Out Of Psychoanalysis: Ficto-Criticism 2005 to 2011

Out of Psychoanalysis is a collection of essays and ficto-criticism from Winnipeg-based cultural critic Jeanne Randolph. Composed between 2005-2011, the texts include psychoanalytic responses to contemporary art exhibitions, a collection of vignettes, lamentations on capitalism, and a contrived history of Canadian ficto-criticism. The books address a diverse range of subjects including the Cucumber Mosaic virus, Bob Dylan, Sigmund Freud, insects at the bottom of a river in Winnipeg, and the colour blue.

Over the decades, Randolph's writing has explored the relevance to art making of psychoanalytic theory, technology, advertising, mass media and other pop phenomena such as Barbie dolls, prize fights, weather reports, medical devices and cars. She is the author of the influential Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming and other writings on art (1991), and her practice as a cultural theorist includes extemporaneous soliloquy performances on the state of contemporary culture. In 1983 she introduced ficto-criticism as a critique of modernist art criticism. Randolph's other books include Symbolization and its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box: essays on art and society (2003), Ethics of Luxury: materialism and imagination (2007) and The Critical Object [digital redux] (2010). In 2011, Randolph completed her seventh book, Shopping Cart Pantheism: a story of commodity adoration, at The Berton House Writers' Retreat (Dawson City, Yukon).