Lost Objects Of Desire

This first book-length critical study of Jeremy Irons concentrates on his key performances and acting style. Through the analysis of some of the major screen roles in Irons's career, such as Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reversal of Fortune, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers and Lolita, Mark Nicholls identifies a new masculine identity that unites them: an emblematic figure of the 1980s and 1990s presented as an alternative to the action hero or the common man. Using clear explanations of complex theoretical ideas, this book investigates Jeremy Irons's performances through the lens of sexual inversion and social rebellion, to uncover an entirely original but recognizable screen type.

'Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life' - Raven Leilani, author of Luster A Best Book of the Summer in The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly,Vogue, Esquire and Refinery29 A university student is flying home to visit her family when she strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son's wedding, her own life unravelling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother's visit prompts a family's reckoning with its old taboos. In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives – from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly lapse. Tender, lucid and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition, each more startling than the last - a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent. 'A debut story collection of the rarest kind . . . you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel.' — Entertainment Weekly Clare Sestanovich named one of The National Book Foundation's '5 under 35'.

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Showcasing some of the most important current research in football studies, this book demonstrates the value of social theory and sociology in helping us to better understand the world’s favourite sport. This book sheds critical new light on key issues in contemporary football, with each chapter using a different theoretical lens, drawing on the work of key thinkers from Elias and Foucault to Hall and Maffesoli. It explores issues and topics central to the study of modern football, including homophobia, feminist-informed coaching practice, the racialised experiences of black professional footballers, the concussion crisis and the role of identity in online football communities. It also looks ahead at the issues that are likely to define the research agenda in football studies in years to come. This is fascinating reading for any student or researcher with an interest in football, the sociology of sport, social theory or social issues in wider society.

The Ideology of Competition in School Music explores competition as a structuring force in school music and provides critiques of that system from multiple philosophical and theoretical perspectives. Competition is seen by many music teachers, students, and supporters as natural and inevitable--a taken-for-granted aspect of music education or an irresistible force, rather than a choice. This book uncovers this ideological nature of competition and examines its effect on student learning, teacher agency, and equity within music education. It considers ways in which music educators might reconsider the role of competition in their teaching practice and offers alternative frameworks for organizing school music. In this book, author Sean Robert Powell views competition as a microcosm of the wider neoliberal capitalist society, in which subjects are interpellated in an antagonistic competitive field as market logic dictates a system of accountability, reduction, and audit culture. Music teachers, students, and education administrators, consciously and unconsciously, reinforce, replicate, and sustain the competitive structure, even if they do so while expressing a cynical disavowal. Powell considers competition broadly, including, for example: formal competitions between schools in which ensembles are given numerical scores and ranked; "festivals" in which groups are given ratings based on pre-given criteria; state, regional, and national honor ensembles; hierarchical arrangements within school music programs; or simply the pursuit of social prestige, reputation, and ever-higher performance standards. Although the book provides examples from the competitive landscape of school music in the United States (and, especially, Texas, considered a "hyper" example of competitive culture), Powell's analyses and discussions are relevant to readers in any context around the world. Although the degree to which competitive achievement as an explicitly-stated aim of instruction varies from program to program and location to location, the "realism" of neoliberal capitalism--and its effect on all aspects of education--is a global phenomenon.

There has been a long-standing and mutually-informing association between psychoanalysis, literature and the arts. Surprisingly, given the oral/aural basis of the ‘talking cure’, music has largely been overlooked by psychoanalysis. Notably, neuroscientific research investigating music reception and production has been steadily increasing in range and scope over the years. However, in order to avoid confounding factors, empirical studies have focused primarily on non-vocal music. Remarkably, operatic vocal music has not featured prominently in either field. Yet the multi-dimensional, multi-layered nature of opera, which fuses together a number of different arts, would appear to provide fertile soil for both disciplines. This book aims to fill that gap, providing a stepping stone for further research. It leverages the individual strengths of psychoanalysis and neuroscience both separately and jointly as the inter-discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. By combining various theories of mind with knowledge about music processing in the brain, this book comprehensively examines the operatic reception experience, providing an account in subjective as well as objective terms. It explores the bittersweet enjoyment of operatic vocal music, which can literally move an operaphile to tears. The explanation for this may be found in a number of subjective dynamics that are unique to the reception of opera, rather than in any distinct objective neural processes, which are common to the reception of all music. These subjective dynamics, which are recruited during neural processing, are triggered by the equally unique features of the operatic voice, in combination with a number of auxiliary elements that are specific to opera. This book will be of interest to academics in a broad range of science and arts disciplines related to music perception and performance, such as music psychology and operatic performance. It may also appeal to passionate operaphiles who wish to understand what drives their addiction!

A 12-year-old boy, mourning the death of his mother, takes refuge in the myths and fairytales she always loved--and finds that his reality and a fantasy world start to meld.

This thoroughly updated third edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism and postcolonial criticism. This new edition features: a major expansion of the chapter on postcolonial criticism that includes topics such as Nordicism, globalization and the ‘end’ of postcolonial theory, global tourism and global conservation an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts a list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.