Speaking Pictures
Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature

Alistair Fox (Author)

9780253020871

Hardback, published 21 March 2016

310 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.572 kg

"Very rich argumentation that progressively constructs its object, shifting with much skill from the conceptual elaboration of its global perspective to the various concrete examples of works approached so to give it flesh and blood."—Raymond Bellour, film critic, theorist, and author of The Analysis of Film

Alistair Fox presents a theory of literary and cinematic representation through the lens of neurological and cognitive science in order to understand the origins of storytelling and our desire for fictional worlds. Fox contends that fiction is deeply shaped by emotions and the human capacity for metaphorical thought. Literary and moving images bridge emotional response with the cognitive side of the brain. In a radical move to link the neurosciences with psychoanalysis, Fox foregrounds the interpretive experience as a way to reach personal emotional equilibrium by working through autobiographical issues within a fictive form.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Changing Configurations in Theories of Fictive Representation
2. Why Does Fictive Representation Exist?
3. The Wellsprings of Fictive Creativity
4. The Materials of Fictive Invention
5. The Informing Role of Fantasy
6. The Shaping of Fictive Scenarios by the Author: Motivations, Strategies, and Outcomes
7. The Exploitation of Generic Templates and Intertexts as Vehicles for Affect-Regulation
8. Theories of Reception in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
9. A Neuropsychoanalytic Theory of Reception
10. Intersubjective Attunement, Filiation and the Re-creative Process: Jules and Jim—from Henri-Pierre Roché to Francois Truffaut
11. The Conversion of Autobiographical Emotion into Symbolic Figuration: William Shakespeare's Hamlet
12. Tracking a Personal Myth through an Oeuvre: the Films of François Ozon
Conclusion
Filmography
Select Bibliography
Index