scholarly journals JUDI DENCH AND SHAKESPEAREAN PERSONAS IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
SOPHIE DUNCAN
Keyword(s):  
Moral Virtue ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Role Choices

Dame Judi Dench’s twenty-first-century theatrical career has defied the expectation that her performance as the Countess in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2003 All’s Well That Ends Well would signal the culmination and conclusion of her stage acting career. This article draws on scholarship on the use of retrospection and persona-building to redirect attention from Dench’s conspicuously ‘late’ success in film to map how Dench has led, collaborated in and resisted public constructions of her persona. Shakespeare has been consistently key to this process. While enlisting persona-building strategies inherited from her Shakespearean forebears, Dench has resisted the overt appointment of any kind of Shakespearean ‘successor’ and thus the continuation of Shakespeare performance genealogies. Simultaneously, her role choices have contributed to her persona’s accrued significance as an avatar of moral virtue and authenticity – augmented by her association with the ‘national poet’, Shakespeare, as England’s most prestigious playwright. The article also examines Dench’s persona specifically as an ageing actress, and her significance for discourses of aspirational ageing, ageism, and national investments in the ageing female performer as a public persona.

‘The extremely private literary giant’: Alice Munro’s poetics of humility

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ailsa Cox
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Private Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Literary Prizes ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Personal Reflections

When the Nobel Prize committee awarded the laureateship to Alice Munro in October 2013, someone or something called ‘Alice Munro’ was immediately placed under a media spotlight. She had, over the years, accrued what Lorraine York has called ‘reluctant celebrity’, regularly gathering literary prizes, but making relatively few personal appearances. In the first decade of the twenty-first century she had become more visible in public whilst still retaining a degree of ambivalence. This ambivalence was evident in the brief interviews she gave in the weeks after the announcement, following which she returned to her private life and the retirement from writing that she had already announced. This article combines an interrogation of Munro’s humble public persona with an investigation into her poetics of short fiction, referring to her published texts and interviews. It concludes with some personal reflections on writing about a living author at the end of her career.

Managing Networks of Twenty-First Century Organisations

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perri Six ◽  
Nick Goodwin ◽  
Edward Peck ◽  
Tim Freeman
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century

Freud, sex, and the soul: does Freud’s focus on sex obscure his relevance to the twenty-first century soul-searcher?

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Eliza Preston
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Psychotherapy Training ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
First Century ◽  
Clinical Approach ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article explores what the work of Sigmund Freud has to offer those searching for a more spiritual and philosophical exploration of the human experience. At the early stages of my psychotherapy training, I shared with many peers an aversion to Freud’s work, driven by a perception of a mechanistic, clinical approach to the human psyche and of a persistent psychosexual focus. This article traces my own attempt to grapple with his work and to push through this resistance. Bettelheim’s (1991) treatise that Freud was searching for man’s soul provides a more sympathetic lens through which to explore Freud’s writing, one which enabled me to discover a rich depth which had not previously been obscured. This article is an account of my journey to a new appreciation of Freud’s work. It identifies a number of challenges to Bettelheim’s argument, whilst also indicating how his revised translation allowed a new understanding of the relevance of Freud’s work to the modern reader. This account may be of interest to those exploring classical psychotherapeutic literature as well as those guiding them through that process.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document