Steven Best

Douglas Kellner

In this timely volume, the authors systematically analyze postmodern theory to evaluate its relevance for critical social theory and radical politics today. Best and Kellner provide: * An introduction and critique of the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Laclau and Mouffe, and Jameson, which assess the varying contributions and limitations of postmodern theory * A discussion of postmodern feminist theory and the politics of identity * A systematic study of the origin of the discourse of the postmodern in historical, sociological, cultural, and philosophical studies. The authors claim that while postmodern theory provides insights into contemporary developments, it lacks adequate methodological and political perspectives to provide a critical social theory and radical politics for the present age.

Critical Interrogations

Postmodern Theory

Tyson E. Lewis

Clayton Pierce

Critique, Liberation, and Reschooling in the Radical Pedagogy of Herbert Marcuse

On Marcuse

Through analysis of several media spectacles - including the O.J. Simpson trial, Elvis, the X-Files and the Clinton sex scandals - Kellner draws insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies.

Media Spectacle

Karl Korsch

Revolutionary Theory

Hollywood film and politics in the Bush-Cheney era

Cinema wars

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern

Media Culture

Michael Ryan

Politik Kamera

The authors systematically interrogate postmodern theory to evaluate its relevance for critical social theory and radical politics today. The book contains an introduction and critique to the work of Foucault, Delueze and Guattari and an introduction to postmodern feminist theory.

Professor Douglas Kellner, PhD

Kellner D Staff

Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music, and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects. The book argues that media culture is now the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity in terms of both social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African-American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique. Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analysis and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system of cultural production, Kellner develops a multidimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disciplines. He also provides new approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and offers new perspectives for cultural studies. Anyone interested in the nature and effects of contemporary society and culture should read this book. Kellner argues that we are in a state of transition between the modern era and a new postmodern era and that media culture offers a privileged field of study and one that is vital if we are to grasp the full import of the changes currently shaking us.

Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern

Stephen Eric Bronner

A collection of seminal essays, many appearing in English for the first time, which provides an excellent overview of the critical theory developed by the Frankfurt School.

A Reader

Critical Theory and Society

"This is the first full-scale critique in English of the work of Jean Baudrillard, a fascinating French thinker who has, during the past twenty years, opened new lines of cultural thought and discourse while sharply questioning many of the Marxian, Freudian, and structuralist positions that were characteristic of the previous era of radical social theory. ... The author argues that through today, Baudrillard is celebrated as one of the most innovative thinkers in the discourses of poststructuralism and postmodernism, his reception has been remarkably uncritical and ahistorical. There has been little analysis of his complex intellectual trajectory, of his involvement in a series of debates within the French post-May 1968 intellectual scene, and of his dramatic transformations in thinking and writing in the 1970's and 1980's. In this book, the author begins the process of mapping out, contextualizing, and critically appraising Baudrillard's trajectory. He deals first with Baudrillard's early writings, notably The System of Objects and the Consumer Society, which form the original matrix of his thought. The remainder of the book is organized thematically, analyzing Baudrillard's early development of a neo-Marxian social theory (The Mirror of Production), his break with Marxism (Symbolic Exchange and Death), his turn to a postmodern position (Forget Foucault and Of Seduction), and the surprising developments in his work of the 1970's and 1980's (America and The Devine Left)."--Cover.

From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond

Jean Baudrillard

An introduction to and critique of the latest trends in critical theory.

Jameson Critique

Postmodernism

Douglas Kellner's Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: 9/11, the War on Iraq, and Election 2004 investigates the role of the media in the momentous political events of the past four years. Beginning with the role of the media in contested election of 2000, Kellner examines how corporate media ownership and concentration, linked with a rightward shift of establishment media, have disadvantaged the Democrats and benefited George W. Bush and the Republicans. Exploring the role of media spectacle in the 9/11 attacks and subsequent Terror War in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kellner documents the centrality of media politics in advancing foreign policy agendas and militarism. Building on his analysis in Media Spectacle (Routledge 2003), Kellner demonstrates in detail how conflicting political forces ranging from Al Qaeda to the Bush administration construct media spectacles to advance their politics. Two chapters critically engage the role of the media in the buildup to the Iraq war and the media-centric nature of Bush's Iraq invasion and occupation. Final chapters delineate the role of the media in the highly contested and significant 2004 election campaign that many believe to be one of the key political struggles of the contemporary era. Criticizing Bush's unilateralism, Kellner argues for a multilateral and cosmopolitan globalization and the need for democratic media to help overcome the current crisis of democracy in the United States.

Terrorism, War, and Election Battles

Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy

Zeynep Paşalı

Medya gösterisi

Dan Streible

Emile De Antonio

Innovative documentary filmmaker; friend of Andy Warhol, John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other leading figures of the New York art world; radical leftist critic of the Establishment; and legendary bon vivant: Emile de Antonio (1919-1989) was a larger-than-life personality and a key figure in the development of post-war American cinema. The films de Antonio made between 1963 and 1989 -- including Point of Order, Rush to Judgment, In the Year of the Pig, Painters Painting, and Millhouse: A White Comedy -- revolutionized the documentary format and inspired a generation of artists and filmmakers. A decade after his death, his cinematic legacy -- ranging from the brilliantly edited compilation of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that helped construct Senator Joseph McCarthy's reputation as a rogue demagogue (Point of Order) to a meditative juxtaposition of documents about F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover and intimate footage drawn from the filmmaker's own life (Mr. Hoover and I) -- remains unparalleled in American documentary film. Emile de Antonio: A Reader is the first full-length volume devoted to this major American filmmaker. It collects interviews with and writings by de Antonio; reviews and other critical material that detail the genesis, production history, and reception of his films; a comprehensive filmography; and an in-depth biographical essay. Offering a long overdue assessment of de Antonio's career, this indispensable book also makes a significant contribution to our understanding of American independent cinema at its most politically engaged.

Emile de Antonio

Bush-Cheney döneminde Hollywood sineması ve siyaset

Sinema savaşları

Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-modern

From the recent shootings at Virginia Tech University to the tragedies at Columbine and Oklahoma City, certain common traits can be traced through all of these events. In Guys and Guns Amok, media and cultural critic Douglas Kellner provides a fascinating diagnostic reading of these acts of domestic terrorism. Skillfully connecting each case with the current environment for male socialization and the search for identity in an American culture obsessed with guns and militarism, Kellner's work is a sobering reflection on these tragedies and the pervasive power of media and popular culture as well as a wake-up call for the future.

Douglas Kellner

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