Critical fantasy studies
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.
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
-
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Cited by 1 other publications
De Cleen, Benjamin, Jana Goyvaerts, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos & Yannis Stavrakakis
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