Disney and the Dialectic of Desire

Fantasy as Social Practice

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by Joseph Zornado

Type: Essays
Subject: Studio > Disney Studios
Keywords: Disney, desire, psychoanalysis
Publishing date: 2018
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 269 pages
6 x 8 ¼ inches (15 x 21 cm)

ISBN

978-3-319-87369-5

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Book Presentation:
This book analyzes Walt Disney’s impact on entertainment, new media, and consumer culture in terms of a materialist, psychoanalytic approach to fantasy. The study opens with a taxonomy of narrative fantasy along with a discussion of fantasy as a key concept within psychoanalytic discourse. Zornado reads Disney’s full-length animated features of the “golden era” as symbolic responses to cultural and personal catastrophe, and presents Disneyland as a monument to Disney fantasy and one man’s singular, perverse desire. What follows after is a discussion of the “second golden age” of Disney and the rise of Pixar Animation as neoliberalnostalgia in crisis. The study ends with a reading of George Lucas as latter-day Disney and Star Wars as Disney fantasy. This study should appeal to film and media studies college undergraduates, graduates students and scholars interested in Disney.

About the Author:
Joseph L. Zornado is Professor of English at Rhode Island College, USA. He is the author of Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (2001/2007) and of a speculative fantasy in three volumes entitled 2050: A Future History, (2014). He has also co-authored Professional Writing for Social Work Practice (2014) and Professional Writing for the Criminal Justice System (Springer 2017).

Press Reviews:
"Disney Fantasy is an important book that draws on theorists from Lacan to Baudrillard in order to examine Disney as both a pervasive ideology rooted in various registers of fantasy and as a disimagination machine wedded to a corporate ethos that markets innocence as a tool for profit making. This is a must book to read if you are concerned about the pervasiveness of Disney’s influence globally and its effect upon generations of young people and others." (Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada)

"Joseph Zornado’sDisney and the Dialectic of Desire is a highly sophisticated and original study of the impact Walt Disney’s ‘fantasy’ films had on consumer culture. Using Jacques Lacan’s notions of the symbolic order and how fantasy functions on personal and cultural levels, Zornado traces the perversion of fantasy in the Disney films and theme parks and how this adverse development is related to a neoliberal nostalgia in crisis, as can be seen in the works of George Lucas. Zornado’s critical analysis of Disney and his works is the first to provide a thorough account of Disney and American ‘fantasy’ culture on the couch!" (Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota, USA)

See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan

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