmodern cultural criticism and theory, the central contemporary debate in the humanities." --Communication Abstracts

"Mellencamp has produced a challenging and an invigorating text.... It should provide much inspiration." --Journal of Communication

"This is a particularly good collection of thirteen papers with, overall, much more theoretically...

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory. She creates a dialogue among theory and popular culture and politics through inventive readings of the films of Owen...

Lyotard is considered one of the most brilliant and influential of French post-structuralist thinkers. Published in 1974 by Minuit, Economie libidinale is, of all his work to date, the most creative in its mode of writing and in its theorizing: a stunning, dense, brilliant piece in which Lyotard, ranging from Marxist and Freudian theory to contemporary arts, argues that political economy is charged with passions and, reciprocally, that passions are infused with the political.

In Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, authors argue that teaching is a performance that incorporates the personal in acts of "im-personation." After David Crane's prefatory "postscript," George Otte recommends that students pretend, writing from various perspectives; Indira Karamcheti suggests putting on race as one can put on gender roles. Cheryl Johnson gets personal by playing the "trickster," and Chris Amirault explores the relationship between the teacher and "the good student." While Karamcheti, Gallop, and Lynne Joyrich use theatrical vehicles to structure their essays, Joseph...

"The book not only confirms the high ethical stakes in informed contemporary reading; it offers a rare readerly pleasure in... exploring the wider cultural significance of gender and the body and their narrative representation." --Henry Sussman, SUNY-Buffalo

Gabriele Schwab revitalizes debates about literature's cultural function by exploring literary experience as an encounter with otherness. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, Schwab contends that literature facilitates contact with cultures that may seem foreign to us. At the same time, literature can...

"Methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity, this book constitutes a unique intervention in contemporary cultural politics." --Social Semiotics

At a time when cultural identity has become intrinsic to the way we read our many "others," Rey Chow argues that what demands to be examined critically is no longer identity politics per se but the idealism--especially in the sense of idealizing otherness--that lies at the heart of identity politics. She discusses multiple cultural...

What good is history to cultural studies? Meaghan Morris looks at struggles over "history" in social settings created by capitalism: in tourist landscapes and in television time. The materials of her analysis are motels, shopping malls, beaches, and local politics. She focuses on history and cultural heritage as issues of controversy for white working-class and poor suburban communities, as well as for urban cultural elites.