How does comedy in film attempt cultural criticism? How does cinema use its own visual technology to reflect on and critique its power within both politics and visual culture?Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film addresses these questions in detail as it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means of staging cultural criticism. Focusing on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture that cinema helped to generate, foster and question in the twentieth century, it examines the issues of technology that allow film comedies to engage in self-reflexive cultural criticism and to produce and critique the use of visual technology within US and global cultural politics.Grounded in the theoretical writings of thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler and Jacques Derrida in relation to repetition, automation, material systems of information media, the level of address in a communicative act, and the shifting role of the image, this book considers comedy as integral for a critical engagement of the constructs of culture. It brings a new perspective to comedy in film, invaluable to students and scholars in Film Studies.

Product Description: Bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, The City as Target provides a sustained and critical response to the relationship between the concept of targeting (in its many forms) and notions of understanding, imagining and shaping the urban...read more

The writings of Jean Baudrillard have dramatically altered the face of critical theory and promise to pose challenges well into the 21st century. His work on simulation, media, the status of the image, the system of objects, hyperreality, and information technology continues to influence intellectual work in a diverse set of fields. This volume uniquely provides overviews of Baudrillard’s career while also simultaneously including examples of current works on and with Baudrillard that engage some of the many and varied ways Baudrillard’s work is being addressed, deployed, and critiqued in the present. As such, it offers chapters useful to the novice and the well-versed in critical theory and Baudrillard Studies alike. Contributors to the volume include John Armitage, John Beck, Ryan Bishop, Doug Kellner, John Phillips and Mark Poster. No less controversial today than he was in the past, Baudrillard continues to divide intellectuals and academicians, an issue this volume addresses by re-engaging the writing itself without falling into either simplistic dismissal or solipsistic cheerleading, but rather by taking the fecundity operative in the thought and meeting its consistent challenge. Baudrillard Now provokes sustained interaction with one of philosophy’s most important, provocative and stimulating thinkers.

Product Description: Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. It explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture...read more

Product Description: Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined and resolved...read more

Product Description: Cultural Politics, while embodying the interdisciplinary coverage and discursive critical spirit of contemporary cultural studies, emphasizes how cultural theories and practices intersect with and elucidate analyses of political power.

'Cultural Politics' explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture.

Product Description: This book addresses issues of space, historicity, architecture and textuality by focusing on Singapore's singular position in the region and as a global city. The articles consider how various experiences of Singapore, both from within and from outside, help to complicate existing assumptions about global urbanism, postcolonialism, and architectural theory while producing challenging new ideas from a variety of disciplines concerned with how space, historicity, architecture and textuality inform one another...read more

Product Description: In Thailand, a $4 billion per year tourist industry is the linchpin of the modernization process called the "Thai Economic Miracle". And what is Thailand's main attraction? Sex for hire. Year after year young women are lured to Bangkok to staff the teeming brothels, massage parlors, and sex bars that cater to male tourists from the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, the Gulf States, Malaysia, and Singapore...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)