Breaking in to the Movies

Henry A. Giroux holds the Waterbury Chair Professorship and is currently the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent books include Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture's War on Children (2001); Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies (2000); The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (1999); and Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope (1997).

• Acknowledgements. Breaking in to the Movies: An Introduction.Part I: Reclaiming the Political in Popular Culture.1. Norma Rae: Character, Class, and Culture.2. Hollywood Film and the Challenge of Neofascist Culture.3. Lina Wertmuller: Film and the Dialectic of Liberalism.4. Looking for Mr. Goodbar: Gender and the Politics of Pleasure.Part II: Hollywood Film and the War on Youth.5. Slacking Off : Border Youth and Postmodern Education.6. Culture, Class, and Pedagody in Dead Poets Society.7. Children's Culture and Disney's Animated Films.8. The Politics of Pedagogy, Gender, and Whiteness in Dangerous Minds.9. Media Panics and the War Against "Kids": Larry Clark and the Politics of Diminished Hopes.Part III: Race and the Culture of Violence in Hollywood Films.10. Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyper-real Violoence: Pulp Fiction and other Visual Tragedies.11. Multiculturalism and the Cultural Politics of Race in 187.12. Brutalized Bodies and Emasculated Politics: Fight Club, Consumerism, and Masculine Violence.Index.

"In this collection of essays, Henry Giroux demonstrates once again that he is one of our leading public political intellectuals. Every page is filled with the passion of his commitment both to social and economic justice and to theoretical rigor. This collection combines insightful readings of how specific films operate in the current social context and original reflections on the central theoretical and methodological issues facing cultural studies today. This is a book that will move both students and teachers." Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Henry Giroux is one of our most penetrating cultural critics. In Breaking in to the Movies, he demonstrates how pleasure and power, entertainment and public pedagogy, are always intertwined in the culture of global capitalism. Giroux offers a refreshing approach in a field often characterized by a paucity of intellectual imagination. This is real cultural criticism." Sut Jhally, University of Massachusetts