In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan's contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.

In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan's contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson's theory can help to make sense of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese's film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory.

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Zizek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present. Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Zizek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Zizekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson's theory can help to make sense of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese's film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory.

Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games, television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject, investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Zizek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present. Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Zizek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Zizekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Imagine Fredric Jameson--the world's foremost Marxist critic--kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In TheJamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson's work and career that refines and extends his most important themes.
In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson's major works--including Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism--by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham's study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses, Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory.
Through its redefinition of Jameson's work and compelling reading of the political present, TheJamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory. Written in a style by turns conversational, playful, and academic, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Marxism, critical theory, aesthetics, narratology, and cultural studies, as well as the wide circle of readers who have felt and understood Jameson's influence.