Hauntings

"This book is so very topical—in the best of all possible senses. It uses contemporary films to comment upon broader social issues: violence, homophobia, sexual abuse, television, capitalism, class, marriage, ecology, democracy, greed, subcultures, and the list could go on. The fears of America—the hauntings by the Rodney King decision, presidential elections, wilding, Bensonhurst—inform and form the insights into the films as well. The mutual interplay is productive and exciting.

"The thesis that popular culture, though constrained by the Market and its values, plugs into what 'haunts' contemporary culture at large, is original, important, disturbing. This is a theoretically sophisticated work that wears its theory with grace. The bringing together of the personal 'hauntings' with the films and headlines is particularly effective." — Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto

"The author tackles new territory in a strikingly new fashion; it is engagingly postmodern and reader-friendly. This book begins a project of cultural redemption, in that it is valuable to the scholar and the casual reader alike, and not an elitist text in any sense." — Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska