Deflating Fascism in Max Steiner’s Score for The Most Dangerous Game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lee
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Satisfaction ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach

This article examines Max Steiner’s original score for the 1932 RKO Production of The Most Dangerous Game. Steiner’s score quotes from a piece of piano music, “Russian Waltz,” which he composed for the film’s villain, Count Zaroff, to play within the film’s diegesis. His vast orchestral underscore liberally quotes the main motif of his piano work. Using a hermeneutic approach, the article argues that Steiner’s orchestral underscore reinforces the film’s anti-fascist narrative potentials by linking Count Zaroff’s motif to his enterprise of hunting human beings and specifically to the sexual satisfaction the Count draws from his gruesome fetish. The motif itself undergoes a myriad of expansions and contractions, intensifications and relaxations, charting the ups and downs of Zaroff’s fortunes. Based on archival research, hermeneutic analysis, and a close reading of both the film and its source material, the article concludes that Steiner participated in crafting an anti-fascist film at a signal moment in history.

The Many Faces of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger

Traversals ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dene Grigar
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Electronic Literature ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Research Interviews ◽  
The Many

This chapters challenges the accepted view that Judy Malloy produced four versions of her pioneering work of electronic literature, Uncle Roger, showing through material uncovered from archival research, interviews, and Traversals, that there are instead six. Through a close reading of each version, the chapter also reveals subtle as well as significant changes the author made to the work during its 30-year history.

scholarly journals WEIGHING THE WORK OF LOVE: ON KATE DAVIS’S RE-VISIONED ICONOCLASM

ARTis ON ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Dominic Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading

This essay offers a close reading of recent work by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis to argue that her practice engages iconoclasm in ways importantly modified by her feminist commitments. Often Davis’s source material has significant historical, political or art historical import, as in her works dealing with the Suffragist attack on Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914. What is at stake in her ‘re-visioning’ of such moments, which often involves labour-intensive drawing as a key method, is a formal commitment to a kind of delicate or caring vandalism, often pursued through labour-intensive drawing (iconoclasm as a means of making images) and a specifically feminist contention with existing hierarchies of value and systems of representation (iconoclasm as contestation). To reckon with these stakes, Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘the pleasure in drawing’ and the feminist concept of the ‘work of love’ are brought into relation with Davis’s work. 

scholarly journals Towards the attainment of mindful bodily relations in music education

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Author(s):  
Cecilia Ferm Almqvist
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Relational Experiences ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
To Receive

Recent studies of female guitar students in upper secondary school ensemble education suggest that girls behave, and are encouraged to behave, in more immanent ways than boys. They seem to receive less encouragement to stretch their bodies and become full musical human beings. Instead they become the second musical sex. During the course of my work with the problem of how to create space for girls playing the electric guitar in educational settings, I have continually found myself wondering how to create educational spaces and relations in ways that let all pupils, independent of sex, realize ideas, transcend as musical bodies, and become what they already are. If teachers and pupils are interrelated bodies, teachers must be aware of how they use their bodies when it comes to creating space for all pupils to develop and stretch out their bodies. The actions of the music teacher, as a musical body, must be balanced in relation to the other musical bodies in the room, as well as to physical preconditions, goals, visions, and expectations of the students. In this article, I want to delve into the subject of bodily interaction, teachers’ responsibilities, and questions of intentional educational bodily relations. The aim is to share my close reading of Young’s philosophical thinking regarding gender structures and especially female comportment, motility, and spatiality, and develop a set of prerequisites for intentional bodily (music) educational relations. With a starting point in research-based inspiration and motivation for conducting the current philosophical investigation, I share my close reading of Young’s theories regarding female situated bodies. Continually I relate to excerpts from two interviews with female guitar students, exemplifying musical body-relational experiences. Finally I share and reflect upon a developed thinking about mindful bodily (music) educational relations.

scholarly journals BRILLIANT DISGUISES: PERSONA, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE MAGIC OF RETROSPECTION IN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LATE CAREER

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Autobiographical Performance ◽  
Magic Trick ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Actual Life

