Disney and the Dialectic of Desire: Fantasy as Social Practice

This book analyzes Walt Disney’s impact on entertainment, new media, and consumer culture in terms of a materialist, psychoanalytic approach to fantasy. The study opens with a taxonomy of narrative fantasy along with a discussion of fantasy as a key concept within psychoanalytic discourse. Zornado reads Disney’s full-length animated features of the “golden era” as symbolic responses to cultural and personal catastrophe, and presents Disneyland as a monument to Disney fantasy and one man’s singular, perverse desire. What follows after is a discussion of the “second golden age” of Disney and the rise of Pixar Animation as neoliberal nostalgia in crisis. The study ends with a reading of George Lucas as latter-day Disney and Star Wars as Disney fantasy. This study should appeal to film and media studies college undergraduates, graduates students and scholars interested in Disney.

Joseph L. Zornado is Professor of English at Rhode Island College, USA. He is the author of Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (2001/2007) and of a speculative fantasy in three volumes entitled 2050: A Future History, (2014).  He has also co-authored Professional Writing for Social Work Practice (2014) and Professional Writing for the Criminal Justice System (Springer 2017).