How do children today learn to understand stories? Why do they respond so enthusiastically to home video games and to a myth like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And how are such fads related to multinational media mergers and the "new world order"? In assessing these questions, Marsha Kinder provides a brilliant new perspective on modern media.

In this innovative synthesis of film history and cultural analysis, Marsha Kinder examines the films of such key directors as Bunuel, Saura, Erice, and Almodovar, as well as works from the popular cinema and television, exploring how they manifest political and cultural tensions related to the production of Spanish national identity within a changing global context.

Concentrated on the decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, Kinder's work is broadly historical but essentially conceptual, moving backward and forward in time, drawing examples from earlier films and from works of art and...

The first collection of critical essays on Luis Bunuel's 1972 Oscar-winning masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, this anthology brings fresh perspectives to the most sophisticated film of this director whose narrative experimentation was always ahead of its time. Combining some of the world's most distinguished scholars on Bunuel and Spanish cinema with new voices in cultural theory, this volume helps us to rethink not only The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but also Bunuel's entire body of work.

In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain s national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era. By emphasizing issues of historical recuperation, gender and sexuality, and the marketing of Spain s peaceful political transformation, the contributors demonstrate that Spanish cinema and other forms of Spanish media culture created new national stereotypes and strengthened the nation s place in the global...

Television shows, comic strips, video games, and other forms of media directed at children are the subject of frequent and rancorous debate. In Kids Media Culture some of the most prominent cultural theorists of children s media join forces with exciting new voices in the field to consider the production and consumption of media aimed at children. What s good for kids and what s merely exploitive? Are shows that attempt to level the socioeconomic playing field by educating children effective? The essays in this anthology tackle these questions and pose provocative new questions of...

Television shows, comic strips, video games, and other forms of media directed at children are the subject of frequent and rancorous debate. In Kids Media Culture some of the most prominent cultural theorists of children s media join forces with exciting new voices in the field to consider the production and consumption of media aimed at children. What s good for kids and what s merely exploitive? Are shows that attempt to level the socioeconomic playing field by educating children effective? The essays in this anthology tackle these questions and pose provocative new questions of...

Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term transmedia with transnational, they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital...

In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain s national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era. By emphasizing issues of historical recuperation, gender and sexuality, and the marketing of Spain s peaceful political transformation, the contributors demonstrate that Spanish cinema and other forms of Spanish media culture created new national stereotypes and strengthened the nation s place in the global...