Moral spectatorship : technologies of voice and affect in postwar representations of the child / Lisa Cartwright.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cartwright, Lisa, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Children in motion pictures.

Deaf people in motion pictures.

Motion picture audiences--Psychology.

Motion picture audiences.

Physical Description:

x, 287 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.

Summary:

In Moral Spectatorship, Lisa Cartwright rethinks the politics of spectatorship in film studies. Returning to impasses reached in late-twentieth-century psychoanalytic film theory, she focuses attention on theories of affect and object relations seldom addressed during that period. Cartwright offers a new theory of spectatorship and the human subject that takes into account intersubjective and affective relationships and technologies facilitating human agency. Seeking to expand concepts of representation beyond the visual, she develops her theory through interpretations of two contexts in which adult caregivers help bring children to voice. She considers several social-problem melodramas about deaf and nonverbal girls and young women (such as The Miracle Worker), and she analyzes the controversies surrounding facilitated communication, a technological practice in which caregivers help children with communication disorders achieve "voice" through writing facilitated by computers. This practice has inspired contempt among professionals and lay people who charge that the facilitator can manipulate the child's speech.

For more than two decades, film theory has been dominated by a model of identification tacitly based on the idea of feeling what the other feels or of imagining oneself to be the other. Building on the theories of affect and identification developed by Andre Green, Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott, and Silvan Tomkins, Cartwright develops a model of spectatorship that takes into account and provides a way of critically analyzing the dynamics of a different kind of identification, one that is empathetic and highly intersubjective.

Contents:

Introduction: Spectatorship, Affect, and Representation 1

Chapter 1 Moral Spectatorship: Rethinking Identification in Film Theory 11

Chapter 2 The (Deaf) Woman's Film and the Quiet Revolution in Film Sound: On Projection, Incorporation, and Voice 51

Chapter 3 "A Child Is Being Beaten": Disorders of Authorship, Agency, and Affect in Facilitated Communication 157

Conclusion: On Empathy and Moral Spectatorship 229.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [255]-280) and index.

ISBN:

9780822341772

0822341778

9780822341949

0822341948

OCLC:

176649035