| Post: | Professor of English |
| Other posts: | Director of Doctoral Studies (English School) |
| Location: | Arts B B231 |
| Email: | V.A.Lebeau@sussex.ac.uk |
| Telephone numbers | |
| Internal: | 2215 |
| UK: | (01273) 606755 ext. 2215 |
| International: | +44 1273 606755 ext. 2215 |
Research
Vicky Lebeau has published widely in the fields of psychoanalysis and visual culture. She has particular interests in the topics of spectacle and terror, sexuality, fantasy and representation - and in popular culture as a form of critical thought. She has recently published Childhood and Cinema (Reaktion and Chicago University Press, 2008). In psychoanalysis, she has interests in Freud, Winnicott, Andre Green, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire, Michael Eigen, Joyce McDougall and Christopher Bollas. She is currently writing a book on Michael Haneke, The Arts of Seeing: the cinema of Michael Haneke (forthcoming, Reaktion) and researching a book-length project, Visions of Security.
Teaching
Vicky Lebeau currently teaches on the MA in Literature, Film and Visual Culture and the MA in Critical Theory ('Psychoanalysis and the Image'). She has recently introduced a new undergraduate course on 'Freud' and has particular interests in 'Literature and Psychoanalysis', 'Sexual Difference: Women and Writing' as well as 'Approaches to English'.
Publications
Books
Childhood and Cinema, London and Chicago, Reaktion and Chicago UP, 2008
Abstract
From its inception, cinema lays claim to the child - both on and off screen. Childhood and Cinema explores the ongoing adventure of childhood on screen, exploring how the child on film as been used to embody the aspirations and anxieties of modern cultural life. From Victorian to contemporary cinema, Vicky Lebeau uncovers the compulsion of film-makers to visualize the child, our uses of childhood as a way of reflecting on sexuality, language, death and difference. By bringing together childhood and cinema as two institutions of modern culture, this book uses the figure of the child - as image, as narrative, as myth - to reflect on the form and significance of cinema itself.
Reviews
'Lebeau's deft look at cinema's treatment of childhood puts aside the cosy teddy bears in favour of the harsher realities of murder, death, child abuse and war. Moving seamlessly from The Exorcist to The Shining via Mysterious Skin and M among countless others, this is fascinating rather than squeamish. Excellent.' -Empire Magazine
'. . . a provocative and unique study of the figure of the child as it has been shaped by photography and cinema since the late nineteenth-century.' -Media and Culture
Psychoanalysis and Cinema: the Play of Shadows, London and New York: Wallflower Press and Columbia University Press, 2001.
Abstract
Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display at Jean-Martin Charcot's clinic at the Salpetriere Hospital in the 1880s, theis book explores the encounter between psychoanalysis and cinema as distinct, but converging, ways of thinking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock and sexuality. Psychoanalysis and Cinema offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory, as well as suggesting a substantial rethinking of some of the paradigms at work in that field.
Reviews
'A very lucid and subtle exploration of the reception of Freud's theories and their relation to psychoanalysis's contemporary developments - cinema and modernism. One of the best introductions to psychoanalytic film theory available.' - Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent
'The arrangement of the book fascinatingly broaches the central issues around the format of hallucination and hypnosis, wish and dream in productive association with sexuality and sexual difference within the modest context of modernity.' - Arnab Das and Subrata Sankar Bagchi, Scope: Online Journal of Film Studies
‘The tenets of psychoanalytic film theory are almost as dense and mysterious as the Freudian id itself, but Vicky Lebeau bravely engages them both ... Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows offers a useful history of the origins of the psychoanalytical method, its early adoption by film studies, the importation of more recent theories of Jaques Lacan, and the flowering of feminist psychoanalytic film theory in the 1970s.' - John P. Garry III
Lost Angels: psychoanalysis and cinema, London and New York: Routledge 1995.
