scholarly journals Playing Upon Biographical Myths: William Shakespeare and Lesia Ukrainka as Characters in Contemporary Drama

Author(s):  
Natalia Vysotska

The article sets out to explore two plays by contemporary playwrights, one American (Don Nigro, Loves Labours Wonne), the other Ukrainian (Neda Nezhdana, And Still I will Betray You), focusing on William Shakespeare and Lesia Ukrainka, respectively, within the framework of “the author as character” subgenre of fictional (imaginative) biography. Accordingly, the article considers the correlation between the factual and the fi ctional as one of its foci of attention. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical approaches (Paul Franssen, Ton Hoenselaars, Ira Nadel, Aleid Fokkema, Michael MacKeon, Ina Shabert and others), the article summarizes the principal characteristics of “the author as character” subgenre and proceeds to discuss how they operate in the dramas under scrutiny. The analysis makes it abundantly clear that in Nigro’s and Nezhdana’s plays the balance between fact and fi ction is defi nitively tipped in favor of the latter. By centering their (quasi) biographical plays on highly mythologized artists of national standing, both dramatists aimed at demythologizing these cult fi gures, inevitably placing them, however, within new mythical plots combining a Neo-Romantic vision of the artist as demiurge, with a Neo-Baroque as well as fin de siècle apology of death and a postmodern denial of one objective reality.

Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

Stephen’s musings on the pre-cinematic ‘stereoscope’ are discussed in relation to Bloom’s contemplation of parallax and his mention of the ‘Mutoscope’. The three-dimensionality, tangibility, and tactility of stereoscopic perception is analysed alongside Bloom’s and Gerty’s encounter in ‘Nausicaa’ and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘intercorporeity’. The bodily effects of projected cinema—achieved through virtual film worlds, virtual film bodies, and the intercorporeity of film and spectator—are discussed through reference to panorama, phantom ride, and crash films. The dizzying effects of some of these films are compared to the vertiginous nature of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses; these cinematic and literary vestibular disturbances are elucidated through gestalt theory and the phenomenological concepts of ‘intention’, ‘attention’, and the ‘phenomenal field’. Finally, the relationship between the self and the other is considered, through a discussion of cinematic mirroring in Ulysses and in Mitchell and Kenyon’s fin de siècle Living Dublin films.


1893 ◽  
Vol 39 (165) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
M. J. Nolan

At the present time, when our fin de siècle knowledge of “general paralysis” enables us to recognize under that generic term many types of the disorder, and when the relation between it and syphilis continues a rather vexed question, little apology is needed for introducing to notice the following cases. They illustrate unmistakably some of the instances in which syphilis is solely responsible for what. Is termed by Dr. Savage” A process of degeneration which ultimately produces the ruin we recognize as general paralysis.”∗ Whatever may be hereafter formulated from the present evolutionary crisis in the history of the disorder there can be but little doubt that syphilis will be one of its most intimate and important relations. The story of its methods is briefly sketched in the following two short life-histories—in one asserting itself in the offspring of its victims by right of impure heredity, in the other carrying death direct into the vital centres by the force of its malignant virus.


Author(s):  
Molly Youngkin

Molly Youngkin’s essay investigates the heterosexism of a fin de siècle feminist newspaper, the Women’s Penny Paper (1894–99, later retitled the Women’s Herald and the Woman’s Signal), highlighting its treatment of three controversies: the Oscar Wilde trials, the death of poet Amy Levy, and the emergence of Sappho as a model of lesbian new womanhood. When the paper did address these controversies it ‘reshaped narratives about this [same-sex] desire to fit its own heterosexist agenda,’ responded in a disapproving way, or avoided a discussion of sexuality entirely (p. 543). The overall effect of this editorial bias was to pursue an ‘overarching agenda of advocating for heterosexual women’ and to reinforce social purity debates about ‘the effects of men’s sexual practices on heterosexual women and their families’ (p. 544). These feminist papers thus constructed the ‘other’ in ways that upheld restrictive conventions of race and sexuality while claiming to be vehicles of progressive thought.


