Overview

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson’s theory can help to make sense of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese’s film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory.

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9781501308338

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Reviews

This breathless non-stop reading of the equally headlong Scorsese film not only uses my own work in an original and creative way (Burnham is one of my best interpreters), it has much that is new and stimulating to say about finance capital itself, and in particular about the status or this apparent mutation or globalized Aufhebung of the classical capitalism analyzed by Marx. Is it unproductive, immaterial, postindustrial, or even no longer capitalistic? Burnham's shrewd reading of this particular representation leads me to what is for me a satisfying and illuminating conclusion: namely that finance capital is an allegory of real capitalism! This is a lively and stimulating book! Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University, USA

Author Information

Clint Burnham teaches theory and popular culture at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His books include The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (1995), The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2011), and the collections Digital Natives (2011, co-ed. with Lorna Brown) and From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom (2012, co-ed. with Paul Budra).

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