These four authors are studied as exemplars of a literature of negation of dominant trends in modern culture and of a certain conception of literature. Specifically, each is shown to write in order to contest the post-Renaissance ideology of instrumentalist rationalism.

Aggressive product placement and retail tie-ins are as much a part of moviemaking today as high-concept scripts and computer-generated special effects, but this phenomenon is hardly recent. Since the silent era, Hollywood studios have proved remarkably adept at advertising both their own products and a bewildering variety of consumer commodities, successfully promoting the idea of consumption itself. Hollywood Goes Shopping brings together leading film studies scholars to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between American cinema and consumer culture, providing an innovative reading of both film history and the evolution of consumerism in the twentieth century.

This bilingual translation and study of selected poems of Andree Chedid includes the original poems in French and English, and an introductory essay. Chedid authored 27 volumes of poetry, and won prestigious prizes in Europe, but is known in the US only for fiction.

Genette uses Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as a work to identify and name the basic constituents and techniques of narrative. Genette illustrates the examples by referring to other literary works. His systemic theory of narrative deals with the structure of fiction, including fictional devices that go unnoticed and whose implications fulfill the Western narrative tradition.