`One of the most interesting theorists in contemporary psychoanalysis, Bollas emphasizes both the creativity of subjectivity itself and the key place of experience in the formation of psychical constructions and fantasy' - Anthony Elliott, Centre for Critical Theory, University of the West of England This eclectic collection of essays reflects the far-reaching, multi-dimensional influence of Christopher Bollas. Bollas galvanises our understanding of what happens when people encounter the objects - the endlessly variegated content - of external reality. Each of us has our own unique idiom through which we endow objects - a painting, a football, a stranger - with special meaning. Bollas has added depth to our understanding of these relationships with vitality rarely found in psychoanalytic writing. The contributors to this volume offer definitions and illustrations that make Bollas' thought accessible for those approaching his work for the first time and illuminating for those more familiar with his canon. The Vitality of Objects reveals the possibilities for self-expression and growth that figure in the process of object relations and shows how and why thinkers and artists from so many different perspectives are attracted to Bollas' thought.
Assessed against comparable documents of Scripture and the Qumran library, the Mishnah shows itself as a triumph of imagination. It exhibits remarkable capacity to think in new and astonishing ways about familiar things. This study compares the Mishnah to four biblical codes and two codes found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The comparison provides perspective upon the uniqueness of the Mishnah in its Israelite context of Scripture and tradition. Linked to Scripture and in dialogue with Scripture, the Mishnah struck out in new paths altogether from those set forth by Scripture's codes and those that imitated them. The capacity to think in fresh ways about the Scripture's own imperatives and their implications attests to the validity of Rabbinic imagination that reaches concrete expression in the Mishnah, a triumph of reconstruction and creative recapitulation.
Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence proposes a striking approach for reading the influences that interlace twentieth-century gay British writers. Focusing on the role of the textual image in literary influence, this book moves toward a new understanding of the interpenetration of literary and visual culture in the twentieth century.
The crime fiction world of the late 1970s, with its increasingly diverse landscape, is a natural beginning for this collection of critical studies focusing on the intersections of class, culture and crime—each nuanced with shades of gender, ethnicity, race and politics. The ten new essays herein raise broad and complicated questions about the role of class and culture in transatlantic crime fiction beyond the Golden Age: How is “class” understood in detective fiction, other than as a socioeconomic marker? Can we distinguish between major British and American class concerns as they relate to crime? How politically informed is popular detective fiction in responding to economic crises in Scotland, Ireland, England and the United States? When issues of race and gender intersect with concerns of class and culture, does the crime writer privilege one or another factor? Do values and preoccupations of a primarily middle-class readership get reflected in popular detective fiction?
Return to Twin Peaks offers new critical considerations and approaches to the Twin Peaks series, as well as reflections on its significance and legacy. With texts that analyze the ways in which readers and viewers endow texts with meaning in light of historically situated and culturally shared emphases and interpretive strategies, this volume showcases the ways in which new theoretical paradigms can reinvigorate and enrich understanding of what Twin Peaks was and what it has become since it went off the air in 1991.
The authors explore the means by which two early 20th-century operas - Debussy's 'Pelléas et Mélisande' (1902) and Bartók's 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle' (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language.
'Little madnesses' are our most deeply felt enthusiasms, investments and attachments in the sphere of culture. The term was coined by the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose work on transitional phenomena grew out of his naming of the transitional object, and extended into preliminary explorations of the crucial role played by cultural experience in a life that feels satisfying. In our socially and culturally sanctioned little madnesses, everyone can find relief from the burden of having to maintain a clear boundary between inner and outer worlds, fantasy and reality, because it is in the space between them that we can find the enthusiasms and passions that excite our creative imaginations. This idea offers intriguing pathways towards understanding how we can engage effectively with the world at a public, social level without setting aside our inner lives, our emotions and our most deeply felt attachments. In Little Madnesses, writers, artists, scholars and experts in a range of fields and disciplines explore the idea of transitional phenomena and consider its potential to extend and deepen our understanding of cultural experience in mental and social life, focusing on the importance of space, place and boundaries in cultural experience; on how we can negotiate media use and cultural identity; and on the aesthetic and creative aspects of cultural experience. Topics covered include cult films, computer use, installation art, trips to the cinema, museums and galleries, the agony and ecstasy of making art and the significance of life stage in cultural experience.
"To Build, form blocks, like a ladder into the sky, into the Earth, to bind the elements, Water and Fire". Like Wittgenstein's this is an attempt to define a personal methodology, which when documented and left behind might help others along a similar path of exploration. I began in an art museum, examining the artifacts of old cultures, Their usable objects which are assumed of "Museum Quality", they were chosen by virtue of being either more desirable than others, having survived the years where others have not, the only pieces left, or for having some special appeal which the others didn't have. It is assumed that they are a reflection of the cultures that they represent, and from them we can deduce the nature of the society which made them. What is the nature of the society that we act in? and how do the objects around us reflect it? What is the nature of the society that we desire? can the making of objects reflecting that desire affect the reality of society and change it, even if only a little, towards what we believe to be desirable? What are the issues of design and production which may have this effect? This is then an attempt to explore some of those issues, and to test them through designing, making and using some special objects.
States that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is as important today, if not more so, as it was at its inception during the 1930s. This title looks at the distinguishing features of this tradition and how it is critical, yet also complementary, of other approaches in the social sciences, especially in sociology.
Explores how literati of China’s mid-Northern Song period developed a social and therapeutic tradition in poetry. Includes a number of translations of the witty poems of the period.
Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? The contributors to this book explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory was founded.
Melanie Klein Today, Volume 1 is the first of two volumes of collected essays devoted to developments in psychoanalysis based on the work of Melanie Klein. The papers are arranged into four groups: the analysis of psychotic patients, projective identification, on thinking, and pathalogical organisation.
