From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film.

• Provides an insightful overview of the American Western genre
  
• Covers the entire history of the Western, from 1939 to the present
  
• Analyses Westerns as products of a genre, as well as expressions of political and social desires
  
• Deepens an audience's understanding of the genre's most important works, including Shane, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Unforgiven, and Kill...

This book explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural and film studies, and asks how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution. Through detailed reference to Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game, Patrick McGee shows how film can be both a product of the culture industry and a critique of it. He analyzes the function of the university in producing interpretations of such highly political art forms and in determing the limits of critical discussion. McGee links Adorno with Derrida to provide a...

Usinga method that combines analysis, memoir, and polemic, McGee writes experimentally about a series of thinkers who ruptured linguistic and social hierarchies, fromMarx, to Gramsci, to Badiou.

McGee studies historical representation in commodified, popular cinema as expressions of historical truths that more authentic histories usually miss and argues for the political and social significance of mass culture through the interpretation of four recent big-budget movies: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, and Inglourious Basterds .

This book explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural and film studies, and asks how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution. Through detailed reference to Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game, Patrick McGee shows how film can be both a product of the culture industry and a critique of it. He analyzes the function of the university in producing interpretations of such highly political art forms and in determing the limits of critical discussion. McGee links Adorno with Derrida to provide a...

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite...

McGee studies historical representation in commodified, popular cinema as expressions of historical truths that more authentic histories usually miss and argues for the political and social significance of mass culture through the interpretation of four recent big-budget movies: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, and Inglourious Basterds .