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    Since its release in 1932, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang had earned a reputation as one of the few Hollywood products that can be associated directly with social change. Film historians attribute the reform of the southern chain gang system to the public outrage generated by this movie, which depicts a true story.
    In addition to being an important social document, the film remains a gripping experience for filmgoers today because of its unusual dramatic conception, its hauntingly inconclusive ending, and Paul Muni's performance as the good boy forced to go wrong.

This book includes the complete screenplay.

In I Know That You Know That I Know, Butte explores how stories narrate human consciousness. Butte locates a historical shift in the representation of webs of consciousnesses in narrative—what he calls “deep intersubjectivity”—and examines the effect this shift has since had on Western literature and culture. The author studies narrative practices in two ways: one pairing eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British novels (Moll Flanders and Great Expectations, for example), and the other studying genre practices—comedy, anti-comedy and masquerade—in written and film narratives (Jane Austen and His Girl Friday, for example, and Hitchcock’s Cary Grant films).

Butte’s second major claim argues for new ways to read representations of human consciousness, whether or not they take the form of deep intersubjectivity. Phenomenological criticism has lost its credibility in recent years, but this book identifies better reading strategies arising out of what the author calls poststructuralist phenomenology, grounded largely in the work of the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. Butte criticizes the extreme of transcendental idealism (first-wave phenomenological criticism) and cultural materialism (when it rules out the study of consciousness). He also criticizes the dominant Lacanian framework of much academic film criticism.

How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology

I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies.

Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube.

McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.

How the Star Wars trilogies and their fandoms have engaged with and mirrored American beliefs about race and gender.
2026 Award for Best Single Work, Popular Culture Association (MPCA) 

The Star Wars saga takes place in a galaxy far, far away, but its social structures—in particular its racial realities—are thoroughly American. So argues Greg Carter in this thought-provoking analysis, which blends historical and theoretical treatments of science fiction cinema and Star Wars fandom to explore the subtle mirroring between fantasy and the communities that create and consume it.

I’d Just as Soon Kiss a Wookiee draws on insights from prominent scholars to examine fictional relationships between groups perceived to be biologically different. Three areas of commonality between the United States and Star Wars arise: stiff regulation of racial mixture; racialized servitude, with nonhumans placed in positions of bondage; and the presumption of white male supremacy. None of these are functions of the of the Star Wars story; rather, they index the expectations of US society. But expectations have also shifted since Star Wars launched in 1977, and the franchise with it. Carter gauges minority and mainstream fan reactions, finding that, while science fiction enthusiasts have a reputation for progressiveness, the truth turns out to be as complicated as US racism itself.

An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic.

As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects.

Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes harmonize in their methods and sensibilities, interpreting the rule-breaking film as a biography that refuses chronology, disdains factual accuracy, flirts with libel, and cannibalizes Western cinema. Fitting the film’s inspiration, creation, and reception alongside its continuing afterlife, Tsika examines Dylan’s music in the film through the context of intellectual property, raising questions about who owns artistic material and artistic identities and how such material can be reused and repurposed. Tsika’s adventurous analysis touches on gender, race, queerness, celebrity, popular culture, and the law, while offering much to Haynes and Dylan fans alike.

Presenting a groundbreaking account of an audacious theatrical undertaking

Created by the Norwegian/German duo of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, the Ibsen-Saga (2006–present) is a six-hundred-year project to restage Henrik Ibsen’s entire oeuvre. Andrew Friedman presents a groundbreaking historical narrative of this project’s development and dramaturgy, through the theories and practices of modernism’s most influential and controversial artists, including Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner, F. T. Marinetti, Erwin Piscator, and Jackson Pollock. Vinge and Müller treat Ibsen’s plays as the urtexts of a mythical struggle between artistic vision and material limits, which they explore through analogous narratives ranging from Hamlet to World Cup soccer matches, all unified by a singular aesthetic that juxtaposes totalizing fiction and extreme reality. As Friedman shows, they mythologize Ibsen’s themes of artistic ambition to resurrect and test modernism’s fantasies of artistic autonomy, totality, creative license, and provocation.

By reading Vinge and Müller’s project through its modernist inspirations, Friedman demonstrates the material and ethical limits of modernist ideals in current theatrical practice, providing new perspectives on the legacy of these pioneering figures. Ibsen Apocalypse is a bold, cross-disciplinary reappraisal of the persistent power of modernity in contemporary performance.
 

The updated edition of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, an in-depth exploration of Lupino’s film and television directing work, provides close readings of the films and TV episodes Lupino directed and accounts for the history of Lupino’s reception, continuing into the mid-2020s, in media and film scholarship. The book gives readers a fuller understanding of Lupino’s major contribution to the history of American cinema and media. The revisions update this book, the first on Lupino’s directing, to address recent scholarship on Lupino’s work and reinforce her abiding relevance for cinephiles and film scholars. It incorporates scholarly and popular culture references to Lupino in the last seven years. Updates include a foreword by writer and film critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose work in film scholarship and the public arena has drawn attention to Lupino and the importance of gender to film noir. Authors Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman have added a complete list of the TV episodes Lupino directed in the 1950s and '60s, as well as an updated epilogue.  

