We the Animals and Honoring an Intimate Story of Brutal Love

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110086
Author(s):  
Nisha Gupta ◽  
Eric Greene
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Dynamics ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Family

In this edited interview, psychologists Nisha Gupta and Eric Greene interview filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar about We the Animals (2018), his film adaptation of the novel by Justin Torres. We the Animals is a coming-of-age story of an adolescent boy named Jonah who grows up with rambunctious brothers in a working class mixed-race family in upstate New York, and who must contend with both his volatile father and his emerging queer sexuality. Jonah’s mother and father have a volatile relationship that makes and unmakes the family many times over, often leaving the boys fending for themselves. As his brothers harden and grow into versions of their father, Jonah, who is the youngest, becomes increasingly aware of his desperate need to escape. Driven to the edge, Jonah embraces an imagined world all of his own. In this conversation, Jeremiah describes what it was like to honor novelist Justin’s intimate story by bringing it to screen, depict the nuanced realities of love interlaced with violence within family dynamics, and craft an immersive story that poses more questions than it answers.

Property and Selfhood in Herman Melville's Pierre

2006 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199
Author(s):  
Jeffory A. Clymer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Urban Market ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ideological Fantasy ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
Market Relations

In Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) Herman Melville analyzes the intricacies of subjectivity and economics by way of two concrete and quite different forms of antebellum American property relations-the residual estates of the landed gentry in upstate New York and the emergent urban market economy of New York City. A condition of unassailability,of timelessness and imperviousness, infuses the family estate in Pierre, while incessant exchange characterizes the novel's urban finale. Taken together, these opposed economic arrangements represent Melville's meditation on how the very concept of alienability, the definitive aspect of modern property relations, impacted forms of non-slave identity in the antebellum United States. The condition of inalienability that structures the patrimonial estates presents the initially attractive possibility of removal from the turbulent world of property relations, exchange, and commodification,but it turns out to be an ideological fantasy supported primarily by violence and death. Melville, always one to brood about selfhood, and faced in Pierre with his realization of the rottenness at the core of his fantasy of a subjectivity not riven by alienability,responds with the novel's urban section. This second portion of the novel presents market relations as a horror wreaked principally on the self. Pierre, ultimately, represents Melville's monument to the desirability, and his dismay at the impossibility, of imagining identity outside the syntax of a market economy's version of property relations.

Organizing Working-Class Academics: A Collective History

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-178
Author(s):  
Allison Hurst ◽  
Tery Griffin ◽  
Alfred Vitale
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Us ◽  
Working Class Studies ◽  
Key Questions

In 2008, the Association of Working-Class Academics was founded in upstate New York by three former members of the Working-Class/Poverty-Class Academics Listserv. The Association had three goals: advocate for WCAs, build organizations on campuses that would support both working-class college students and WCAs, and support scholarship on issues relevant to class and higher education. The Association grew from a small handful to more than 200 members located in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany. In 2015, it was formally merged with the Working-Class Studies Association, and continues there as a special section for WCSA members. This is our collective account of the organization, told through responses to four key questions. We hope this history will provide insight and lessons for anyone interested in building similar organizations.

A HOUSEWIFE IS CONVICTED OF MURDERING HER FIVE CHILDREN

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. A32-A32
Author(s):  
J. F. L.
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Infant Death ◽  
Genetic Basis ◽  
Sudden Infant Death ◽  
Sudden Infant ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Research Article ◽  
The Family

For nearly a quarter century, the fact that Waneta Hoyt, a housewife in rural New York, had lost five babies to sudden deaths was taken as medical evidence that sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) had a genetic basis. A leading SIDS expert, Dr Alfred Steinschneider, had studied Mrs. Hoyt's last two children, and in a pioneering research article in 1972 (Pediatrics, Vol 50, Number 4, page 646) he cited them as evidence that SIDS ran in families. His study offered hope that children at risk could be identified and saved. But some doctors found the odds of five siblings dying of SIDS impossible. For years one skeptic, Dr Linda Norton, a forensic pathologist from Dallas, mentioned the case to every district attorney she met. Finally, one of them, Robert Simpson, listened. In 1994, Mrs. Hoyt was confronted by state troopers, and she confessed to smothering the infants with a pillow to still their crying. On Friday a jury in Tioga County, in upstate New York, accepted Mrs. Hoyt's belated explanation of her babies' deaths and convicted the 48-year-old woman of five murders. Sudden infant death is real, but the import of multiple deaths can be badly misinterpreted. These deaths were certainly familial, "but not because of genetics," Dr Norton said. "It's because there was a murderer in the family."