Popular musicians with long careers provide rich source material for the study of persona, authenticity, endurance and the maintenance (and reinvention) of significant bodies of work. Successful artists’ songs create a soundtrack not only to their own lives, but also to those of their audiences, and to the times in which they were created and to which they bore witness. The work of singers who continue to perform after several decades can be heard in terms of their ‘late voice’ (Elliott 2015), a concept that has potentially useful insights for the study of musical persona. This article exploits this potential by considering how musical persona is de- and reconstructed in retrospective, autobiographical performance. I base my articulation of the relationship between persona, life-writing and retrospective narrativity on a close reading of two late texts by Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run, the autobiography he published in 2016, and Springsteen on Broadway, the audiovisual record of a show that ran from October 2017 through to December 2018. In these texts, Springsteen uses the metaphor of the ‘magic trick’ as a framing device to shuttle between the roles of autobiographical myth-breaker and lyrical protagonist. He repeatedly highlights his songs as fictions that bear little relation to his actual life, while also showing awareness that, as often happens with popular song, he has been mapped onto his characters in ways that prove vital for their sense of authenticity. Yet Springsteen appears to be aiming for a different kind of authenticity with these late texts, by substituting the persona developed in his recorded work with an older, wiser, more playful narrator. I appropriate Springsteen’s ‘magic trick’ metaphor to highlight the magic of retrospection and the magical formation of the life narrative as an end-driven process.

scholarly journals ‘WAR AS REMEDY OR POISON’: READING THE BLIND MAN'S GARDEN AND THE KITE RUNNER WITH A CRITICAL LENS OF MBEMBE’S NECROPOLITICS

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1577-1584
Author(s):  
Sara Iqbal Kakar ◽  
Humaira Riaz ◽  
Nayab Ahmad Khan
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reading Technique ◽  
Asian Society ◽  
The World ◽  
Asian People

Purpose of the Study: This study emphasizes the contribution of fiction in highlighting the American exercise of power around the world predominantly Pakistan and Afghanistan. It investigates how America has become a dictating body deciding the life and death of human beings mainly in South Asian developing countries. Methodology: Being Qualitative, this study uses Eaglestone’s (2000) close reading technique to analyze words and structure of the texts of Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Nadeem Aslam Khan’s The Blind Man’s Garden. It develops a descriptive thesis leading to construct arguments by drawing a theoretical framework from Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003). Mbembe took his inspiration from Foucault’s idea of bio-power. Modern narrative discourse on sovereignty and its relation to war is taken as the main subject of necropolitics. Mbembe’s idea of sovereignty as an exercise to get control of the mortality of the enemy helps to interpret the texts via the close reading method. Main Findings: This study evaluated two novels to assert that necropolitics by taking its four basic concepts, power, war, politics, and death was the actual controlling power of a country. It analyzed fictional characters to argue how individuals endured hardships because of the necropolitical exercise of America and Russia in Afghanistan. Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics helps in understanding fiction. Applications of this study: The present study has significant implications from both theoretical and interpretative perspectives. Necropolitics, originally a political notion is reworked in fiction, which asserts that using this concept, power relations, their roots, and exercise around the world can be explored in various fields. This study contributes to dismantling the latent necropolitics in the society represented in fiction. It elevates the social and political consciousness of the general public of South Asia, particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan. This study can be helpful in the field of psychology to popularize the notion of necropolitics in contemporary society. Novelty/Originality of this study: Comparatively a new field, Necropolitics has been discussed in the fields of medical sciences and education. This study significantly highlights its existence in the field of literary studies. Fiction as a direct reflection of society helps in deconstructing the prevailing exercise of necropolitics in South Asian society. It is also helpful in raising the social and political consciousness of South Asian people.

The Monstrosity of God Made Flesh

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 238-256
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Jobe
Keyword(s):  
Karl Barth ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Monster Theory ◽  
The Status

Abstract Three times over the course of thirty-eight years, Karl Barth images God as the monster Leviathan (once each in the Epistle to the Romans, Church Dogmatics II.1 and& IV.3.1). Barth’s imagination for God in monstrous form emerges from his interpretation of Romans 11:35, in which the apostle Paul quotes a line from Job 41:11, a poem about Leviathan, to describe the greatness of God. Using monster theory and a close reading of Barth, this article will discuss how God as Leviathan answers one of Barth’s primary questions—namely, how it is that Jesus saves human beings from their headlong rush into the abyss. Moving from Barth’s exegetical insights, through Barth’s soteriology, the article ends with the ethics of a God made monstrous flesh—an ethics that Barth explicitly links to the status of prisoners and all those depicted as monstrous and cast into the abyss.

