The first edition of this book, edited by Cohen and the late Gerald Mast, appeared in 1974 and was the first significant survey of the subject. The various editions of the anthology have included work by early commentators such as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Benjamin, and Kenneth Tynan, who anticipated film theory. More recent editions have paired essays both for and against grand theory. Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media and the Recruitment of the Spectator," Public Culture Vol.4, No.2 (Spring 1992). The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French.

Film theory also inherits antecedent questions concerning artistic realism. An uncommonly contested and elastic term, realism comes to film theory heavily laden with millennial encrustations from antecedent debates in philosophy and literature. Classical philosophy distinguished between Platonic realism – the assertion of the absolute and objective existence of universals, i.e. the belief that forms, essences, abstractions such as beauty and truth exist independent of human perception – and Aristotelian realism – the view that universals only exist within objects in the external world (rather than in an extra-material realm of essences). The term realism is confusing because these early philosophical usages often seem diametrically opposed to common-sense realism – the belief in the objective existence of facts and the attempt to see these facts without idealization. Adorno, T. W. 1978. Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. Jeph. London: Verso. Commissioned essays on topics in cinema study with special attention to theory. Many of the most important contemporary scholars contributed. Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006) coauthored with Ella Shohat Race in Translation: Culture Wars in the Postcolonial Atlantic (Routledge, 2012) coauthored with Ella Shohat

Cinema and Media Studies

Rothwell, K. S. (2004 (1999)) A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Auerbach, Erich 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Other Subject Areas

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Stam completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. His dissertation was published as a book, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985). Ang, Ien 1985. Watching “Dallas”: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Trans. Della Couling. London: Methuen.

Adams, Parveen 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge. The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference and Power," Screen, Vol. XXVI, Nos. 3-4 (May- Aug 1985).

How to Subscribe

Naremore, J. (1990) ¿Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism¿, Film Quarterly 44 (1), 14-22. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2000), coauthored with Ella Shohat Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.