Books by Randy Laist

While they stood, the Twin Towers captured the imagination of the world. In their dramatic destruction, they became icons of a history that is still being written. Here viewed in the context of popular cinema, the twin towers are emblematic of how architecture, film and narrative interact to express cultural aspirations and anxieties.

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.

Don DeLillo is a phenomenologist of the contemporary technoscape and an ecologist of our new kind of natural habitat. This book examines the variety of modes in which DeLillo's fictions illustrate the technologically mediated confluence of his human subjects and the field of cultural objects in which they discover themselves.