Incorporating Cultural Theory

Download or read book Incorporating Cultural Theory written by John O'Neill and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2002-04-25 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incorporating Cultural Theory addresses the status of the body and sexuality in cultural criticism by focusing on issues of sexuality, intimacy, and identity. With a perspective grounded in body politics, O'Neill offers careful but contesting studies of theorists including Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Freud, Lacan, Hegel, Parsons, and Merleau-Ponty, that amplify his own overarching theoretical framework. Concluding chapters demonstrate the practicality of the author's body-political critical theory, offering analyses of Jurassic Park and the London Millennium Dome as cyborg practices designed to bypass the reproductive anxieties of bodies, families, and communities by shape-shifting the loss of a civic boundary. The overarching frame of the book—maternity at the millennium—provides a unique topic for using psychoanalysis to reconsider cultural studies, and O'Neill argues throughout for keeping cultural studies focused on wholeness and integration, instead of the fragmentation and alienation embraced by postmodern theoretical excesses.