A "Study of Church in America": Catholicism as Exotic Other in The Damnation of Theron Ware

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Aaron Urbanczyk
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Old World ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Theron Ware ◽  
Damnation Of Theron Ware ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Erotic

AbstractThe Damnation of Theron Ware is the tale of a young Methodist minister's tragic downfall set in rural upstate New York. The inexperienced Reverend Ware finds himself in an environment which triggers his moral, spiritual, and intellectual degeneration. The novel represents Theron's temptations as a complex and organically connected web, at the center of which is Catholicism. "Unreformed" old world Roman Catholicism subsumes under its metaphorical auspices every specific register of transgressive alterity in Theron's imagination (e.g., ethnicity, aesthetics, the intellectual life, the erotic). Theron's romantic imagination radically misperceives Catholicism; it becomes the abyss of difference against which Theron gives way to "enlightened" agnosticism, pride, lust, avarice, covetousness, and self-loathing. The innocent young Methodist parson eventually loses his faith and becomes a stalker, a gossip, a thief, and a would-be adulterer. This transformation takes place through his experience with the Catholic "other" represented by Celia Madden, Father Vincent Forbes, and Dr. Ledsmar. Theron Ware misinterprets everyone associated with Catholicism, recasting the Catholic as the master trope under which all his desires for exotic transgression find an object. The Catholic becomes a dangerous mirror of Theron's perverse desires which "illumines" the way to his "Damnation."

scholarly journals Dzieje grzechu, czyli Protokół zbrodni i nieszczęść

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (29) ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Roman Włodek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Single Motherhood ◽  
Italian Version ◽  
Free Love ◽  
25Th Anniversary ◽  
Back Seat ◽  
The Family

Stefan Żeromski’s novel, The Story of a Sin (1908), was controversial and considered scandalous at the beginning of the twentieth century. Żeromski was accused of undermining the significance of the family as the basic unit of society. His book, it was said, promoted “free love,” by disparaging Polish women and vividly portraying the moral degradation of the heroine. Theatrical and film adaptations of the novel met with similar charges (Leon Schiller, Polish Theatrical adaptation, Warsaw, 1926). The first film adaptation appeared in 1911, followed by an Italian version in 1917 (La Storia di unpeccato). In 1933, Sfinks, the most honored Polish film studio, produced yet another adaptation for the studio’s 25th anniversary. Such issues as divorce, abortion, single motherhood, and prostitution (topical issues in society and major themes in the book) took a back seat to the film’s criminal motif.

scholarly journals De Roberto and Faenza: Ideological Shifts in I Viceré

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-266
Author(s):  
Annamaria Pagliaro
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Political System ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Family Saga ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between De Roberto’s I Viceré and Faenza’s film adaptation focusing on the two texts’ different ideological positions and narrative strategies. Both texts depict the mechanisms employed by a ruling caste to remain in power through a period of acute social change. The novel, through a multifocal narration, gives agency to individuals for shaping their environment and presents them in their alienating subjective deformation of reality, casting the historymaking process and any interpretation of it in an ambivalent light. The film focuses on the family saga and on the ongoing trasformismo of the Italian political system bringing to the fore its resonance with the present. The characters, particularly Consalvo as the principal voice, are represented as victims of a larger socio-political mechanism.

I. Speaking Out about Race: “The United States of Lyncherdom” Clemens Really Wrote

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 115-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Terry Oggel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
Dwelling House ◽  
The Family ◽  
Saranac Lake

On June 21, 1901, Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their daughter Jean ensconced themselves for the summer at Kane Camp, a “little bijou of a dwelling-house,” Clemens called it, on the south end of Ampersand Bay on Lower Saranac Lake in upstate New York. The family nicknamed the cottage The Lair. “Everyone knows what a lair is,” Clemens said; “lairs do generally contain dangerous animals, but I bring tame ones to this one.” As we shall see, danger did lurk in The Lair that summer, in the thought and writing of Clemens himself.

scholarly journals 113 in 1928? Validation of Delina Filkins as the First “Second-Century Teenager”

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-255
Author(s):  
Robert Douglas Young
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hudson River ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Hudson River Valley ◽  
Mohawk Valley ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Family ◽  
Local Farmer

AbstractDelina Filkins was born May 4, 1815 in Stark, Herkimer County, New York, a small village of less than 2000 persons in the Hudson River Valley, Upstate New York. Her father, William Ecker, and mother, Susanna Herwick, were descended from Dutch and German settlers that came to the Mohawk Valley, New York, in the 1700s. Living her entire life in the same area within a ten-mile radius, her life spanned over 113 years. With the exception of her great age and her generally good health, Delina’s life was rather ordinary: she lived most of it on the family farm, helping with family tasks such as spinning yarn and making clothes. Delina married John Filkins, a local farmer, at age 18 and they had six (possibly seven) children together, two of whom outlived her. Delina was noted for her age in very late life, with local coverage from about 1916, then reaching national attention in the 1920s. With the understanding that Delina’s age was generally considered to be reliable by the press at the time, her case is a candidate for the earliest validated person to reach age 113+. This chapter takes a closer look at the case and the documents available and concludes that the amount and consistency of the available documentation suggest that Delina Filkins did indeed reach age 113 in 1928.

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