Lost Objects of Desire


Book Description

This first book-length critical study of Jeremy Irons concentrates on his key performances and acting style. Through the analysis of some of the major screen roles in Irons's career, such as Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reversal of Fortune, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers and Lolita, Mark Nicholls identifies a new masculine identity that unites them: an emblematic figure of the 1980s and 1990s presented as an alternative to the action hero or the common man. Using clear explanations of complex theoretical ideas, this book investigates Jeremy Irons's performances through the lens of sexual inversion and social rebellion, to uncover an entirely original but recognizable screen type.




Objects of Desire


Book Description

“A debut story collection of the rarest kind ... you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." —Entertainment Weekly Fresh, intimate stories of women’s lives from an extraordinary new literary voice, laying bare the unexpected beauty and irony in contemporary life A college freshman, traveling home, strikesup an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a family’s reckoning with its old taboos. A wife considers the secrets her marriage once contained. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into a gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives, from the brink of adulthood to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. Tender, lucid, and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last—a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.




The Story Grid


Book Description

WHAT IS THE STORY GRID? The Story Grid is a tool developed by editor Shawn Coyne to analyze stories and provide helpful editorial comments. It's like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells the editor or writer what is working, what is not, and what must be done to make what works better and fix what's not. The Story Grid breaks down the component parts of stories to identify the problems. And finding the problems in a story is almost as difficult as the writing of the story itself (maybe even more difficult). The Story Grid is a tool with many applications: 1. It will tell a writer if a Story ?works? or ?doesn't work. 2. It pinpoints story problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer, revealing exactly where a Story (not the person creating the Story'the Story) has failed. 3. It will tell the writer the specific work necessary to fix that Story's problems. 4. It is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attic drawer. 5. It is a tool that can inspire an original creation.




Objects of Desire


Book Description

Surrealism expanded our reality by drawing upon myths, dreams, and the subconscious as sources of artistic inspiration. Beginning in the 1930s, the movement made a crucial impact on design, and it continues to inspire designers to this day. »Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design« is the first book to document this fascinating conversation. It includes numerous essays and a comprehensive selection of images which traces these reciprocal exchanges by juxtaposing exemplary artworks and design objects. Among the featured artists and designers are Gae Aulenti, Achille Castiglioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, ntoni Gaudí, Frederick Kiesler, René Magritte, Carlo Mollino, Meret Oppenheim, and many others. The book is rounded off with historical text material as well as short texts and statements by contemporary designers. This in- depth examination makes one thing abundantly clear: form does not always follow function -- it can also follow our obsessions, our fantasies, and our hidden desires.




Everyday Extraordinary


Book Description

The concept of fetishism has long been a window through which philosophers, psychoanalysts and cultural anthropologists have looked in order to critically examine the nature of beliefs, sexual interests and material values, and it remains today a vital interpretive paradigm. The enduring interest in fetishism gives testimony to the fact that its status and significance have yet to be fully resolved. In the attempt to further clarify this ambiguous and often mystifying phenomenon, the contributors to Everyday Extraordinary: Encountering Fetishism with Marx, Freud and Lacan have taken a fresh look at the fundamental dynamic of fetishism through the lenses of its most influential interpreters?not only Marx, Freud and Lacan, but also Derrida, Mannoni and Pietz.In this collection of essays, the philosophical approach joins forces with the psychoanalytic, and the psychoanalytic with the aesthetic and mythological, often with striking results. Emerging from the essays contained in this volume is a notion of fetishism as a response to a crisis of meaning: personal, social or religious. The fetish mediates the crisis that arises when a system of meaning and identity is confronted with something that threatens it with dissolution, whether this threat arises from an excessive and traumatic figure of alterity, or from the loss of the ground on which ones certainty had been staked. And the stakes of this confrontation are indeed high, as the fetish is here seen as an object having a profound influence on the life of desire, now leading to a symbolic blossoming of the mundane, now into perverse repetition and the refusal of change.




Object of Desire


Book Description

"It's always been golden for you, Danny. You've always been the golden boy." Danny Fortunato seemed to have it all. He was cute, funny, sexy, smart--the hottest go-go boy in West Hollywood. When he danced on stage, all eyes were upon him and all men desired him. But something always kept Danny from ever really believing he was the golden boy that others said he was. . . Twenty years later, living in Palm Springs, Danny is celebrating his 41st birthday--although "celebrating" might not be the right word for how he feels about his life today. To the outside world, he's still golden: he still has his looks, and he still loves Frank, his boyfriend of nearly two decades. But something is missing in his life. Passion. Romance. Adventure. The same something that's been missing ever since that day when he turned fourteen, when his sister Becky disappeared and his whole world flipped upside-down. . . Filled with unforgettable warmth, incorrigible humor, and irresistible charm, Object of Desire takes readers through three milestone eras in one man's life--his youth in the 1970s, his days of abandon in the 1980s, and his more sober, reflective existence today--and reaffirms William J. Mann's reputation as one of gay fiction's major narrative powers. "Mann's vivid style is a treat." --Publishers Weekly "Mann's writing is smart, aware and cognizant enough to take a well-practiced theme and give it a shot in the arm." --Instinct




Reclaiming Desire


Book Description

I'm so busy and tired, how can I find time for sex? How can I go from mommy one minute to passionate lover the next? What medicines or natural herbs can I take to improve my libido? At some point in their lives, most women experience a decline in their sexual desire. Yet despite the vast number of books devoted to sex, surprisingly few focus on the problem of low libido. Fewer still offer any practical advice to the woman who has lost her sex drive and longs to find it again. Reclaiming Desire presents the holistic approach that gynecologist Andrew Goldstein and clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon—co-founders of the Sexual Wellness Center in Annapolis, Maryland—use to successfully treat women with low libido. Capitalizing on their combined medical and psychological expertise, they reveal how a complex set of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual factors—as well as specific life-changing events such as marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, divorce, and menopause—can affect female sex drive. Reading this book, women will come to understand that low libido isn't "all in their heads"—or all in their bodies, for that matter. The problem is real and it's diverse—but it's curable.




South Korean Film


Book Description

South Korean Film: Critical and Primary Sources is an essential three-volume reference collection representing three distinct phases in the development of South Korean national cinema, foregrounding how epochal characteristics inform the way in which the national cinema represents the penetrating thematic concern of auteur-ship, genre, spectatorship, gender, and nation, as well as the way in which these themes find expression in distinct visual styles and forms.




Capitalism and Desire


Book Description

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.




Lost Beyond Telling


Book Description

In seeking to give voice to absent things or lost experiences, Richard Stamelman says, modern poetry attempts to give absence a shape. Loss, in his view, is both the cause and the subject of the modern poem. Fittingly, in Lost beyond Telling he formulates and develops what he calls a poetics of loss, with which he frames his treatment of modern French poetry.