Youth Fantasies The Perverse Landscape Of The Media

Youth Fantasies is a collection of studies conducted in cross-cultural collaboration over the past ten years that theorizes 'youth fantasy'; as manifested through the media of TV, film, and computer games. Unlike other media studies and education books, the authors employ both Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalytic concepts to attempt to make sense of teen culture and the influence of mass media. The collection includes case studies of X-Files fans, the influence of computer games and the 'Lara Croft' phenomenon, and the reception of Western television by Tanzanian youth. The authors see this book as a much needed reconciliation between cultural studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and attempt to highlight why Lacan is important to note when exploring youth fantasy and interest in the media, especially in shows like X-Files .

Providing a distillation of knowledge in the various disciplines of arts education (dance, drama, music, literature and poetry and visual arts), this essential handbook synthesizes existing research literature, reflects on the past, and contributes to shaping the future of the respective and integrated disciplines of arts education. While research can at times seem distant from practice, the Handbook aims to maintain connection with the live practice of art and of education, capturing the vibrancy and best thinking in the field of theory and practice. The Handbook is organized into 13 sections, each focusing on a major area or issue in arts education research.

Music in Youth Culture examines the fantasies of post-Oedipal youth cultures as displayed on the landscape of popular music from a post-Lacanian perspective. Jan Jagodzinski, an expert on Lacan, psychoanalysis, and education's relationship to media, maintains that a new set of signifiers is required to grasp the sliding signification of contemporary 'youth'. He discusses topics such as the figurality of noise, the perversions of the music scene by boyz/bois/boys and the hysterization of it by gurlz/girls/grrrls. Music in Youth Culture also examines the postmodern 'fan (addict)', techno music, and pop music icons. Jagodzinski raises the Lacanian question of 'an ethics of the Real' and asks educators to re-examine 'youth' culture.

This book argues that we have moved into a new cultural period, automodernity, which represents a social, psychological, and technological reaction to postmodernity. In fact, by showing how individual autonomy is now being generated through technological and cultural automation, Samuels posits that we must rethink modernity and postmodernity.

Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings. Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film’s ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending’s hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator’s sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed. Sheila Kunkle is Associate Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University and the coeditor (with Todd McGowan) of Lacan and Contemporary Film.

States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios engages with the crisis of our capitalist world, with a view to explaining its origins, unravelling its symptoms, and demystifying the anodyne corrective solutions so far proposed. At the same time, it endorses the necessity for utopian interventions aimed at drastically rethinking our social order. Organised around the themes of economy and politics, critical theory, and culture in order to offer an impressive range of thematic perspectives and critical angles, the book delves into the most pressing of today’s quandaries by combining stringent critical analysis with creative foresight. A rigorous examination of the current crisis of late-capitalist society, States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios develops paradigms that promise to rekindle the desire to move beyond capitalism towards a different social order. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences with particular interests in social and political theory, contemporary philosophy and the crises faced by the current capitalist order.

This collection brings together artists and theoreticians to provide the first anthology of a new field: Practical Aesthetics. A work of art already contains its own criticism, a knowledge of its own which need not be conceptual or propositional. Yet today, there are many approaches to different forms of art that work on the brink between science and art, 'sensible cognition' and proposition, aesthetic knowledge and rational knowledge, while thinking with art (or the artistic material) rather than about it. This volumes presents ways of thinking with different forms of art (film, sound, dance, literature, etc), as well as new forms of aesthetic research and presentation such as Media Philosophy, the audiovisual essay, fictocriticism, the audio paper, and Artistic Research. It reveals how writing about art can become 'artistic' or 'poetic' in its own right: not only writing about artistic effects, but producing them in the first place. This takes art not as an object of (external) analysis, but as a subject with a knowledge in its own right, creating a co-composing 'conceptual interference pattern' between theory and practice. A 'practical aesthetics' thus understood, can be described as thinking with art, in order to find new ways to create worlds and thus to make the world perceivable in different ways.