Have yourself a merry little Christmas? Organizing Christmas in women’s magazines past and present

Organization ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 747-762 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brewis ◽  
Samantha Warren

This article investigates the organization of Christmas in 15 women’s magazines from the 1930s and 2009, using an analytical strategy of close reading to explore the discursive imperatives these texts seem to (re)create around female ‘festive labour’. We arrive at two conclusions: (1) a critique of popular perceptions of the ‘problem of gift giving’ as a contemporary phenomenon; and (2) a shift from the ‘domestic goddess’ discourse of the 1930s to a construction of women’s role in performing Christmas that rests on a somewhat contradictory rendering of managerialism. Our rather pessimistic endpoint is that the pressure on women to pull off the perfect Christmas has intensified—at least in these popular cultural texts—over the last 70-plus years, but at the same time there is a sense here that even the most intensive endeavours are doomed never to entirely succeed.

Author(s):  
Jan Baetens ◽  
Domingo Sánchez-Mesa

A modo de expansión y aplicación del marco teórico y metodológico sobre inter- y transmedialidad propuesto por los autores en un artículo previo en Tropelías (n.27), este ensayo explora, tanto desde una perspectiva histórica como narratológica, el género del cine-foto-novela o cineromanzo, un tipo tremendamente popular, pero de escasa vida y ampliamente olvidado, de “cine narrado” o “cine impreso” de finales de los 50 y comienzos de los 60. Adoptando el lenguaje visual de la fotonovela así como las innumerables constricciones del contexto de publicación de revistas para mujeres de la época, el cineromanzo parece, a primera vista, un caso típico de lo que falla cuando las adaptaciones fílmicas se ven obligadaa a ser tan “fieles” como sea posible. En la práctica, sin embargo, el cine-foto-novela demostró ser capaz de generar diversas innovaciones. A través de un close-reading del cineromanzo de La ventana indiscreta, de Alfred Hitchcock (1954), se trata de demostrar esas capacidades creativas de una industria despreciada, al tiempo que se ilustra un proceso de transmedialización popular que precede al tiempo de las narrativas transmediales de última generación. Expanding on the theoretical and terminological framework on inter-  and transmediality proposed by the authors in a previous Tropelias contribution (n.27), this essay explores in a both historical and narratological perspective the genre of the film photo novel or cineromanzo, a widely popular, but short-lived nowadays largely forgotten case of “narrated cinema” or “cinema in print” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Adopting the visual language of the photo novel as well as the countless constraints of the publication context of the women’s magazines of that day, the film photo novel seems at first sight a typical example of what goes wrong when film adaptations are obliged to be as “faithful” as possible. In practice however, the film photo novel proved capable of various innovations. This article offers a close-reading of the Italian film photo novel of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which demonstrates the creative possibilities of a despised creative industry while illustrating a popular transmedialization process which comes before the last generation transmedial narratives.


NAN Nü ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ping Yao

AbstractThis essay examines the women's role in Chinese Buddhism through a close reading of epitaphs from the Tang dynasty (618-907). During this period, more than ever before, the religion became instrumental in the development of mothers' identity and in the conceptualization of ideal maternal virtues. According to many Tang dynasty epitaphs (muzhi ming), it would appear that children of Buddhist mothers largely complied with their mothers' desire to leave the household life or to be cremated rather than buried after her death. They were also much more likely than children of Buddhist fathers to become Buddhist believers themselves. What these epitaphs show is that Tang mothers played a vital role in the continuing sinification of Buddhism through the spread of religious devotion and practice in the domestic sphere.


2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Brown ◽  
Alex McEntire ◽  
Heather B. Transgrud
Keyword(s):  

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.


Author(s):  
Corinne Saunders

A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such historical grounding requires taking a long cultural perspective, going beyond traditional medical history – typically the history of disease, treatment and practice – to trace the origins and development of the ideas that underpin medicine in its broadest sense – ideas concerning the most fundamental aspects of human existence: health and illness, body and mind, gender and family, care and community. Historical sources can only go so far in illuminating such topics; we must also look to other cultural texts, and in particular literary texts, which, through their imaginative worlds, provide crucial insights into cultural and intellectual attitudes, experience and creativity. Reading from a critical medical humanities perspective requires not only cultural archaeology across a range of discourses, but also putting past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts with later perspectives. Medical humanities research is illuminated by cultural and literary studies, and also brings to them new ways of seeing; the relation is dynamic. This chapter explores the ways mind, body and affect are constructed and intersect in medieval thought and literature, with a particular focus on how voice-hearing and visionary experience are portrayed and understood.


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