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Anti-Communist hysteria had a wide-ranging impact on Hollywood across the postwar period. As writers, directors and stars came under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) due to the content of their films and their political activities, careers were interrupted indefinitely and Hollywood‘s ability to promote cultural change in the new era following World War II was severely hampered. Frank Sinatra‘s heavy involvement in liberal politics during this period illustrates the problems confronting the American film industry as it attempted to address the country‘s imperfections.
Del Principe argues that a compelling historical and political vision of post-unification Italy lies beneath the preternatural façade of Ugo Tarchettis Fantastic Tales, and that the authors transgressive approach to social realism is a reflection of the vast, cultural transformations of the period. Del Principe proposes correlations between sexual and political realms surfacing in Tarchettis narrative as indicators of mutating class structure and emerging capitalism. An examination of spatial allegories engages a discussion of psychic and physical modes of hysteria and xenophobic reactions that stem from the nationalistic fervor of post-unification Italy.
Not only did Sigmund Freud know literature intimately, and quote liberally from literatures of several languages, he has also inspired twentieth-century writers and philosophers, and created several schools of criticism, in literary and cultural studies. Freud was not just practising psychotherapy on his patients, helping them in difficult situations, but helping them by studying the unconscious as the basis of their problems. This book deals with Freud and psychoanalysis, and begins by analysing the 'Copernican revolution' which meant that psychoanalysis decentres the conscious mind, the ego. It shows how Freud illuminates literature, as Freud needs attention for what he says about literature. The book presents one of Freud's 'case-histories', where he discussed particular examples of analysis by examining obsessional neurosis, as distinct from hysteria. It analyses Freud on memory, in relation to consciousness, repression and the unconscious. Guilt was one of his central topics of his work, and the book explores it through several critical texts, 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', and 'The Ego and the Id'. The book discusses Melanie Klein, a follower of Freud, and object-relations theory, while also making a reference to Julia Kristeva. One of the main strands of thought of Jacques Lacan was the categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, as well as paranoia and madness, which are linked to literature here. The book finally returns to Freud on hysteria, and examines him on paranoia in Daniel Paul Schreber, and the psychosis of the 'Wolf Man'.
Unconscious. These inform what Graham termed the physical gesture that impresses them into an artwork through processes and materials. I want to gloss these insights by introducing more recent formulations of such insights – semiotics and psychoanalysis – precisely to open up, and at the same time destabilize, the issues of embodiment and sexual difference as explored in the previous chapter, with the more radical instability but equally intense psychic freight of hysteria. 6 Claire Pajaczkowska introduces French
’ experience has left around the eyes and mouth of her friend: ‘her portraits and sketches [trace the] unfolding of the soul’ (Maru, 108). The figured begins to figure by figuring the other – itself. How might this concept, this narrative of transfiguration, or indeed self-transfiguration, be more closely related to the question of colonial and postcolonial bodily representation? Here I want to introduce the partial analogy for symbolisation under colonial conditions offered by the Freudian condition of hysteria (the ‘partiality’ will become clearer in a moment). I will take up
bouts of political hysteria—most conspicuously after the Haymarket affair of 1886, in the 1919 Red Scare, and during the McCarthy era of the 1950s—in which the society’s most powerful forces persecuted socialism and communism with a degree of fervor and venom wildly disproportionate to their actual influence in American life. Many theorists and journalistic commentators have asserted that America’s political essence is a liberal democracy impervious to Marxism, often pointing to the country’s unique national formation without feudal antecedents. 8 Engels himself, in
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly argued polemic or through imaginative storytelling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grassroots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal–human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal–human history.
to the problems of a deprived child, whose frustrations born of parental neglect are transferred on to his relations with Baines the butler. The adult world of marital strife, adultery, obsession and hysteria is the eventual destination of the child whose innocence, far from being an idyllic phase, is already compromised in The Fallen Idol through contact with unstable adults. While the film often dwells on the child’s view
the worst pre-war imaginings had the people giving way to hysteria, panic and despair, as they were plunged into CHAP2.p65 74 16/09/02, 09:24 WAR EXPERIENCED: 1939–41 75 the holocaust. A fair assessment of the reality of 1940–41 would first have to acknowledge that, intense though they were while they lasted, the air assaults on London, Coventry and the rest, fell short of the predicted cataclysm. The behaviour that contemporary observers recorded was therefore a reaction to something that might have been incomparably worse and inherently less bearable. That
). The most famous vampire text, Dracula (1897), coincides with the early development of psychoanalysis; its swoon-states express deep anxieties about interference and thought transference, anxieties that also dogged the development of psychoanalysis and Freud's treatment of swooning hysterics. I propose a set of correspondences between the vampiric swoon-states of Dracula , the early hypnotic treatment of hysteria, and psychoanalysis's anxious relation to telepathy and occult modes of thinking. I argue that the swoon iconises a pleasurable softening into