The Future of an Illusion was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The Future of an Illusion documents the pivotal role Constance Penley has played in the development of feminist film theory. Penley analyzes the primary movements that have shaped the field: the conjunction of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis, and the inherent debates surrounding the politics of women and representation. These debates center on the position of women in the classical Hollywood narrative, the construction of the spectator's desire in pornography and eroticism, and the implicitly male bias in psychoanalytically oriented film theory. Essential to anyone studying the sexual policies of representation, The Future of an Illusion ranges from avant-garde films to video, popular cinema, television, literature, and critical and cultural theory.
Constance Penley is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Rochester. A co-editor of the journal Camera Obscura,she is the editor of Feminism and Film Theory.
Studies of Nazi persecution and destruction of Jews have to date largely been based on the accounts of men. And yet gender difference in Western society is so profound that women and men seem to have divergent experiences, speak different languages, and see and hear in dissimilar ways. Denise de Costa's book explores the significance of sex and gender differences in the construction of history and society-specifically, the Nazi genocide of Jews in World War II-by focusing on the writing of two Jewish women, Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum.
De Costa argues that although both of these writers have received much attention, little has been done to understand how the significant difference occasioned by both gender and Jewishness helps to define cultural or personal identity in relation to the Holocaust. De Costa uses a variety of psychoanalytic and feminist theories to approach the writing of Frank and Hillesum. Critiquing as well as employing the concepts of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Simone de Beauvoir among others, she presents a detailed and rich discussion of each writer.
De Costa approaches Anne Frank largely from a psychoanalytical perspective that emphasizes the function of writing itself in the development of self-identity. For Etty Hillesum, she is more concerned with how writing establishes a philosophy, and a faith, that can entertain and is indeed based in doubleness and paradox. Her assessment of these two writers makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust as a cultural and historical phenomenon, of the role of writing in the production and expression of gendered identity, and of the complex relation between women, writing, and culture.
With Sigmund Freud notoriously flummoxed about what women want, any encounter between psychoanalysis and feminism would seem to promise a standoff. But in this lively, often surprising history, Mari Jo Buhle reveals that the twentieth century’s two great theories of liberation actually had a great deal to tell each other. Starting with Freud’s 1909 speech to an audience that included the feminist and radical Emma Goldman, Buhle recounts all the twists and turns this exchange took in the United States up to the recent American vogue of Jacques Lacan. While chronicling the contributions of feminism to the development of psychoanalysis, she also makes an intriguing case for the benefits psychoanalysis brought to feminism.
From the first, American psychoanalysis became the property of freewheeling intellectuals and popularists as well as trained analysts. Thus the cultural terrain that Buhle investigates is populated by literary critics, artists and filmmakers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists—and the resulting psychoanalysis is not so much a strictly therapeutic theory as an immensely popular form of public discourse. She charts the history of feminism from the first wave in the 1910s to the second in the 1960s and into a variety of recent expressions. Where these paths meet, we see how the ideas of Freud and his followers helped further the real-life goals of a feminism that was a widespread social movement and not just an academic phenomenon. The marriage between psychoanalysis and feminism was not pure bliss, however, and Buhle documents the trying moments; most notably the “Momism” of the 1940s and 1950s, a remarkable instance of men blaming their own failures of virility on women.
An ambitious and highly engaging history of ideas, Feminism and Its Discontents brings together far-flung intellectual tendencies rarely seen in intimate relation to each other—and shows us a new way of seeing both.
In this provocative new book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands writing biography makes on the biographer and explores the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis.
A practicing psychoanalyst, a distinguished scholar, and the widely praised biographer of Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt, Young-Bruehl here reflects on the relations between self-knowledge, autobiography, biography, and cultural history. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas--theory of character, for instance--must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory.
Psychoanalytic theory used for biography, she argues, can yield insights for psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the understanding of creativity. Subject to Biography offers not simply the products of an astute mind, but an entrée into the thinking process; it welcomes the reader into the writer's workshop.
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