Article published in:
Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice
Edited by Benjamin De Cleen, Jana Goyvaerts, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos, Yannis Stavrakakis and Ilija Tomanić Trivundža
[Journal of Language and Politics 20:1] 2021
► pp. 95–111

Critical fantasy studies

| University of Essex
Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the category of fantasy, from a theoretical point of view. Importantly, however, I also argue that the qualification ‘critical’ in Critical Fantasy Studies captures something about how such studies can draw out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of psychoanalytic insights and observations, and thus become part of a broader enterprise in critical theoretical and empirical research.
Keywords: fantasy, discourse theory, poststructuralism, discourse analysis, post-marxism, normative critique, critique of ideology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Critical fantasy studies as a frontier of post-Marxist discourse theory
  • 3.Fantasy and/in post-Marxist discourse theory
  • 4.Questions of theory: Fantasy & enjoyment
  • 5.Questions of critique: Normative and ideological critique
  • 6.Concluding caveat: Not all that is not conscious is unconscious
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20052.gly
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De Cleen, Benjamin, Jana Goyvaerts, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos & Yannis Stavrakakis
2021. Moving discourse theory forward. Journal of Language and Politics 20:1 ► pp. 22 ff. Crossref logo

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