Flowers Disguised

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Soo Y. Kang

Abstract Since the late twentieth century, Latina artists have used Catholic images, such as depictions of altars and the Virgin of Guadalupe, to speak both for themselves and for women’s issues at large. Maria Tomasula seems far from that norm, since she focuses on tightly constructed, dramatic still life, painted in the traditional European illusionistic manner. She reveals, however, Catholic influences and feminist messages in her flower paintings. This article aims to unveil the woman’s voice in the works of still life by Tomasula, as communicated through embedded Catholic symbolism and references. It will examine how her works evoke the home altar tradition as well as images of saints in martyrdom to speak for the Mexican American woman. This article also applies the concept of the abject, as espoused by Kristeva to denote a woman’s realm, to Tomasula’s art. Tomasula’s still lifes thus ultimately delineate a woman’s space and her discrete experience.

Author(s):  
James Tweedie

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (16) ◽  
pp. 68-73
Author(s):  
Y. Ostropalchenko

The drama of the American writer Wendy Wasserstein is an important material for literary studies. Of particular interest for the study is the intertextual aspect of her work. The article analyses the interpretation of Chekhov`s motives (on the example of the drama “Three Sisters”) in Wasserstein’s drama on the example of the play “Sisters Rosensweig” (1992). It is determined that the concept of intertextuality in literary studies means the interaction of any text with each other, the superposition of the text on another. The main aspects of intertextuality that are relevant for the analysis of W. Wasserstein’s drama are analyzed and highlighted. Chekhov’s motives are described in the drama “The Sisters Rosenzweig” and the commonalities and differences between Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters” and Wasserstein are highlighted. The ideological-aesthetic and genre transformations of Chekhov’s artistic models proposed by an American woman playwright are analysed. The use of the classification of intertexts rel­evant for the analysis of plays by W. Wasserstein, according to M. Trostnikov is substantiated. In Chekhov’s play adapted by an American female playwrigh, popular plots and motifs receive a different feminist, optimistic sound development that meets the needs of late twentieth-century American society as well as in the con­text of novelty. Chekhov’s motives in Wasserstein’s drama made it possible to assess the degree of intertextuality of the play “The Sisters Rosenzweig”, in particular to find clear components of intertextuality in the drama. Rewriting Chekhov’s drama “Three Sisters” (1901) at the gap of almost a century, American playwright Wendy Wasserstein described the life of the Chekhov sisters in the modern way: successful professionals, two sisters realized themselves at the same time in motherhood and with love. Wasserstein practically preserved the plot, motives, artistic techniques and details in her modern play. The play­wright creates an interesting intertext that captivates the reader with a play on the discovery of “Chekhov style” in the text, the recognition of factual material and fiction.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ethan White

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian deified his male lover, Antinous, after the latter drowned in the Nile. Antinous’ worship was revived in the late twentieth century, primarily by gay men and other queer-identified individuals, with Antinous himself being recast as “the Gay God.”


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...


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