Abstract
Lost Angels: psychoanalysis and cinema was written out of the various dilemmas surrounding a psychoanalytic and feminist theory of cinema in the mid-1980s. Revisiting the concept of identification as it emerges through Freud's writings - from Studies in Hysteria to Civilisation and its Discontents - the book aims both to question and to expand the use of that concept in psychoanalytic film theory and, in particular, its privileged associated with so-called classic Hollywood cinema. Using psychoanalysis to explore a number of (more or less) mainstream American youth films of the 1980s, Lost Angels opens up the questions of fantasy and sexual difference so central to feminist film theory to the critique of mass culture, its degradation of subjectivity and cultural investiture, in the writings of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Kluge).
Selected articles and chapters
'Psychoanalysis and the visual: D.W. Winnicott and Michael Haneke', Screen Spring 2009 (Anniversary Issue).
'Strange contracts: Elfriede Jelinek and Michael Haneke', Projections, Volume 1, issue 2 (Winter 2007), Berghahn Journals.
Abstract This essay explores the representation of sexuality and vision in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin [The Piano Teacher] (1983) and Michael aneke’s La Pianiste (2001). In its focus on the relation between Mother and Erika, Die Klavierspielerin brings right to the fore the grounding of both sexuality and visuality in the ongoing ties between mother and child. Displacing that novel onto the screen, Haneke redoubles its focus on vision. It is in the convergence between the two that we can begin to explore what may be described as the maternal dimension of the various technologies of vision that have come to pervade the everyday experience of looking—their effect on our ways of understanding the relations between visuality and selfhood,visuality and mind.
'The Unwelcome Child: Elizabeth Eckford and Hannah Arendt', in eds. Cameron McCarthy, Warren Crichlow, Greg Dimitriadis and Nadine Dolby, Race, Identity and Representation in Education (Volume II), New York and London: Routledge 2005; reprinted from Journal of Visual Culture 3:1 2004.
Abstract This article explores Hannah Arendt's response to Will Counts's well-known photographs of the 'crisis' of Little Rock - photographs that prompted Arendt's initial challenge to the broad liberal support for the civil rights campaign to end segregated schooling in the southern States. Read in the context of both contemporary and retrospective accounts of Little Rock, Arendt's challenge is used to examine her insistence on: (1) the rights of children to be protected by adults from the burdens of political life; (2) the fundamental importance of adult rights to sexuality and sexua desire; and (3) the purchase of Arendt's controversial distinctions between public, social and private life.
'Children of violence: Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks', in Max Silverman ed., Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Manchester University Press, 2005.
'Another child of violence', New Formations, Special Issue: Childhood, eds. Christine Clegg, Vicky Lebeau, and Paul Myerscough, Winter 2001, pp. 19-29.
'The Child in Question', Angelaki, Special issue: International Poetries, Vol. 5, No. 1, April 2000, pp. 149-157.
Abstract 'What have they done to you, you poor child?' This article explores this question as one that belongs to those structures of identification and feeling - psychoanalysis and literature among them - which explore the drama of being a child. First posed by Goethe's Mignon in her song, Kennst du das Land? in 1795, the query is taken up by Freud in the 1890s, but suppessed, for some decades, within the psychoanalytic literature. It returns with a vengeance in the 1980s and 1990s in the form of an accusation against psychoanalysis as an institution, and a therapy, that has abandoned the abused child. This article attempts to address the impasses sometimes produced by that accusation by returning to an earlier evocation of Mignon's question in H.D.'s lyrical presentation, in her Tribute to Freud, of her psychoanalysis with 'the Professor' at the beginning of the 1930s. The articles explores H.D.'s uncanny use of Mignon's song to symbolise her experience of psychoanalysis, and the significance of that usage for our understanding of the figure of the child in Freud's theory.
'Clinical Poetics', Fragmente: A magazine of contemporary poetics. Special issue: Psychoanalysis and Poetics, Issue 8, Summer 1998. eds. David Marriott and Vicky Lebeau.
'The worst of all possible worlds' in Roger Silverstone ed., Visions of Suburbia, London and New York: Routledge 1996.
'Daddy's cinema: femininity and mass spectatorship', Screen 33:3 Autumn 1992, pp. 244-258
'"You're my friend": River's Edge and social spectatorship', Camera Obscura 25-27, January/May 1991, pp. 251-274.