Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries

Now retired,Joseph Natoli spent more than four decades teaching at the university level and twenty years as the editor of the SUNY book series in Postmodern Culture. He is the author of many books, including Hauntings: Popular Film and American Culture 1990–1992; Speeding to the Millennium: Film and Culture 1993–1995; Postmodern Journeys: Film and Culture 1996–1998; Memory's Orbit: Film and Culture 1999–2000; and This Is a Picture and Not the World: Movies and a Post-9/11 America, all published by SUNY Press.

"…Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries is a captivating journey across mind and culture; a tracing of the American cultural imaginary that embraces the backwards gaze of self-reflexivity in search of post-truths within the personal and mass psyches. What results is an equally mesmerizing and unnerving cautionary tale that warns against the burgeoning reality of alienation and exploitation of the American people in an unbridled plutocratic regime." — Popular Culture Studies Journal"…Natoli grounds his work in lived experience, an awareness of realities … reading his essays … will help you better understand the world you live in and why it keeps deviating from the world you thought you knew." — Voices in Italian Americana"Reading Dark Affinities is a welcome break from the neoliberal buzzword-speak of politicians and university administrators. It reminds me why I entered academia, when it was a profession and not a business, and when modeling thinking actually mattered." — Alison Lee, University of Western Ontario"Natoli's Dark Affinities reads as a culminating work of scholarship, marshaling evidence from autobiography, literary analysis, critical theory, and everyday culture in support of its claims. Natoli presents his personal history in the same spirit that Raymond Williams did: as evidence for the ways that cultural forces shape individuals, and as grounds for the shaping of his intellectual and political practice." — Jeff Karnicky, author of Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture

• Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. William Blake: Prophet against EmpireIntroduction, Twentieth-Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the PresentExcerpt from Mots d’Ordre: Disorder in Literary Worlds Why Are We Not Roused to Action? 2. A Patient Appears at the Psychiatrist’s Office: The Turn to Phenomenological PsychopathologyDark Affinities: The FatherPhenomenological Psychology and Literary InterpretationThe Code of Crisis and Disaster 3. The World Is a BookTextual Studies and the Selection of EditionsMeditating on a Postmodern Strategy of ReadingEndless Deferment: The Inequitable Melee of Events and Words 4. Looking for Disorder in Literary WorldsMapping the Inconceivable: Disordering Taxonomies 5. Postmodernity Is a HootGo to Citizen Kane to Find Twentieth-Century Modernism: On the Edge of PostmodernityThe Deep Morals of Inglourious Basterds 6. At the Theory CarnivalPreface to Tracing Literary Theory Preface to Literary Theory’s Future(s) 7. Into the American Mass Psyche of the NinetiesHauntings: Popular Film and American Culture Hunting the Haunted HeartSpeeding to the Millennium: Film and Culture 1993 –1995 Court and Culture: The Days of Our Life with O. J.Postmodern Journeys: Film and Culture 1996 –1998 That Rug Really Tied the Room TogetherMemory’s Orbit: Film and Culture 1999 –2000 After September 11, 2001Hearing the Ping of Poverty—or Not 8. Railing through Europe: "Is This a Postmodern World?" 1995 –2010This Is a Picture and Not the World 9. A Long Journey to Find an Online Political HomeTruthout’s Public Intellectual ProjectPolitical Affairs: "From each according to his ability to each according to their work"Why the Rich Get Richer and Other Truth StoriesBad Subjects: Politics in Everyday LifeThe Leftist PsycheThe "Free Exchange of Ideas": Our New NormalCounterpunchingGun Control, Illegal Aliens, Moochers, Planned Parenthood, Gay Marriages, "Big Brother" Government, and Obama 10. Popular Culture: What I Did at the MoviesDoing the American HustleThe Hateful Eight: History’s Dark Bounty 11. I Roam into TV: Rebel Sons, Foodies, DBs, TV Pharmacy, and SportsTV’s Rebel Sons: The Anger of Deep RevoltAutopsy TVFood TVThe Emergence of Greater-than-Human Sports…and Baseball 12. Dark AffinitiesDark Affinities: Liberal and NeoliberalThe Economics of Immiseration/The Politics of SeductionUS Higher Education: The New "Treasure Island" for InvestorsPlutocracy, Gentrification, and Racial Violence 13. Dark ImaginariesWhat Climate Scenarios Do We Imagine?A Modest Proposal, 2014The Coming Transformation of Work to LeisureThe American Middle Class: The Political Chosen People? 14. Portrait of Generation NextTo Gaga Is to DadaThe Twitter MomentLiving Backward: The Millennials’ AliceOur Millennial Age of Magic 15. Occupy Wall StreetEpilogue to the Kindle Publication of Occupying Here & Now: The New Class Warfare Psychomachia: Battles within the American Cultural Psyche 16. Travels of a New GulliverIn Which the Author Introduces Himself and Then Sets OutThe Author Is Admitted to the Academy, Inhabited by Enormous-Headed Giants; Visits the Wick, theGreat Augury, and The Singularity Club; Meets a Terrorist, and Then Ends BadlyThe Author Comes to the End of His Travels Bibliography Index