A new class is emerging in the wake of the information economy and is altering American culture. Instead of arguing about values in aesthetic taste or morality, this book sheds new light on the culture wars by examining the social sources of recent cultural developments. Both opponents and defenders of the current cultural scene have neglected the class factors in culture generally and in present society. If the new class is added to our picture of American society, its input into the cultural marketplace helps to explain present trends in postmodernism, mixtures of high and low culture,...

Now that the political correctness controversy has cooled, a time for sober reflection on the field of English has arrived. In this insightful overview of English, and of literary studies, Fleishman employs both historical perspective and pragmatic sense about choices for the future. His approach is to apply recent strategies of contextual understanding to English itself. What can a class analysis tell us about the influence on the profession of the changing American socioeconomic system? What are the likely intellectual and professional outcomes of the curricular embrace of minority...

In Narrated Films, Avrom Fleishman explores the distinctive literary techniques often used by filmmakers to tell their stories. Through close viewings of ingeniously paired films, Fleishman documents five narrational practices in the cinema: voice-over ( Orpheus and Sunset Boulevard); dramatized narration, in which the film is a story that one character tells another ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Hiroshima Mon Amour); multiple narration, in which a number of characters tell the story that is the film ( Rashomon and Zelig); written...