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.
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 neoliberal nostalgia 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.
1. Introduction: What is Fantasy?.-
2.
Chapter Two: Capital, Crisis and the Rise of Disney Fantasy.- 3.
Chapter Three: Walt Disney, Snow White, and Trauma of the Real.-
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Chapter Four: Disney Fantasy as the Discourse of the Other.-
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Chapter Five: Disneyland and the Perversity of Disney Fantasy.-
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Chapter Six: Disney, Pixar, and Neoliberal Nostalgia.-
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Chapter Seven: Conclusion: The Empire Expands: Star Wars as Disney Fantasy.
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).
