The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

The Imaginary Signifier

Abstract: Reduced to its most fundamental approach, any psychoanalytic reflection might be defined in Lacanian terms as an attempt to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic, in the hope of extending the latter by a new province:* an enterprise of displacement, a territorial enterprise, a symbolising advance; that is to say, in the field of films as in other fields, the psychoanalytic itinerary is from the outset a semiological one, even (above all) if in comparison with the discourse of a more classical semiology it shifts from attention to the &nonc6 to concern for the inondation.

Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Abstract: Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit The Ontology of Desire Bodily Paradoxes: Lordship and Bondage Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel Kojeve: Desire and Historical Agency Hyppolite: Desire, Transcience, and the Absolute From Hegel to Sartre Sartre: The Imaginary Pusuit of Being Image, Emotion, and Desire The Strategies of Pre-reflective Choice: Existential Desire in Being and Nothingness Trouble and Longing: The Circle of Sexual Desire in Being and Nothingness Desire and Recognition in Saint Genet and The Family Idiot The Life and Death Struggles of Desire: Hegel and Contemporary French Theory A Questionable Patrilieage: (Post-) Hegelian Themes in Derrida and Foucault Lacan: The Opacity of Desire Deleuze: From Slave Morality to Productive Desire Foucault: Dialectics Unmoored Final Reflections on the "Overcoming" of Hegel

The Play Theory of Mass Communication

Abstract: The literature on mass communication is now dominated by "objective sociological "approaches. What makes the work of Stephenson so unusual is his starting points: his frank willingness to adopt a "subjective "and "psychological "approach to the study of mass communication. In short, this is an internal analysis of how communication processes are absorbed by individuals. The theory of play is not a doctrine of frivolity, but rather a way in which Stephenson gets at such sensitive areas of communication theory as what is screened out and why. Without a notion of the play element in communication one would be led to imagine that every televised docudrama would be immediately lived out by every adolescent. Clearly, this is not the case. People can distinguish quite well between imaginary and real events in mass communication contexts. "The Play Theory of Mass Communication "is a work that studies subjective play, how communication serves the cause of self-enhancement and personal pleasure, and the role of entertainment as an end in itself. In short, for those who are tired of cliche-ridden volumes on the political hidden messages and meanings of communication, or the economic management of media decisions, this volume will come as a refreshment, a piece of entertainment as well as instruction. But with all the emphasis "on "aspects, Stephenson's volume is shrewdly political. He takes up themes ranging from the reduction! of international tensions to the happily alienated worker to such pedestrian events as the reporting of foreign Soviet dignitaries in their visits to democratic cultures. This is, in short, an urbane, wise book--sophisticated in its methodology and critical in its theorizing.

Scraps Of The Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia

Abstract: Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky , Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new "critical dystopias:" Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower , and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It .With its detailed, documented, and yet accessible presentation, Scraps of the Untainted Sky will be of interest to established scholars as well as students and general readers who are seeking an in-depth introduction to this important area of cultural production.

Complying with colonialism : gender, race and ethnicity in the Nordic region

Abstract: Contents: Introduction: postcolonialism and the Nordic models of welfare and gender, Diana Mulinari, Suvi Keskinen, Sari Irni and Salla Tuori Part I Postcolonial Histories/Postcolonial Presents: Colonial complicity: the 'postcolonial' in a Nordic context, Ulla Vuorela The Nordic colonial mind, Mai Palmberg The flipside of my passport: myths of origin and genealogy of white supremacy in the mediated social genetic imaginary, Bolette B. Blaagaard The promise of the 'Nordic' and its reality in the South: the experiences of Mexican workers as members of the 'Volvo family', Diana Mulinari and Nora RAthzel Stranger or family member? Reproducing postcolonial power relations, Johanna Latvala Historical legacies and neo-colonial forms of power? A postcolonial reading of the Bosnian diaspora, Laura Huttunen. Part II Welfare State and Its 'Others': When racism becomes individualised: experiences of racialisation among adult adoptees and adoptive parents of Sweden, Tobias HA binette and Carina Tigervall Contradicting the 'prostitution stigma': narratives of Russian migrant women living in Norway, Jana Sverdljuk Postcolonial and queer readings of 'migrant families' in the context of multicultural work, Salla Tuori 'Experience is a national asset' a postcolonial reading of ageing in the labour market, Sari Irni Licorice boys and female coffee beans: representations of colonial complicity in Finnish visual culture, Leena-Maija Rossi. Part III Doing Nation and Gender: the Civilising Mission 'At Home': Guiding migrants to the realm of gender equality, Jaana Vuori Institutional nationalism and orientalized others in parental education, Nanna Brink Larsen Whose feminism? Whose emancipation?, Chia-Ling Yang 'Honour'-related violence and Nordic nation-building, Suvi Keskinen Index.