The Missing Day

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisha Gaines
Keyword(s):  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Journal Entry ◽  
John Howard ◽  
Racial Impersonation

This chapter considers the iconic, cross-racial impersonator, John Howard Griffin, author of the bestselling Black Like Me (1961). This chapter uses archival research to reveal how Griffin prepared for his temporary (mis)adventures in Southern blackness, first published in a six-part series in the now defunct, black periodical, Sepia. Before those articles, Griffin wrote about his experiment in his personal journals. Close-reading those journals uncovered Griffin’s secret black persona, “Joseph Franklin.” Written in an unpublished Halloween journal entry, known in this book as the “missing day, this chapter centers that entry.” It reads Griffin’s later success in cross-racial empathy through the spectral persona of Joseph, an imagined identity on which Griffin projected anxieties about black masculinity, and his dread about his impending temporary blackness. This chapter details how the haunting absence of Joseph and the missing October 31, 1959, journal entry structure each iteration of Griffin’s empathetic racial impersonation—from his journals and articles for Sepia to the literary and film versions of Black Like Me. By tracing this strategic avoidance, Griffin’s archive uncovers the imagined spectre of black masculinity shaping the most iconic example of empathetic racial impersonation in this genealogy.

Selling Smartness: Corporate Narratives and the Smart City as a Sociotechnical Imaginary

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 540-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jathan Sadowski ◽  
Roy Bendor
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Smart Urbanism

This article argues for engaging with the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. By conducting a close reading of primary source material produced by the companies IBM and Cisco over a decade of work on smart urbanism, we argue that the smart city imaginary is premised in a particular narrative about urban crises and technological salvation. This narrative serves three main purposes: (1) it fits different ideas and initiatives into a coherent view of smart urbanism, (2) it sells and disseminates this version of smartness, and (3) it crowds out alternative visions and corresponding arrangements of smart urbanism. Furthermore, we argue that IBM and Cisco construct smart urbanism as both a reactionary and visionary force, plotting a model of the near future, but one that largely reflects and reinforces existing sociopolitical systems. We conclude by suggesting that breaking IBM’s and Cisco’s discursive dominance over the smart city imaginary requires us to reimagine what smart urbanism means and create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs, and models.

scholarly journals Sandor Katz and the Possibilities of a Queer Fermentive Praxis

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Maroney
Keyword(s):  
Rural Community ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The North ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Queer Politics ◽  
Do It Yourself

Fermentation, when embedded in queer politics, offers a conceptual and material challenge to the ideology of purism that structures dominant understandings of health in the North American context. Through a close reading of Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation and the author’s experiences at a 2014 summer residency at Katz’s Foundation for Fermentation Fervor, this article contributes to food studies scholarship exploring the transformative potential of fermentation. In his teaching and writing, Katz challenges the ideology of purism through a queer fermentive praxis that advocates for improvisation, microbial inspiration, and interdependent nourishment. This praxis demonstrates an imperfect, do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos of fermentation that empowers folks to experiment with found and foraged materials. Katz’s theorization of fermentation as social change heralds the queer shape-shifting of microorganisms as inspiration for human action. And, in the context of the queer rural community where he makes his home, Katz’s fermentive praxis cultivates interdependent, inter-species nourishment. This queer fermentive praxis activates the political potential of fermentation by refusing the dominant view of human beings as individuals engaged in purity projects of control and subordination. Instead, it imagines humans as co-constituted, deeply dependent subjects who are responsible to, and in service of creating conditions for flourishing of all kinds of life.

scholarly journals MENGUNGKAP SIFAT-SIFAT TERPUJI MANUSIA DALAM CERITA RAKYAT SASAK: SUATU KAJIAN TEMATIS

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-58
Author(s):  
Lalu Fakihuddin
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Expected Result ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach

This study describes ideal characters reflected in Sasaknese Folklore (Cerita Rakyat Sasak). The design of this study is qualitative implementing descriptive-interpretive techniques. Sources of the data of this study were sequences of the Folklore representing ideal characters of human beings.  Specifically, this study used hermeneutic approach, an approach from which indepth analysis of a text is applied.  Data analysis referred to perspective-constructive that focused on intensity, determined categories, and target of the expected result.  The study revealed that Sasakne Folklore is one of the oral folklore reflecting high human values.  The good characters included religious, work hard, patient, high responsibility, mutual-consultative, and loyal. 

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