Books by Kip Kline

Movies about college have been a staple of American cinema since the silent era. College movies such as The Paper Chase (1973), Animal House (1978), and Higher Learning (1995) provide insight into the ways that college has been variously imagined as a middle class rite of passage, a landscape of hedonistic fantasy, a microcosm of societal hypocrisy, a repressive system of deindividuation, and a carnivalesque holiday from "real life." This unique volume examines the representation of college and campus life in movies. Chapters discuss the extent to which movies about college inform the expectations, perceptions, and attitudes of students, faculty, and the public. Cinema U includes close analysis of individual films as well as broader examinations of the manner in which college films have addressed issues such as race, class, gender, technology, sexuality, and cultural difference.

Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film examines the portrayal of youth in American cinema with Jean Baudrillards radical social theory and philosophical system. Kline uses Baudrillards corpus to analyze the troubling effects of the portrayal of youth in American teen films, namely, its contribution to discursive violence against young people which holds such a prominent place in many adult-controlled, modern institutions like schools. This kind of violence has multiple iterations, including the inability to imagine youth as meaningful political actors, the insistence on taking teenagers to be morally impoverished, and the propensity for viewing young people as thoroughly heteronomous. While there are certainly pockets of exception, violent discourses often animate institutional disregard for youth. Kline promotes Baudrillards fatal theory as a way for critical educators, philosophers, sociologists, and other concerned pedagogues to argue for an alteration in the way that youth is portrayed in American films, and to discourage the negative discourse that have colonized conceptions and treatment of young people.