Introduction

Abstract

The introduction positions the book within current debates about the contemporary significance of the notion of postmodernism, the state of film theory in a ‘post-media’ age and the symptomatic place of Quentin Tarantino’s cinema in this context. It first elaborates on the ongoing relevance of film theory and Tarantino’s films in the current historical moment, which is here regarded as a declining, or ‘late,’ postmodernity. The Introduction also presents the structure of the book. It explains how Tarantino’s cinema is approached in the first three chapters, focused on the aesthetic and dialectical frameworks proposed by Jacques Rancière, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Finally, it illustrates the usefulness of adopting Carol Clover’s analysis of horror cinema for the analysis of Tarantino’s films. This argument serves as the basis for the fourth and final chapter, as well as the book’s closing remarks about the issue of the representation of violence, gender and History in Tarantino’s cinema.