Temporary Accommodation: Joanna Hogg's Cinema of Dispossession

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-20
Author(s):  
John David Rhodes

Joanna Hogg's cinema is characterized by its formal precision and its unflinching take on upper-middle class privilege, especially in the context of the family. Her first two feature films—Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010)—scrutinize the dynamics of unhappy families on vacation. Exhibition (2015) takes a long hard look at a couple, both of whom are artists, as they go about their everyday lives in their modernist London home. All of these films avail themselves of rigorous framing and frequent long-take cinematography in order to make cinematic space itself a vehicle of emotional and political analysis. Her most recent feature, The Souvenir (2019), converts elements of Hogg's own biography to tell the story of a young filmmaker who learns the hard way that filmmaking and romantic love are the most difficult enterprises.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meilutė Taljūnaitė

Each country has its own criteria for the upper middle class. On the other hand, it is clear that even the general principles that define the middle class in different countries differ markedly between them. The US and British criteria are often compared. The role of the family as an element of social stratification is important in the British upper middle class model. The article advocates the influence of family stratification on the formation of the upper (and not only) middle class in Lithuania. Not only does the upper middle class have self-employment, its income is above average and it has higher education, it also influences, identifies trends and fundamentally shapes public opinion (an aspect of its ‘social role’). The broad upper middle class is not so much a guarantor of the welfare state but of social stability in the country.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Bova ◽  
Francesco Arcidiacono

This paper sets out to investigate the issues leading parents to engage in argumentative discussions with their children during mealtimes. Within a data corpus of 30 video-recorded meals of 10 middle to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families with a high socio-cultural level, 107 argumentative discussions between parents and children aged from 3 to 9 years old were selected. The approach for the analysis is based on the pragma-dialectical ideal model of a critical discussion. The results show that family argumentative discussions unfold around issues that are generated both by parental prescriptions and by children’s requests. The parental prescriptions largely concern context-bound activities such as having to eat a certain food or the teaching of correct table manners. The issues triggered by children’s requests refer to a wide range of activities, mainly related to the activity of mealtimes but also related to the children’s behavior outside the family context. These results indicate that argumentative interactions between parents and children are not mere conflictual episodes that must be avoided, but they essentially have a broader educational function.


2020 ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Jessi Streib

There are two types of family men: those raised in conservative communities and with resource strengths, and those raised with resource weaknesses who use the identity to make a virtue of necessity. The former distances themselves from school, college, and work but maintain enough resources to remain insecurely tied to the upper-middle class. The latter distances themselves from school, college, and work too. However, having started with fewer resources, they are unable to stay in the upper-middle class. Still, most are pleased with how their lives unfold: they are on route to marrying, becoming fathers, and providing—becoming the family men they’ve long wanted to be.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30
Author(s):  
Binmei Liu

Abstract Few previous studies have examined the impact of social class on language attitudes and language use in mainland China. A total of 215 questionnaires were collected from a university in China for this study. The participants were classified into four social classes: upper middle class, middle middle class, lower middle class, and lower class. Then an individual interview was conducted with 10 students. Findings show that the students from the upper middle class had significantly lower attitudes toward local dialects and they had the lowest percentage of current use of dialect at home. The study adds evidence to findings of previous studies that local dialects might face certain danger of maintenance. It also shows that this change would start from people from the upper middle class. The study also points out a possible future tendency that social class privilege will play a more significant role in English learning and education.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dr. Indu Goyal

Marriage is an important thing in the life of a woman. The importance that our society attaches to marriage is reflected in our literature and it is the central concern of Shashi Deshpade’s novels. In our society where girl learns early that she is ‘Paraya Dhan’, and she is her parents’ responsibility till the day she is handed over to her rightful owners. What a girl makes of her life, how she shapes herself as an individual, what profession she takes up is not as important as whom she marries. Marriage is the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. This paper attempts to probe into the problems of marriage through the protagonists of her novels where one enjoys the freedom of marriage and the other accepts the traditional marriage. Shashi Deshpade highlights the problems of marriage faced by middle-class people in finding suitable grooms for their daughters. This problem is well-illustrated through the characters of her novels. Since the girl’s mind over her childhood is tuned that she is another’s property, she tries to attach a lot of importance to it. it is indeed a tragedy that even in the modern age, Indian females echo the same sentiment where it was marriage which mattered most of them but not to the men. It is a beginning of females sacrifices in life that marriage brings to her. Shashi Deshpande encourages her female protagonists to rise in rebellion against the males in the family matters, instead she wants to build a harmonious relationship between man and woman in a mood of compromise and reconciliation.  


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