In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. 

Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.

The interdisciplinary essays in Showing Off, Showing Up examine acts of showing, a particular species of performance that relies on competition and judgment, active spectatorship, embodied excess, and exposure of core values and hidden truths. Acts of showing highlight those dimensions of performance that can most manipulate spectators and consumers, often through over-the-top heightening and skewing of presentation. Many forms of showing and of heightened performance, however, operate more enigmatically and covertly while still profoundly affecting the social world, even if our reactions to them are initially flippant or unconcerned because “it’s just a show.” Examining a wide range of examples—from dog shows to competitive dancing to carnivals to striptease, the essays illuminate how such events variously foster competition, exaggerate a characteristic, and reveal hidden truths. There is as much to be learned about the power of showing through subtlety and underlying intentionality as through overt display. The book’s theoretical introduction and 12 essays by leading scholars reveal how diverse, particularly efficacious genres of showing are theoretically connected and why they merit more concerted attention, especially in the 21st century.