ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Walt Disney enterprises as a storytelling organization in which an active-reactive interplay of premodern, modern, and postmodern discourses occurs. A postmodern analysis of these multiple discourses reveals the marginalized voices and excluded stories of a darker side of the Disney legend. Premodern Western discourse mixes passion and spiritual meditation with preindustrial and even feudal customs and traditions. Modernist discourse sought to the premodern pagan and mythical passion, contain the feudal corruption of absolute monarchy, and counteract the autocracy of the clergy. Stories of modernist life depict the administered, rationally planned, grand society that harnesses premodern passion, subjectivity, and choice. In deconstruction, the artificial lines that separate the story from its contexts are challenged to reveal how permeahlo a story is to its broader environmental and historical contexts. As the analysis proceeded from 1989 through 1994, totalizing, universalizing, essentializing, and panoptic control became a major analytic construct.
