The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

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 The Jamesonian 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, The Jamesonian 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.

Literature & Fiction

Burnham, Clint

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

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 The Jamesonian 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, The Jamesonian 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.

Jeremy Shaw : DMT: [an Exhibition at the Presentation House Gallery, September 16 until October 24, 2004]

Shaw, Jeremy

Presentation House Gallery

Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (Film Theory in Practice)

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.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Bloomsbury Academic

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 Žižek 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 Žižek'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 Žižekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture (Psychoanalytic Horizons)

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj &#381;i&#382;ek 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 &#381;i&#382;ek'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 &#381;i&#382;ekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Graphics & Design

A doll taped to the hood of a wedding car. A list of favorite cocktails from the eighties. Hide the drugs from your parents and your kids. Kevin Costner in Waterworld: hot or not? Smoke Show is a novel that will astound readers with its audacious, stripped-down narrative set in the mid-nineties about assorted losers, diehards, and lost souls, seen through a hazy filter of bus fumes and cigarette smoke. Told in “real time,” Smoke Show is raw, candid, and amorphous, told through jargon and petty dialogue commonly heard in the street or on public transit. Clint Burnham evokes William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Irvine Welsh in this novel, a confounding period piece that takes no prisoners.

Smoke Show

Literary

Arsenal Pulp Press

The Kootenay School of Writing is an internationally renowned poetry group that came of age in the 1980s. It is best known for its contributions to language poetry, the tradition founded in the early 1970s by Charles Bernstein and others, a direct descendant of the "New American" poetry movement. Using the psychoanalytic criticism of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žizek, novelist and poet Burnham unpacks and demystifies the purposely dense and disjunctive work of KSW poets, arguing that it matters because of its materiality, because of its politics, and because of how the writing, rather than offering a ready-made message, passes the work onto the reader, allowing the reader to create meaning. Burnham identifies three tendencies: the "empty speech" of poets like Kathryn MacLeod, the "social collage" of Jeff Derksen’s work, and the Red Tory "neopastoralism" of Lisa Robertson. He also takes a tour through the KSW archive, unearthing its place in a social history of Vancouverits art, its politics, its tumultuous geography.The Only Poetry That Matters is essential reading for anyone who is interested in contemporary writing, in political art, and in what it means to make meaning.Clint Burnham is an English professor at Simon Fraser University. His books include the novel Smoke Show (Arsenal Pulp Press) and The Jamesonian Unconscious (Duke University Press).

The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing

Part travelogue, part autofiction, part record of living under Western regimes that torture, kidnap, and murder its own citizens and those who wish to cross its borders, White Lie is a collection of super-short fictions. Written to be read in a book, but written on a phone, about that technology, about how our stories today blend into factual-seeming fictions and lying propaganda. Repressed memories of living in repressive societies. Like Tierra Whack's album of one-minute rap songs or Stan Douglas' Monodramas. Shorter than a stand-up comic's joke and longer than a criminal tyrannical president's tweet. A museum room full of paintings you zoom thru in thirty seconds or Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould.New fakes for attention spans that ... what was I saying? Something something the age of distraction. You get me.Clint Burnham's White Lie is a series of quick bursts - hilarious, tragic, and thoughtful in turn. You won't forget these paragraph-length stories because you will read them again and again.

White Lie

Anvil Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Burnham, Clint. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Burnham, Clint

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Burnham, Clint. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Jeremy Shaw : DMT: [an Exhibition at the Presentation House Gallery, September 16 until October 24, 2004]

Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (Film Theory in Practice)

Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (Film Theory in Practice)

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture (Psychoanalytic Horizons)

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture (Psychoanalytic Horizons)

Smoke Show

The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing

White Lie