What do men-white straight men in particular-want? In a series of witty and provocative investigations of American popular culture, Fred Pfeil exposes the contradictions in the construction of white heterosexual masculinity over the last fifteen years. White Guys probes such topics as the rock'n'roll bodies of Bruce Springsteen, Axl Rose, and the late Kurt Cobain; the "male rampage" films Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and the films of "sensitive transformation" that followed in their wake; and the curious yet symptomatic activities of the men's movement whose "rituals" Pfeil has investigated firsthand.

Through his work as a fiction writer, critic and activist, Fred Pfeil has sought to extend the progressive possibilities within contemporary American culture. Idiosyncratic and provocative, Another Tale to Tell moves from evaluations of politically engaged texts and practices - such as Hans Haacke's deconstructive artwork, Chester Himes' Harlem police thrillers, 'cyberpunk' and the feminist science fiction of Octavia Butler - to considerations of the history, dynamics and potential of postmodern culture. Pfeil's work on postmodernity is distinct from the spate of their works on the subject in its insistence on the social base of postmodern practices within today's professional managerial class, and in his endeavour both to use and to criticize Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist thought in order to illuminate our present political impasses and openings.From his audacious reading of the film River's Edge as the terminus of the vexed history of bourgeois narrative, and his analysis of Reaganite oedipality in Back to the Future, to his unsettling meditation on the 'poststructuralist paradise' embodied in contemporary SF, Pfeil sorts through a welter of contemporary cultural texts and practices for the glimmerings of a postmodern narrative and politics that may truly be 'another tale to tell'.

On the current battlefield of cultural criticism and production, no term has been more vigorously contested than 'postmodernism'. Defying clear definition, yet persisting as an indispensable category, it has become one of the central topics in the theory and practice of contemporary culture. Postmodernism and Its Discontents collects some of the major theoretical statements in this debate, including the key intervention of Fredric Jameson, and pits them against original contributions by a range of younger writers who explore the terrain of postmodernism in a variety of cultural practices. Essays on poetry and punk culture, recent American fiction, rock videos, Hollywood and foreign film, and sports and soap operas complement more directly theoretical pieces which tackle, to repeat the title of one essay, 'what is at stake in the debate on postmodernism.' Above all, this collection is distinguished by its steadfast refusal to elide the determinate political issues posed by postmodernism. Each of the essays insists upon the materiality of cultural production, locating various post-modernist practices in the social conditions of contemporary life, including the overarching structures of gender and class.