Ideological Fantasy Research Articles

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (review)

infant daughter to SIDS), his confused flight, several years earher, from a teaching career and his current troubled relationship with a sexually manipulative kleptomaniac—the length of the novel seems fully justified . What's noteworthy is how weU Lamb orchestrates it all. This is a story full of characters, all of whom seem to have Uves as compUcated as Dominick's, but' because they're aU seen from the perspective of the protagonist 's search for self-knowledge and acceptance, the whole is remarkably integrated—even the strange and gruesome journal of Dominick's Italian grandfather, which Lamb interpolates in its entirety. In fact, the journal is one of the highlights of the novel and features by far the best villain in the book. By contrast, Lamb's other characters, even the Ul-doers, are a little too soft, a Uttle too nice. Even the worst of them is easily and neatly redeemed in the end. It seems like hair-spUtting to criticize this good, big, absorbing book, but a touch less earnestness wouldn't have hurt. (ES) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David S. Landes Norton, 1998, 650 pp., $30 One of the most vexing questions of aU time is why millions of people living on land masses called North America or Western Europe possess health, food and material goods unimaginable to miUions of other people living on different land masses such asAfrica. David S. Landes, a professor of history and economics at Harvard University, devotes 524 pages of text and 110 pages of citations to exploring the answers. Landes does not settle the matter fuUy. Who could? But perhaps he comes closer than most. While he discounts opposing theories based on colonial-era racism or current poUtical correctness, he does not entirely dismiss them. "We shaU see that both of these manichean visions have elements of truth as weU as of ideological fantasy," Landes comments. "Things are always more complicated than we would have them." Though he rejects the notion that Western Europeans and their American descendents are inherently superior to Africans, Landes refuses to ignore the East-West dichotomy or its racial impUcations. To state that European peoples did no more than ride on the backs of less Western tribes "is patently incorrect," Landes declares. "As the historical record shows, for the last thousand years Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity ." Obviously not concerned about winning popularity contests, Landes is an iconoclast throughout his thick book. He refuses to completely discard the concept of Eurocentrism just because it offends certain races and ethnic groups. "I prefer truth to goodthink ," he says. "I feel surer of my ground." He should. Any polymath who has inspected the academic literature, then employed his common sense the way Landes has, is bound to feel confident. Fortunately, though, his confidence does not degenerate into smugness. Most of all, Landes wants to be seen as an out-there-inthe -trenches humanitarian. 208 · The Missouri Review Geography is not destiny, he concludes . So what contributes to economic inequality? Landes' conjectures, many of them backed by hard-toobtain evidence, are sometimes persuasive and almost always eloquently stated. (SW) Freedomland by Richard Price Broadway, 1998, 546 pages, $25 Richard Price has followed up Clockers with another novel about racial tensions in urban America. Again he has the voices down perfectly : the young black toughs, the black policeman, his Irish counterpart , the ambitious reporter. Set, like Clockers, in Dempsy, New Jersey, Freedomland is the story of a single white mother, Brenda Martin, who claims that her car with her small child strapped inside was hijacked near the "projects." Lorenzo Council, a cop who grew up in those same projects, is assigned to investigate the case. He interviews Brenda, walks her through the crime scene, tries to keep her policeman brother from inflaming the situation and begins to suspect that the "crime" did not happen in the way that she claims. Also investigating is Jesse Haus, a reporter, the daughter of a radical, who faUs into a close relationship with Brenda. EventuaUy, though, she too,becomes suspicious of Brenda 's claims...

Formations, Locations and Reproductions of Fascist Fantasies

The conjunction of fascism and fantasy inevitably recalls Klaus Theweleit's extensive two volume study of Freikorps' Male Fantasies (1987). Now a decade later, four books-representing some of most important, innovative scholarly work on fascism-shift our focus to literal and figurative matrices of fascist fantasies-women. The naturalization of motherhood; fantasy of harnessing as literal reproductive organs of fascist collectivity; representation of sexualized violation, and destruction of signifiers of feminine to demarcate sexual and economic autarky: given these staples of fascist ideological fantasies, women's roles in, accommodations to, and revisions of gendering of power in Italian fascism and National Socialism--one of main foci of these studies-make a particularly compelling topic for analysis. It is safe to say, without leveling out specificities of particular historical and political articulations of fascism, as ideology and/or regime, that fascist ideology recognized and celebrated insofar as they remained in domestic, or private, sphere as mothers and wives, while it also called upon them to participate politically. And yet, as each author here asks, what do we know about affiliated with, or supportive of, fascism, yet excluded by narrow gender prescriptions of such an ideological filter: unmarried; childless; those who occupied a public role; those whose defense of women's rights made them intolerant of misogyny of reproductive scripts and disdainful of paucity of roles accorded to them in fascist ideology? How do negotiate, or rewrite, what Barbara Spackman refers to as the fascist topography of sex and gender-the boundaries of public and private space-when, as she observes in discursive regime of Italian fascism, stepping out into public sphere 'masculinizes' and 'sterilizes' women, and production and reproduction are strictly, and asymmetrically, linked for men and women (35). Negotiating and renegotiating public and private space constitutes not only objective of fascist ideology; it is also

Review: Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas by Timothy Murray

Review: Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas by Timothy Murray

: Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas . Timothy Murray.

: Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas . Timothy Murray.

Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas

Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas

The sublime object of ideology

In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. Zizek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a 'post-ideological' world ignores the fact that 'even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them'. Rejecting postmodernism's unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.

Another Look at Lacan and Literary Criticism

deterritorialized version of was recently published in this journal.2 This turn of events would appear to call for a realignment in the critical debate. It would be absurd to begin this latest account by attempting to review psychoanalytic criticism, but equally absurd to make a foray into without giving some indication of the kind of it has displaced, if only in order to show how the presuppositions of traditional psychoanalytic have been challenged and made to serve a different purpose. This is not how the editors of the latest anthology of Literature and Psychoanalysis see it: spins ideological fantasies as he reinterprets and co-authors the text. As in actual analysis, anything goes. An ideological version of what the patient does in analysis is applied to the study of literature.3 This is surely right insofar as we all spin ideological But the implication of the above assertion is that am a critic, you are a reader, he is a spinner of ideological fantasies. The question to which I am addressing myself is what has made so attractive, both in the sense of attracting adulation and of attracting abuse. Thus the designation Lacanian criticism may be made to stand both for in the mode of Lacan and of the mode of Lacan. It may turn out that the second type, where it is grounded in an informed dissension, will prove to be more productive than the first. My presentation divides itself into three unequal sections: first, I shall briefly allude to the theory and practice of pre-Lacanian criticism, going rapidly over by now familiar territory; second, I shall try to explain in some detail what is implied by Lacan's return to Freud insofar as it has affected literary criticism; third, I want to illustrate how this new has lately become the scene for an anti-Lacanian which is nevertheless grounded in Lacan's return to Freud, which serves as a text providing the material for its own dis