Adapting Kafka’s Ape to the Twenty-First Century: Gesture, Montage, and Performance in Antonietta De Lillo’s Il Signor Rotpeter

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Luciano ◽  
Steele Burrow
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
First Person ◽  
Cinematic Adaptation ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Narrative Report

Abstract This article explores Italian filmmaker Antonietta De Lillo’s cinematic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ in which she incorporates elements from both literary and visual media to create a ‘re-performance’ of an earlier performance, that of Kafka’s Rotpeter. De Lillo through the extensive use of gesture, montage, shift of focus, and other cinematic devices, interrupts and disrupts the narrative ‘report’ thereby ‘shocking’ the viewer in Brechtian fashion into an awareness of the fragility of identity and of the ‘ape’ nature that remains in all of us. De Lillo’s addition of an interview to Kafka’s monologue represents an innovation in Kafka adaptation and within this framework her first person/ape narrator Signor Rotpeter is allowed to respond to what she terms our ‘loss of humanity’. He provides first person/ape evidence of this loss both verbally and through his gestural complex, addressing the disconnect between young and old, the cruelty toward animals, and the violence of everyday life, prompting the viewer to reflect on the lives of those who, like the narrator Rotpeter, are desperately seeking a ‘way out’.

scholarly journals Tyrannous Minds and Tamed Bodies: The Curious Case of Irene Adler from Canon to Screen

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Debanjali Roy ◽  
◽  
Tanmoy Putatunda ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Gendered Power ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Power Play

Appearing in the singular short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the character of Irene Adler has been adapted and reconstructed in subsequent literary and visual media. Twenty-first century screen adaptations have swivelled upon postfeminist re-appropriations of the character and overt sexualisation of the ‘body’, thereby engaging in reassessment of the Irene-Sherlock relationship and problematizing gendered presentations of the character. Locating Irene in a heteronormative space, such narratives have attempted to revise the image of the cross-dressing ‘adventuress’ through varied portrayals which seemingly broaden her scope by means of her deliberate transgressions of fixed gender tropes. This article, by taking into account the gendered power-play embedded in three popular twenty first century screen adaptations of the text, namely, the films Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), CBS’s Elementary (2012-2019) and BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), scrutinizes the dilemma of presentation of Irene Adler through the lenses of sexual dynamics and gendered performances.

A Study in Four Colours: The Case of the Chameleon Detective

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
First Episode ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literary Characters

Sherlock Holmes, one of the world's most famous detectives, is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in the process of adaptation, be it cinematic or literary, and I propose calling him a cultural chameleon: regardless of the palette and colour against which he is positioned – warm (scarlet and pink), cold (emerald), or black – he remains a brilliant sleuth. This paper compares four titles and four colours: A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first of the long-running series of texts by Doyle, and three instances of Holmes's adaptability to twenty-first century standards and expectations: ‘A Study in Emerald’ (2003), an award-winning short story by Neil Gaiman, ‘A Study in Pink’ (2010), the first episode of the BBC series Sherlock, and ‘A Study in Black’ (2012–13), a part of the Watson and Holmes comics series. Each background highlights different aspects of the detective's personality, but also sheds light on his approach to crime and criminals.

An Invitation from the Displaced: Refuge Restaged in The Jungle and As Far as My Fingertips Take Me

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-372
Author(s):  
Jeff Casey
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
First Century ◽  
Good Chance ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Remedial Strategies ◽  
Mutual Responsibility

Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, produced and developed by Good Chance, are twenty-first-century productions that foreground the medial affordances of performance art and drama to foreground Western audiences’ relationships and responses to refugees. I propose a taxonomy of the strategies used in these two works as a model for analyzing theatre and performance about refugees. These strategies are classified in terms of the responses they seek to elicit from the audience, and my analysis explores some of the tactics used to achieve these goals. Remedial strategies counter harmful stereotypes about refugees; transformative strategies challenge and reshape basic conceptions of self, other, nation, and citizenship; and ethotic strategies reorient the audience to consider their relationship with refugees, particularly with respect to their disparate identity positions, mutual responsibility, and interdependence. Fingertips and The Jungle are substantially different artworks but are able to achieve similar results by utilizing the different affordances of their respective mediums. Thus, the taxonomy of strategies provides a more systematic and precise way of analyzing how refugee drama and performance achieve their goals. It avoids being overly prescriptive in how these goals should be achieved and instead recognizes how exploiting different tactics and medial affordances can advocate for refugees and other migrants.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

Pietro Basso,Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Livesin the Twenty-first Century. London: Verso, 2003. pp. 275. $27.00 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 134-136
Author(s):  
Gerd-Rainer Horn
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Working Time ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

For some time now, sociologists, economists and assorted futurologists have flooded the pages of learned journals and the shelves of libraries with analyses of the continuing decline of industrial and other forms of labor. In proportion to the decline of working time, those social scientists proclaim, the forward march of leisure has become an irresistible trend of the most recent past, the present and, most definitely, the future. Those of us living on planet earth have on occasion wondered about the veracity of such claims which, quite often, appear to stand in flat contradiction to our experiences in everyday life. The work of the Italian sociologist Pietro Basso is thus long overdue and proves to be a welcome refutation of this genre of, to paraphrase Basso, obfuscating hallucinations.

scholarly journals Heartfelt Love: Singing Maiden Characters in Romantic Vocal Music, 1800-1850

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Haiman Liu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
German Lieder ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Vocal Works ◽  
Female Singers ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

<p>The images of maidens in Italian opera and German lieder from the period 1800-1850 are vivid. In the plots of the operas and the scenes and stories of the lieder almost invariably these characters focus enthusiastically on heartfelt love. This exegesis explores the relationship between the expression of love by unmarried women in selected lieder and opera of the first half of the nineteenth century and performance of these works by the young soprano in the twenty-first century. In the period when these songs and operas were written, performers of lieder would often have been of a similar age to the maiden characters portrayed in the songs, and in the case of Italian opera at the time, the singers who created such roles were usually in their twenties or early thirties. As a young soprano myself, in my study I consider some questions which are relevant for twenty-first century female singers who choose to perform these nineteenth-century portrayals of virgin characters. The figures in the works I have selected to study display a wide variety of personalities, moods and emotions, from the tenacious wild rose in Schubert’s ‘Heidenröslein’, to his passionate Gretchen and the melancholic Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. I consider how the soprano may express the different emotions involved and approach performing young maiden characters such as these, whose experiences of life and status in society may be substantially removed from twenty-first century experiences.   In order to address these questions, I examine the selected song and aria texts in terms of the relationship between the content of the stories and the characters, as well as analyzing the vocal skills that can be used and vocal effects that may be applied when shaping these roles according to the music as written. In addition, I combine the background to the story and the plot with the musical markings in selected phrases to explore the emotional variety of the characters so as to interpret the deeper significance in the compositions. Through learning and performing these particular pieces I have explored the vocal techniques which are required in singing them from a practical perspective and this enables me to contribute insights I have gained to the general understanding of the skills required for this particular area of the repertoire. Having chosen repertoire for this study which combines Italian opera arias and lieder, and I also consider how the differences I have found in the vocal works may reflect their respective genres and distinguish the skills required for each. Through writing about my own research into the performance of these works, I provide new insights and ideas about these maiden characters which may be applicable to any young sopranos who sing repertoire from this period, and useful for their own vocal perfo</p>

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic System ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Life ◽  
Twenty First Century

To find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, I call this the long downturn. The economics of the long downturn worked interfered with the most intimate experiences of everyday life, and inspired the fear that there would be no tomorrow. This fear takes the form of what I call neoliberal apocalypse. The varieties neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation’s commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century.

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