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Unveiling Fantasy In The American Gothic, Olga Jacqueline Neroni

English

In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek charts the relationship between theoretical ideology, fantasy, and ideology in practice. While ideology roots itself firmly in our lives—it crafts our very reality according to Žižek—it is a paradoxically fragile and self-destructive system of interacting symbols. We consume and perpetuate fantasy in order to elucidate and internalize the laws of ideology by placing these symbols into dialogue with one another. In turn, fantasy often draws these laws to their conceptual edge, granting bodies and voices to the underlying fears and desires implied by these symbols. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and William Faulkner’s The …