2021 ◽  
pp. 36-65
Author(s):  
Robert Schuett

Who shaped the early Kelsen’s style of thinking under the Kaiser? What were the intellectual circles in which he moved in fin-de-siècle Vienna and the interwar period before he left Austria for Cologne, Geneva, Prague, and the United States? The chapter explores ‘the other Kelsen’ by revisiting his formative years, as well as his work in the lecture halls of university and his high-profile roles in the War Ministry, Karl Renner’s state chancellery, and American foreign intelligence after escaping the fascist Continent. A reluctant jurist, Kelsen had a passion for philosophy and literature, and from Freud and the economists he learned that individual and social life was all about drives and desires, instincts and interests. Where Kelsen was, there was no land of utopia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ірина Борисюк

The relevance of the article stems from the demand for rethinking Natalia Kobrynska’s prose and therefore her position in the Ukrainian literary canon. On the one hand, Kobrynska’s artistic searches reflect the development path of fin de siècle Ukrainian literature (realistic and modernist writing). On the other hand, some issues and themes in Kobrynska`s prose are actually ahead of her time (conceptualizing the Other, identity construction through power discourses, interrelation of power and knowledge, Kobrynska`s writing ecological impulses and so on). The paper was written within the framework of identity studies; the key issue is the tension between a construction and a choice. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Kobrynska’s characters’ identity is the result of their choices rather than their belonging to society. To conclude, Kobrynska has discovered the most appropriate ways of representation of society’s members at the time in which social relations collapse and emergence.


Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Mihaela Gabriela Stănică

By the end of the 19th century one may observe the birth of a particular form of knowledge which would further be known as scientia sexualis as well as the rationalization of the hermaphroditic body. Ernest Martin’s attempt to realize a taxonomy of the different forms of monstrosity (Histoire des monstres depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours -1880) from a juridical and clinical perspective is representative for what Jean-Jacques Courtine will call “le désenchantement de l’étrange”.Since the physicians from that period refuse to acknowledge the existence of real hermaphrodites among humans, the pseudo-hermaphrodite will lose his ontological independence and will turn into a simple pathological deviation which will be placed among the other pathological figures which constitute the inventory of degenerationshaunting the imaginary of the fin de siècle. Since the hermaphroditic body, this gender trouble that threatens the dual taxonomy of the society, is denied the ontological independence, this body enters the sphere of invisibility. Given that the transgressive body becomes a simple deviation, the hermaphrodite can only be a secondary representation.How are these mechanisms of the secondary representation applied to the literary productions of that period? The answer to this question could be found in Huysmans’ texts where the ambiguity of the hermaphroditic figure is captured into somatic and psychical representations that seem to confirm the epistemic paradigms of that fin de siècle.


Pólemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-354
Author(s):  
Sidia Fiorato

Abstract Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents an investigation of identity from multiple perspectives: the political stance of the Victorian fin de siècle intersects with questions of identity and their liminal articulation through narrative control. The count becomes a “thick” synecdoche for the East and his arrival to England symbolises a reverse political and cultural colonisation that leads to a new image of the individual, revealing the innermost recesses of Western culture.


1996 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selçuk Esenbel

The modern Japanese tourist visiting the Topkapi Sarai may well be struck by a display of sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmet held there. It was presented, along with a sword, to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1892 by Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957), an important pioneer in the history of Turkish-Japanese relations and the subject of this paper. Yamada, who was to remain in the imperial capital for almost twenty years, was witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism under the despotic regime of the so-called ‘Red Sultan’, and the subsequent dramatic transition to constitutionalism that came with the Young Turk revolution of 1908. He was one of only two Japanese resident in the city (possibly in the whole empire) in this period. The other was Nakamura Ejirō, owner of the first Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Yamada's friend and partner.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Joanna Kokot

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the time of great geographical explorations and discoveries which also constituted a source of inspiration for the fin-de-siecle writers. Between 1880 and 1920 there emerged a variant of adventure fiction, usually defined as the “quest romance” or “imperial romance”. The article discusses three such texts by H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887) and She (1887). It concentrates mainly on the interrelation between fact and legend (the process of one turning into the other) and on the function of the peritext — the title page, the introduction, the footnotes or the quoted texts from the fictional reality — in establishing that relation as well as blurring the barrier between the fictitious world and the world of the actual readers.


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