Jennifer Friedlander

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Jennifer Friedlander is an American cultural studies scholar.

Contents

Friedlander received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh, and also a Ph.D. Certificate [ further explanation needed ] in Cultural Studies. [1]

She is the Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California and chair of the Media Studies Department. [2]

Friedlander describes her academic work as being heavily informed by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, critical theory, and the work of Roland Barthes, expressed in her book Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism. Earlier, she had focused more on feminist film theory and had written Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion. [3]

In the first half of 2021, Friedlander was Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, [4] where she worked on a new monograph ("Powers of Pleasure: The Psychopolitics of Enjoyment in Media and Popular Culture") and taught a Master's seminar at the University of Vienna. [5]

Books

Real Deceptions contends, in opposition to many enduring understandings, that realism’s radical political potential emerges not by revealing deception but precisely by staging deceptions – particularly deceptions that imperil the very categories of true and false. Deception, Friedlander argues, does not function as an obstacle to truth, but rather as a necessary lure for snaring the truth. Rather than seeking to unearth the truth behind fiction, this book argues that we would do better to turn our attention to the truth of fiction. Friedlander draws upon insights from a range of cultural theorists, most notably Jacques Rancière, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard. [6]
Friedlander examines how the Lacanian concept of sexuation provides a context for a new understanding of the interactions of feminism, psychoanalysis, and spectatorship.[ citation needed ]
  • "Feminine Look continuously retells and (re)explores several theories as Friedlander employs them to contrast the inscribed and approved methods of late twentieth-century scholarly work on sexuation and spectatorship, and as she explores her conceptualization and subversion of these theories she suggests a new politics of the image as well as a new theoretical approach." — Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies[ citation needed ]
  • "Friedlander [contributes to] the field of feminist visual-media theory and female spectatorship by returning to its origins in Lacanian studies. By reinvestigating the role Lacan played in those studies, vis-à-vis Freud, Saussure, and Barthes, she creates a playful new space for contemplating the gendered look. She also offers a theoretical account of how contemporary photography and other technological 'gaze' media represent gendered images through unconscious and linguistic devices." — Laura Hinton[ citation needed ]
  • "Most of the recent work on the feminine look, while not as critical of pleasure [as previous work], has not reincorporated psychoanalysis. Jenniefer Friedlander's Feminine Look works to fill this lacuna as it brings these components back together again to argue for a feminist theory of the feminine look that incorporates pleasure rather than reacting against it." — Hilary Neroni [7]

Related Research Articles

Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Lacan</span> French psychoanalyst and writer (1901–1981)

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.

Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separated into two waves. The first wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s.

The matheme is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The term matheme "occurred for the first time in the lecture Lacan delivered on November 4th, 1971 [...] Between 1972 and 1973 he gave several definitions of it, passing from the use of the singular to the use of the plural and back again".

In continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, jouissance is the transgression of a subject's regulation of pleasure. It is linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved, which spontaneously compels the subject to transgress the prohibitions imposed on enjoyment and to go beyond the pleasure principle. Beyond this limit, pleasure then becomes pain, before this initial "painful principle" develops into what Jacques Lacan called jouissance; it is suffering, epitomized in Lacan's remark about "the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such". He also linked jouissance to the castration complex, and especially to the aggression of the death drives.

Identification refers to the automatic, subconscious psychological process in which an individual becomes like or closely associates themselves with another person by adopting one or more of the others' perceived personality traits, physical attributes, or some other aspect of their identity. The concept of identification was founded by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the 1920’s, and has since been expanded on and applied in psychology, social studies, media studies, and literary and film criticism. In literature, identification most often refers to the audience identifying with a fictional character, however it can also be employed as a narrative device whereby one character identifies with another character within the text itself.

In continental philosophy, the Real refers to the remainder of reality that cannot be expressed, and which surpasses reasoning. In Lacanianism, it is an "impossible" category because of its opposition to expression and inconceivability. The Real Order is a topological ring (lalangue) and ex-ists as an infinite homonym.

[T]he real in itself is meaningless: it has no truth for human existence. In Lacan's terms, it is speech that "introduces the dimension of truth into the real."

The Symbolic is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.

<i>The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis</i> 1973 seminar by Jacques Lacan

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the 1978 English-language translation of a seminar held by Jacques Lacan. The original was published in Paris by Le Seuil in 1973. The Seminar was held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris between January and June 1964 and is the eleventh in the series of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. The text was published by Jacques-Alain Miller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist views on the Oedipus complex</span> Feminist psychoanalytic response to Freuds model of gender identity

Feminists have long struggled with Sigmund Freud's classical model of gender and identity development, which centers on the Oedipus complex. Freud's model, which became integral to orthodox psychoanalysis, suggests that because women lack the visible genitals of the male, they feel they are "missing" the most central characteristic necessary for gaining narcissistic value—therefore developing feelings of gender inequality and penis envy. In his late theory on the feminine, Freud recognized the early and long lasting libidinal attachment of the daughter to the mother during the pre-oedipal stages. Feminist psychoanalysts have confronted these ideas and reached different conclusions. Some generally agree with Freud's major outlines, modifying it through observations of the pre-Oedipal phase. Others reformulate Freud's theories more completely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oedipus complex</span> Idea in psychoanalysis

In classical psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex refers to a son's sexual attitude towards his mother and concomitant hostility toward his father, first formed during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. A daughter's attitude of desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine Oedipus complex. The general concept was considered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), although the term itself was introduced in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

Penis envy is a stage in Sigmund Freud's theory of female psychosexual development, in which young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in a series of transitions toward a mature female sexuality. In Freudian theory, the penis envy stage begins the transition from attachment to the mother to competition with the mother for the attention and affection of the father. The young boy's realization that women do not have a penis is thought to result in castration anxiety.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Naomi Schor</span> American literary critic and theorist

Naomi Schor was an American literary critic and theorist. A pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, she is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory of her time. Naomi's younger sister is the artist and writer Mira Schor.

Psychoanalytic sociology is the research field that analyzes society using the same methods that psychoanalysis applies to analyze an individual.

Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lacanian perspectives contend that the world of language, the Symbolic, structures the human mind, and stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate between Lacanians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergio Benvenuto</span> Italian psychoanalyst

Sergio Benvenuto is an Italian psychoanalyst, philosopher and author. He is researcher for the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Rome. He is Professor Emeritus in Psychoanalysis at the International Institute of Depth Psychology in Kiev. He founded and edited the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Teckyoung Kwon is a literary critic, translator and professor in English literature at the School of English, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, ecology, American and British fiction, narrative theory, neuro-humanities, Korean literature and Dao.

Bruce Fink is an American Lacanian psychoanalyst and a major translator of Jacques Lacan. He is the author of numerous books on Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis, prominent among which are Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995), Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique.

References

  1. "IMS Faculty - Core IMS Faculty". Pitzer College, IMS (Intercollegiate Media Studies) Department. Retrieved May 30, 2021.
  2. "Jennifer Friedlander". Pomona College. June 2015. Retrieved April 7, 2021.
  3. "Meet Jennifer Friedlander". Sigmund Freud Museum. 2021. Retrieved June 3, 2021.
  4. "Jennifer Friedlander". Fulbright Scholar Program. Retrieved May 30, 2021.
  5. "Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis". Sigmund Freud Museum. Retrieved May 30, 2021.
  6. Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism (abstract). Oxford University Press. 2017. ISBN   978-0-19-067616-2 . Retrieved May 30, 2021.
  7. Neroni, Hilary (November 20, 2010). "Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (review)". Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 28 (1): 91–93. doi:10.1080/10509200802441007. S2CID   191258140 . Retrieved May 30, 2021.