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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.
List of contents
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.- 4. Chapter Four: Disney Fantasy as the Discourse of the Other.- 5. Chapter Five: Disneyland and the Perversity of Disney Fantasy.- 6. Chapter Six: Disney, Pixar, and Neoliberal Nostalgia.- 7. Chapter Seven: Conclusion: The Empire Expands: Star Wars as Disney Fantasy.
About the author
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).
Summary
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 neoliberalnostalgia 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.