This new edition addresses how our views of Lupino’s innovative cinema and her prodigious contributions to classic television have been taken up by others, proving that Lupino, whose reputation has waxed and waned since the middle of the twentieth century, is here to stay as a major figure in the history of American media.

An archival study of Ida Lupino’s work in film and television directing, writing, producing, and acting from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Though her acting career is well known, Ida Lupino was, until very recently, either unknown or overlooked as an influential director. One of the few female directors in Classical Hollywood, Lupino was the only woman with membership in the Directors Guild of America between 1948 and 1971. Her films were about women without power in society and engaged with highly controversial topics despite Hollywood’s strict production code. Working in a male-dominated field, Lupino was forced to manage her public persona carefully, resisting attempts by the press to paint her solely as a dutiful wife and mother—a continual feminization—just so that she could continue directing.

Filmmaker Alexandra Seros retells the story of Ida Lupino’s career, from actor to director, first in film, then in television, using archival materials from collections housed around the world. The result provides rich insights into three of Lupino’s independently directed films and a number of episodes from her vast television oeuvre. Seros contextualizes this analysis with discussions of gendered labor in the film industry, the rise of consumerism in the United States after World War II, and the expectations put on women in their family lives during the postwar era. Seros’s portrait of Lupino ultimately paints her life and career as an exemplar of collaborative auteurship.

2002 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

The struggle to forge a collective national identity at the expense of competing plural identities has preoccupied Israeli society since the founding of the state of Israel. In this book, Yosefa Loshitzky explores how major Israeli films of the 1980s and 1990s have contributed significantly to the process of identity formation by reflecting, projecting, and constructing debates around Israeli national identity.

Loshitzky focuses on three major foundational sites of the struggle over Israeli identity: the Holocaust, the question of the Orient, and the so-called (in an ironic historical twist of the "Jewish question") Palestinian question. The films she discusses raise fundamental questions about the identity of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children (the "second generation"), Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries or Mizrahim (particularly the second generation of Israeli Mizrahim), and Palestinians. Recognizing that victimhood marks all the identities represented in the films under discussion, Loshitzky does not treat each identity group as a separate and coherent entity, but rather attempts to see the conflation, interplay, and conflict among them.

In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, Yaron Shemer presents the most comprehensive and systematic study to date of Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films produced in Israel in the last several decades. Through an analysis of dozens of films the book illustrates how narratives, characters, and space have been employed to give expression to Mizrahi ethnic identity and to situate the Mizrahi within the broader context of the Israeli societal fabric. The struggle over identity and the effort to redraw ethnic boundaries have taken place against the backdrop of a long-standing Zionist view of the Mizrahi as an inferior other whose “Levantine” culture posed a threat to the Western-oriented Zionist enterprise.

In its examination of the nature and dynamics of Mizrahi cinema (defined by subject-matter), the book engages the sensitive topic of Mizrahi ethnicity head-on, confronting the conventional notion of Israeli society as a melting pot and the widespread dismissal of ethnic divisions in the country. Shemer explores the continuous marginalization of the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli cinema and the challenge some Mizrahi films offer to the subjugation of this ethnic group. He also studies the role cultural policies and institutional power in Israel have played in shaping Mizrahi cinema and the creation of a Mizrahi niche in cinema. In a broader sense, this pioneering work is a probing exploration of Israeli culture and society through the prism of film and cinematic expression. It sheds light on the play of ethnicity, class, gender, and religion in contemporary Israel, and on the heated debates surrounding Zionist ideology and identity politics. By charting a new territory of academic inquiry grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the study contributes to the formation of “Mizrahi Cinema” as a recognized and vibrant scholarly field.

"A brilliant and daring book on how art reveals life, how it illuminates childhood beyond what the sciences of development can tell us."
---Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University

"Combining the surgical precision of a psychoanalytically informed critic with the oracular eloquence of a brilliant close reader, Ellen Handler Spitz reads our cultural fortunes about childhood and parenting through works of art.  Moving us (in both senses of the term) from the serene plenitude of Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Childbirth to the unsparing horror of Lessing's Fifth Child, she reveals just how powerfully art puts us in touch with the pulsing energies of real life."
---Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University 

"Illuminating Childhood is a wonderfully well-written and researched interdisciplinary study of childhood in various media and mediums as well as through ethnicity, race, gender, cultures, and time."
---T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Distinguished Professor of French and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University

While literature and the arts are rarely considered primary sources for knowledge about human motivation and behavior, people read novels, attend movies, watch television, and go to the theater not solely to be entertained but also to learn about one another and about themselves. Illuminating Childhood formalizes this quest for psychological knowledge in the domain of the arts.

