Why Are You Talking Like That, Sir? Il-Limbi, Phonology and Class in Contemporary Egypt

Arabica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 260-277
Author(s):  
Islam Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Correspondence Rules ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Urban Working ◽  
Cairene Arabic

Abstract This article investigates the phonological patternings in the speech of il-Limbi, an immensely popular character in Egyptian comedy; and it stands therefore at a crossroads between cultural studies and linguistics. Il-Limbi represents the urban working classes, and his speech often mocks social conventions through ludicrous parody of educated speech. Masquerading as socially superior personas, his speech highlights the diglossic situation in Egypt as well as the pretentious use of English into the elite register. My examination of il-Limbi’s pronunciation in four movies reveals a number of systematic patterns in both consonants and vowels, which construct a unique code. This code is based partly on exaggerated features of Cairene Arabic and partly on genuine features of illiterate, lower-class vernacular. And it is often the interplay between various registers via correspondence rules that creates humor in the films.

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

Breakthrough: Wendy and Lucy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Dawn Hall
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Disaster Victims ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Political Statement

This chapter is a close reading of Wendy and Lucy, a film loosely based on the depictions of disaster victims and the perceived governmental failing to provide and protect those affected by Hurricane Katrina. It is Reichardt’s political statement about being homeless and female in America. Highlighting distribution details, the chapter explores the necessity of a micro-budget that dictate and contribute to many independent filmmakers’ aesthetics. The chapter discusses her use of “slow cinema,” ecofeminism, and the rejection of a capitalistic and patriarchal “American Dream.” Reichardt highlights the overlooked or marginalized in America: women, the working classes, and the poverty stricken. Influenced by the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, the film addresses current issues of poverty juxtaposed with consumerism in America. Finally building on work of Anita Harris and Sherry Ortner’s analysis of lower class women’s representation in independent film, the chapter situates Wendy and Lucy in relation to post-feminist and third wave feminist concerns.

Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar Period

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-238
Author(s):  
Saeko Yoshikawa
Keyword(s):  
National Parks ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Lake District ◽  
World War ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Global Tourism ◽  
First World ◽  
Urban Working

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.

Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes

1952 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
B. R. Hinchliff ◽  
E. T. O. Slater ◽  
M. Woodside
Keyword(s):  
Working Classes ◽  
Marriage Relationships ◽  
Urban Working

Polyphonie und Audiovision

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernand Hörner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
The Third ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
The Voice

This interdisciplinary analysis uses concepts of voice and polyphony both as visible, audible and understandable means of expression and as abstract analytical categories for the interpretation of music videos. The study combines abstract concepts of voice from music, media, literary and cultural studies, and linguistics with an analysis of the orchestration of the voice in the audiovisual form of music videos. The book has three parts: The first part highlights theories of voices and polyphony. The second part consists of the audiovisual transcription of a music video (‘Verliebt’ by the German rap group Antilopen Gang) by means of the online transcription tool trAVis. The third part offers an interpretation of the music video, joining the transcription with the theoretical concepts and the methodological approaches based on polyphony. This music video serves as an exhaustive test of ‘polyphony’ as a theoretical and methodological background against which one can interpret audiovisual material.

‘First-Class Evening Entertainments’: Spectacle and Social Control in a Mid-Victorian Music Hall

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Till
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Urban Working

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

scholarly journals De la retórica a la erística en la industria editorial y en el folletín: María, la hija de un jornalero de Ayguals de Izco

2014 ◽  
pp. 166
Author(s):  
María Ángeles Varela Olea
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Secret Society ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Publishing Group ◽  
Serial Novel ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
Urban Working

<p><strong> </strong></p>Resumen <p>El gran éxito de <em>María…, </em>debe mucho al hecho de que su autor era propietario del primer y mayor trust editorial español especializado en folletines. Gran estratega comercial, adula al pueblo, recrea acontecimientos históricos de 1833-1837 y desarrolla su ideología populista. Analizamos el paso de la retórica a la erística que persigue <em>convencer</em> y <em>vender</em>.</p> <p>Palabras clave: Empresa editorial, erística, Marx, Schopenhauer, Sociedad secreta.</p> <p>Abstract</p><p><em>Mary </em>was the most successful serial novel published in Spain in the XIX century, because its author was also owner of an important Publishing Group. This novel describes the plight of the urban working classes and the Spain’s History from 1834 to 1837 as a literary device to pursue of his political ideology. This essay analizes Ayguals method, according to Schopenhauer, <em>Eristic Dialectic.</em></p> <p>Key words: Publishing Group, Eristic, Marx, Schopenhauer, Secret Society.</p>

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