Carl Freedman

The fundamental argument this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.

A Study in Cultural Power

The Age of Nixon

This book offers (in the first six chapters) critical readings of six novels by China Miéville, which are followed (in the seventh chapter) by a theoretical meditation on some of the conceptual issues raised by and engaged in the Miéville oeuvre. There comes a moment in The City & the City, though it is not necessarily the same moment for every reader, when you realise that Beszel and Ul Qoma are not separate realms but the same space divided. Likewise, art and idea are often subject to absurd partition, but then along comes an author such as China Miéville who shows them to be, in truth, indissoluble. So argues Freedman's inordinately readable and just as rigorous account of Miéville's major novels. Highly recommended. (Mark Bould, University of the West of England) Freedman offers a compelling interpretation of Miéville's novels informed equally by an impressive range of literary influences and a carefully documented exploration of historical antecedents. Seeing Miéville's genre hybridity as an illustration of the power of dialectical thinking, Freedman illuminates the complex utopian project of Miéville's fiction. Freedman is one of our finest critical voices on Miéville, one of the most important speculative writers of the 21st century. (Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside)

Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville

This book offers (in the first six chapters) critical readings of six novels by China Miéville, which are followed (in the seventh chapter) by a theoretical meditation on some of the conceptual issues raised by and engaged in the Miéville oeuvre.

Jeanette Winterson

Tracey Emin

Rudolf Herman Fuchs

Max Freedman

The most highly publicized of the infamous Young British Artists, Emin has stirred as much controversy as she has acclaim, being both highly personal and extremely original in her art. Emin's work is engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional. One of her most famous pieces is Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with names. Another notorious work, My Bed—the scene where she spent four days contemplating suicide—was exhibited at Tate Britain when the artist was short-listed for the Turner prize in 1999. Though denounced by conservative critics at the outset, Emin's work has attracted serious critical attention for more than a decade. In the words of Art in America, "What brought Emin to prominence was shock value, but what keeps her work powerful as she continues is the strength and nuance of its form and content." Compiled in close collaboration with the artist herself—and unprecedented in its scope—this is the definitive book on Emin, featuring drawings, paintings, sculptures, appliqués and embroideries, neon and video stills as well as her own writing.

Works 1963-2006

A concise, lively account of Marxist thought and American culture The Incomplete Projects reevaluates the role of Marxist theory in the study of culture and makes a case for Marxist cultural analysis as a relevant political practice. Part I provides the reader with a comprehensive and lively overview of Marxist thought. Part II is a collection of case studies analyzing a wide range of cultural objects, from the novels of Philip K. Dick to the television series M*A*S*H. The objects of study are either American or British in origin, reflecting the dominance of Anglo-American culture in our new global economy; they are also what Freedman describes as 'middle culture,' falling somewhere between the bifurcated categories of high and low art. Through these case studies, Carl Freedman shows that it is impossible to make sense of capitalism without the Marxist critique and demonstrates that cultural analysis is an especially appropriate form of discourse in which to begin thinking politically. This book is particularly timely and relevant to anyone interested in the study of culture.

Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture

The Incomplete Projects

No society is without crime, prompting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrator to make his famous statement inThe Scarlet Letter that, however high its hopes are, no civilization can fail to allot a portion of its soil as the site of a prison. By establishing the category of crime - by drawing a line between the lawful and criminal, however thin, blurry, or even effectively meaningless the line may in practice become - society offers its own perhaps most consequential self-definition. Film, argues Carl Freedman, is an especially fruitful medium for considering questions like these. With Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema, he offers a series of critical readings spanning several genres, by directors Coppola, Scorsese, Ford, Wilder. From among the mob movies, Freedman focuses on Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy - arguably the foremost work of crime cinema - using it to reflect on the Marxist notion of primitive accumulation and relationship between “gangsterism and capitalism”. The volume also includes in-depth critique of classics of film noir (including Double Indemnity and Body Heat) and, surprisingly, Western, which is not often thought of as a kind of crime film even though its setting is an entire society in which crime flourishes yet is fought against, bringing into focus films of John Wayne. For crime fans and scholars alike, the radical readings of known classics in Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema provide an insightful critique of modern culture and high capitalism that produced, and that are reflected in, the range of films discussed.

Studies in Ford, Wilder, Coppola, Scorsese, and Others

Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema

Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman’s five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.

Carl Freedman

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