Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Žižek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Žižek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Žižek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Žižekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Žižek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek affirms Žižek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Žižekian criticism. Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Žižek

Hitchcock gets onto the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies. The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as Rear Window and Psycho. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning,' the authors examine the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of hidden ideological and psychic mechanisms. But Hitchcock is also a bait to lure the reader into a serious Marxist and Lacanian exploration of the construction of meaning. An extraordinary landmark in Hitchcock studies, this new edition features a brand-new essay by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, presenter of Sophie Fiennes's three-part documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Contributors: Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovi?, Michel Chion, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Stojan Pelko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupan'i? and Slavoj Zizek.

'A modernist work of art is by definition 'incomprehensible'; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated. What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: it objects par excellence are products with mass appeal; the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange their initial homeliness: 'you think what you see is a simple melodrama your granny would have no difficulty in following? Yet without taking into account the difference between symptom and sinthom/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father ... you've totally missed the point!' if there is an author whose name epitomises this interpretive pleasure of 'estranging' the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock (and—useless to deny it—this book partakes unrestrainedly in this madness).' Hitchcock is placed on the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies, as its contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an exemplar of 'postmodern' defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning', the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into 'serious' Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies. Contributors: Frederic Jameson, Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovic, Michel Chion, Mlladen Dolar, Stojan Pellko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek.

This collection of essays displays the range and breadth of Hitchcock scholarship and assesses the significance of his body of work as a bridge between the fin de siecle culture of the 19th century and the 20th century. It engages with Hitchcock's characteristic formal and aesthetic preoccupations.

Mexican Literature in Theory is the first book in any language to engage post-independence Mexican literature from the perspective of current debates in literary and cultural theory. It brings together scholars whose work is defined both by their innovations in the study of Mexican literature and by the theoretical sophistication of their scholarship. Mexican Literature in Theory provides the reader with two contributions. First, it is one of the most complete accounts of Mexican literature available, covering both canonical texts as well as the most important works in contemporary production. Second, each one of the essays is in itself an important contribution to the elucidation of specific texts. Scholars and students in fields such as Latin American studies, comparative literature and literary theory will find in this book compelling readings of literature from a theoretical perspective, methodological suggestions as to how to use current theory in the study of literature, and important debates and revisions of major theoretical works through the lens of Mexican literary works.

Slavoj Žižek is one of today's leading theorists, whose polemical works span topics from German idealism to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Shakespeare to Beckett, and from Hitchcock to Lynch. Critical through and through of both post-modern ideological complacencies-e.g., the death of the subject and the return to ethics-and pre-modern ones-e.g., the re-enchantment of the world, the embrace of postcritique-Žižek doubles down on the virtues of the modern, on what it means to be modern, and to ask modern questions (about the subject, nature, and political economy) in the age of the Anthropocene. This volume takes up the challenges laid out by Žižek's iconoclastic thinking and its reverberations in an array of fields: philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, literary studies, and film studies, among others. Žižek's multi-disciplinary appeal attests to the provocation, if not scandal, of his politically incorrect thought. Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism makes the force and inventiveness of Žižek's writings accessible to a wide range of students and scholars invested in the open question of modernism and its legacies.

Slavoj Žižek's prolific comments on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, scapegoating, popular nationalism, the refugee crisis, Eurocentrism, the War on Terror, neocolonialism, global justice, and rioting comprise a dizzying array of thinking. But what can we pull out of his various writings and commentaries on race in the contemporary world? Is there anything approaching a Žižekian philosophy of race? Zahi Zalloua argues here that there is and that the often polemical style of Žižek's pronouncements shouldn't undermine the importance and urgency of his work in this area. Zalloua not only examines Žižek's philosophy of race but addresses the misconceptions that have arisen and some of the perceived shortcomings in his work to date. Žižek on Race also puts Žižek in dialogue with critical race and anti-colonial studies, dwelling on the sparks struck up by this dialogue and the differences, gaps, and absences it points up. Engaging Žižek's singular contribution to the analysis of race and racism, Žižek on Race both patiently interrogates and critically extends his direct comments on the topic, developing more fully the potential of his thought. In a response to the book, Žižek boldly reaffirms his theoretical stance, clarifying further his often difficult-to-work-out positions on some of his more controversial pronouncements.