Lākān-Hīchkāk: Persian 1402

A modernist work of art is by definition "incomprehensible". It acts as a shock, as a jolt of shock that undermines our everyday contentment and resists integration. However, what postmodernism does is quite the opposite: it believes that they are products of mass appeal. Postmodernist treatment aims to alienate their primal domesticity: "You'd think what you're seeing is a simple melodrama that your grandmother would have no problem following" However, without considering the difference between symptom and syndrome/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that woman is one of the father's names... you're completely missing the point!' If there's an author whose name epitomizes the interpretive joy of "alienating" the most banal content, it's Alfred Hitchcock (and - it's useless to deny it - this book is infinitely complicit in this madness). In this extraordinary book of case studies, Hitchcock is placed on the analyst's couch, as the contributors bring an unparalleled enthusiasm and theoretical flow to Hitchcock's entire body of work, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an example of "postmodern" defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that "everything has meaning," the apparent narrative content and formal procedures of the films are analyzed to reveal the rich proliferation of ideological and psychological mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lead the reader to "serious" Marxist and Lacanian considerations of the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative, and original, this book is sure to become a milestone in Hitchcock studies.