Starting with the premise that a gifted writer, artist, or filmmaker has the ability to teach us as much in one scene as a theorist can in a treatise or a therapist in a session, the author shares her intimate experience of eight thematically linked works in film and literature from the second half of the twentieth century, touching on issues central to parent-child relations, including toxic intrafamilial secrets, the disjunction between love and understanding, and the lasting impact of deceased parents on their children. While the canon of literature about children and parent-child relations includes books that identify problems, propose solutions, and present statistical data, Illuminating Childhood offers a living out of experience via the arts, written for a general audience---parents, teachers, mental health professionals, those who engage with their students via the arts of literature and film, and others.

Ellen Handler Spitz holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland. She is the author of a number of books on art, psychology, and imagery, including The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood. Her abiding research interests are the cultural lives of young people; the relations between aesthetics and psychology; and the interconnections among literature, music, dance, and the visual arts.

Jacket photo: Courtesy of PhotoFest

A revisionist history of Method acting that connects the popular reception of “methodness” to entrenched understandings of screen performance still dominating American film discourse today.

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

Gertrude Hoffmann made her name in the early twentieth century as an imitator, copying highbrow performances staged in Europe and popularizing them for a broader American audience. Born in San Francisco, Hoffmann started working as a ballet girl in pantomime spectacles during the Gay Nineties. She performed through the heyday of vaudeville and later taught dancers and choreographed nightclub revues. After her career ended, she reflected on how vaudeville’s history was represented in film and television.

Drawn from extensive archival research, Imitation Artist shows how Hoffmann’s life intersected with those of central figures in twentieth-century popular culture and dance, including Florenz Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis. Sunny Stalter-Pace discusses the ways in which Hoffmann navigated the complexities of performing gender, race, and national identity at the dawn of contemporary celebrity culture. This book is essential reading for those interested in the history of theater and dance, modernism, women’s history, and copyright.

The thoroughly revised third edition of the bible of improvisational theater.

Viola Spolin's improvisational techniques changed the very nature and practice of modern theater. The first two editions of Improvisation for the Theater sold more than 100,000 copies and inspired actors, directors, teachers, and writers in theater, television, film. These techniques have also influenced the fields of education, mental health, social work, and psychology.

The revised edition features:

• 30 new exercises, including introductions (Slow/Fast/Normal; Extended Sound; Mirror Speech; Unrelated Conversation)
• More than 200 updated classic exercises
• new section of traditional theater games for warm-up use 
• “Paul Sills' Sayings of Viola Spolin” 
• New glossary of side-coaching phrases, with definitions of their meaning and value 
• Alphabetical list of all games and exercises

In Force, Drive, Desire, Rudolf Bernet develops a philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis focusing on human drives. Rather than simply drawing up a list of Freud’s borrowings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or Lacan’s from Hegel and Sartre, Bernet orchestrates a dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis that goes far beyond what these eminent psychoanalysts knew about philosophy. By relating the writings of Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts to those of Aristotle, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, more tacitly, Bergson and Deleuze, Bernet brings to light how psychoanalysis both prolongs and breaks with the history of Western metaphysics and philosophy of nature.

Rereading the long history of metaphysics (or at least a few of its key moments) in light of psychoanalytic inquiries into the nature and function of drive and desire also allows for a rewriting of the history of philosophy. Specifically, it allows Bernet to bring to light a different history of metaphysics, one centered less on Aristotelian substance (ousia) and more on the concept of dunamis—a power or potentiality for a realization toward which it strives with all its might. Relating human drives to metaphysical forces also bears fruit for a renewed philosophy of life and subjectivity.

The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them.  But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows.

Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation.  Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona.  While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson.

A comprehensive guide to creating inclusive and accessible musical theater at the high school level. 

This book is a comprehensive guide that presents a research-backed curriculum and strategies for creating an inclusive and accessible musical theater rehearsal and performance process for high schoolers. It draws on the author's doctoral research and extensive teaching experience to provide practical tools, assessments, and process modifications to support students of all learning needs and backgrounds.

The book begins by exploring the historical context and legal frameworks surrounding special education in public schools, as well as the intersection of drama education and disability studies. It then delves into an in-depth analysis of traditional actor training methods, highlighting their ableist origins and the need for adaptations to foster radical inclusion.

The core of the text outlines a twenty-nine-week rehearsal and performance curriculum, broken into three distinct phases, that is designed to scaffold skill development, promote ensemble collaboration, and empower diverse learners. Accompanying the unit plans are detailed assignments, assessments, and grading rubrics that align with national and state arts standards. Additionally, the author provides a wealth of supporting documents, such as student contracts, production resources, and a sample warm-up guide. 

By championing inclusive practices rooted in the principles of Universal Design for Learning and culturally responsive pedagogy, this book equips drama educators with the tools to create transformative theatrical experiences for all students.

An exploration of race, Hollywood, and the commodification of the body

Incorporations offers a new way of thinking about issues of race, bodies, and commodity culture. Moving beyond the study of identity and difference in media, Eva Cherniavsky asserts that race can be understood as a sign of the body’s relation to capital.