Speaking Pictures: Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature [Hardcover]

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.

Alistair Fox is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is author ofJane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema(IUP, 2011), translator of Anne Gillain'sFran?ois Truffaut: The Lost Secret(IUP, 2013), and editor (with Rapha?lle Moine, Hilary Radner, and Michel Marie) ofA Companion to Contemporary French Cinema.

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.

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 Jimfrom Henri-Pierre Roch? to Francois Truffaut
11. The Conversion of AulC-