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The works discussed transpose the conceit of The Most Dangerous Game to the world of commercial broadcast entertainment, pitting characters against each other in competition for the ultimate prize: their own lives. Round Four discusses how the game show has come to represent the political and personal dangers of citizenship in an America governed by a late-capitalist consumerism that has morphed into a new brand of totalitarianism that turns people into trivial objects and trivial objects into subjects of the highest importance. The “reality” of these games and their rules represent a simulated and heavily mediated environment posing as real to conceal a sinister truth. In order to challenge the dominance of this inverted world order, the protagonists must first defeat totalitarianism’s synecdoche: the game show.

This essay examines Suzanne Collins’s monstrous “mutts” in her phenomenally popular series The Hunger Games. Hiltz is especially interested in Collins’s characterization of human-animal hybrids, investigating the relationship between the political commentary at work in the novels and these “monsters,” from the half-wolf, half-humans that nearly overtake Katniss at the Cornucopia in the first novel to the lizard-humans whispering her name throughout the viaducts beneath the city in the last. Hiltz focuses on the mutts as abject creatures, demonstrating the ways in which these uncanny monsters, quite literally making the familiar strange, are at once metaphors for the political control exerted by the Capitol, the rebels’ resistance to the Capitol’s power, and the disruption of natural order. She also concentrates on Katniss and Peeta muttations, each of them reformed by warring entities in service of “the greater good.” Most importantly, Hiltz emphasizes that Collins’s mutts are designed to demonstrate the fine and wavering line between good and evil, calling into question the nature of monstrosity, especially as it relates to human behavior. Her location of monstrosity in the protagonists themselves especially offers a new way of thinking about teen dystopic novels that engage horror as a means of conveying identities assaulted by external forces.

Rhonda V. Wilcox’s “Forced Glory: Katniss Everdeen, Bella Swan, and Varieties of Virginity” contrasts Twilight’s Bella Swan and The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen. There are many parallels between the characters, from triumph despite low self-esteem within a first-person narrative to being forced to wear elaborate outfits that serve as signs of power. In early repudiation of marriage and the mother, they reflect the pattern of independence illustrated in Janice Radway’s conceptualization of the romance heroine. Virginity is also central to this pattern, where mental impermeability offers a metaphoric echo. Ultimately, where the characters most differ is in agency. Bella’s protection from (mental) penetration is an inborn ability that helps assimilate her into patriarchy. By contrast, Katniss pretends to have sex while being able to choose virginity. She purposefully and much later chooses procreation, while Bella and Edward assert that in their love, they had no choice.

This chapter argues that screen stories are often didactic; either explicitly or implicitly, they make a sociomoral or political case. They cue spectators to judge, believe, and feel in certain ways toward characters, situations, and other entities, both fictional and actual. They also promote certain moral sensitivities, actions, responses, and beliefs. Stories are like trolley problems more fully narrativized. Screen stories offer evidence and affective incentives to make judgments, and to have sensitivities, beliefs, and responses, cued by the narration. Chief among these incentives are various sorts of affective pleasures that reward spectators for their cooperation and the fact that public narratives may draw on the forces of social attunement. The chapter ends with a discussion of the qualities of stories that make them persuasive, according to contemporary social science.

The book's conclusion argues that the commodification of the family is at the heart of the consumer culture of religion. In order to resist the hold of consumer life, the family must be reimagined as an assumed structure of economic, social, and ethical dependence.

This introduction starts off by situating the music of Steve Reich both in relation to popular culture (film, contemporary fiction, and popular music) and as the subject of serious musicological study. An overview of the ever-changing landscape of Reich scholarship is then provided—from formal analyses to approaches that seek to view the composer’s music through the prism of the “new musicology.” The introduction concludes by arguing that the gap between discourse and practice is sometimes extensive. Reich’s own reflections can at times obfuscate more complex realities that lie under the surface. In encompassing sketch studies, discourse analysis and reception history, hermeneutic investigations, intertextual studies, historical timelines and contexts, harmonic and formal analysis, philosophical and religious ruminations, and deep archival digging, this volume draws on a wide range of perspectives that contribute a wealth of knowledge and learning that complements Reich’s own writings.