Synopses & Reviews
Hitchcock gets onto the analyst’s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies. The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as
Rear Window and
Psycho. Starting from the premise that ‘everything has meaning,’ the authors examine the films’ ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of hidden ideological and psychic mechanisms. But Hitchcock is also a bait to lure the reader into a serious Marxist and Lacanian exploration of the construction of meaning.
An extraordinary landmark in Hitchcock studies, this new edition features a brand-new essay by philosopher Slavoj iek, presenter of Sophie Fiennes’s three-part documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.
Contributors: Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Boovi?, Michel Chion, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Stojan Pelko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupan?i? and Slavoj iek.
Synopsis
The contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Windowto Psycho, which is shown to be an exemplary source of postmodern defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning,' the authors analyze the films" ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of ideological and psychic mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is also a bait to lure the reader into a serious Marxist and Lacanian exploration of the construction of meaning. An extraordinary landmark in Hitchcock studies, this edition features a brand new essay by Slavoj Zizek.
Synopsis
Hitchcock gets onto the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies.
About the Author
Slavoj iek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include
Living in the End Times,
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,
In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential iek, and many more.
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.
Renata Salcel is a philosopher and sociologist. She is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology, University of Ljublijana, Slovenia, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Her previous books include The Spoils of Freedom and, edited with Slavoj iek, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects.
Alenka Zupan?i? is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljublijana