Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Psychopragmatics
- Book Review,
by Angela B. Moorjani
From Book News, Inc.
Moorjani (French and intercultural communication, U. of Maryland) presents a psychopragmatic notion of the cultural unconscious and various interpretations of the femininity fetish, with studies of the postcolonial unconscious, aesthetic paradoxes and perplexities, the phallic woman and the pregnant man, skin fetishism, and other topics.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR
Book Description
Do the meanings of the innumerable fetish-signs appearing in recent artworks depend on the senders' intentions? Is the meaning of postfeminist glamour the celebration of femininity that its practitioners tout to counter ersatz macho posturing? To fully examine and clarify these and other issues involving gender, postcolonial, and artistic otherness, this book argues for a more adequate view of performativity than presently available from speech-act theory and certain strains of linguistic pragmatics. In drawing simultaneously on Charles Sander Peirce’s pragmatic analysis of signs, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic inquiry, and radical feminist thought, the concern of Beyond Fetishism is with the ethical and aesthetic import of the psychopragmatics resulting from this intermingling.
Card catalog description
"Do the meanings of the innumerable fetish-signs appearing in recent artworks depend on the senders' intentions? Is the meaning of postfeminist glamor the celebration of femininity that its practitioners tout to counter ersatz macho posturing? How are pregnant-father figurations in religion, folk tales, art, and Hollywood related to "feminine writing"? What is one to make of the fetishization of skin occurring all around us? And what if men and women have been fetishizing femininity all along despite orthodox interpretations of fetish-signs as stand-ins for a single male body part? To fully examine and clarify these and other issues involving gender, postcolonial, and artistic otherness, this book argues for a more adequate view of performativity than presently available from speech-act theory and certain strains of linguistic pragmatics. In drawing simultaneously on Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic analysis of signs, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic inquiry, and radical feminist thought, the concern of Beyond Fetishism is with the ethical and aesthetic import of the psychopragmatics resulting from this intermingling."--BOOK JACKET.
About the Author
Angela Moorjani is Professor of French at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
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