scholarly journals Tyrannous Minds and Tamed Bodies: The Curious Case of Irene Adler from Canon to Screen

Author(s):  
Debanjali Roy ◽  
◽  
Tanmoy Putatunda ◽  

Appearing in the singular short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the character of Irene Adler has been adapted and reconstructed in subsequent literary and visual media. Twenty-first century screen adaptations have swivelled upon postfeminist re-appropriations of the character and overt sexualisation of the ‘body’, thereby engaging in reassessment of the Irene-Sherlock relationship and problematizing gendered presentations of the character. Locating Irene in a heteronormative space, such narratives have attempted to revise the image of the cross-dressing ‘adventuress’ through varied portrayals which seemingly broaden her scope by means of her deliberate transgressions of fixed gender tropes. This article, by taking into account the gendered power-play embedded in three popular twenty first century screen adaptations of the text, namely, the films Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), CBS’s Elementary (2012-2019) and BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), scrutinizes the dilemma of presentation of Irene Adler through the lenses of sexual dynamics and gendered performances.

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko

Sherlock Holmes, one of the world's most famous detectives, is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in the process of adaptation, be it cinematic or literary, and I propose calling him a cultural chameleon: regardless of the palette and colour against which he is positioned – warm (scarlet and pink), cold (emerald), or black – he remains a brilliant sleuth. This paper compares four titles and four colours: A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first of the long-running series of texts by Doyle, and three instances of Holmes's adaptability to twenty-first century standards and expectations: ‘A Study in Emerald’ (2003), an award-winning short story by Neil Gaiman, ‘A Study in Pink’ (2010), the first episode of the BBC series Sherlock, and ‘A Study in Black’ (2012–13), a part of the Watson and Holmes comics series. Each background highlights different aspects of the detective's personality, but also sheds light on his approach to crime and criminals.


Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Luciano ◽  
Steele Burrow

Abstract This article explores Italian filmmaker Antonietta De Lillo’s cinematic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ in which she incorporates elements from both literary and visual media to create a ‘re-performance’ of an earlier performance, that of Kafka’s Rotpeter. De Lillo through the extensive use of gesture, montage, shift of focus, and other cinematic devices, interrupts and disrupts the narrative ‘report’ thereby ‘shocking’ the viewer in Brechtian fashion into an awareness of the fragility of identity and of the ‘ape’ nature that remains in all of us. De Lillo’s addition of an interview to Kafka’s monologue represents an innovation in Kafka adaptation and within this framework her first person/ape narrator Signor Rotpeter is allowed to respond to what she terms our ‘loss of humanity’. He provides first person/ape evidence of this loss both verbally and through his gestural complex, addressing the disconnect between young and old, the cruelty toward animals, and the violence of everyday life, prompting the viewer to reflect on the lives of those who, like the narrator Rotpeter, are desperately seeking a ‘way out’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Furniss

Since 2000, design practice in the UK has changed dramatically. Boundaries between design disciplines have dissolved, and many contemporary design studios now defy classification. These studios are reconfiguring the design landscape, yet a uni-disciplinary structure still dominates undergraduate education. This is creating a disconnection between practice and education and posing critical questions for the current design education system. This article outlines the findings of a PhD research study exploring this disconnection, and although situated within the UK, the findings have international relevance. An initial scoping exercise draws on interviews with leading commentators from the UK design sector, examining the evolution of design practice over the past 10 years, and possible future directions for undergraduate education. Findings highlight that UK policy for creative education has placed undergraduate design courses in potential crisis. Arguably, the current university system for design education is outdated. It is now necessary to redefine the skills and processes twenty-first-century designers need. The body of the research is situated within five internationally renowned creative studios which defy classification. In-depth ethnographic studies cross-analyse the creative processes of these studios and their views on education. Findings identify key components of each studio’s processes, while also exploring studio members’ educational experiences, and reflections on future implications for pedagogy. This article argues that this growing disconnect between practice and education calls for existing pedagogic models to be challenged, proposes alternative approaches and highlights the need for policymakers, practitioners and educators to work together to best prepare young designers to meet today’s challenges.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.


Author(s):  
Denis Noble

Biophysics at the systems level, as distinct from molecular biophysics, acquired its most famous paradigm in the work of Hodgkin and Huxley, who integrated their equations for the nerve impulse in 1952. Their approach has since been extended to other organs of the body, notably including the heart. The modern field of computational biology has expanded rapidly during the first decade of the twenty-first century and, through its contribution to what is now called systems biology, it is set to revise many of the fundamental principles of biology, including the relations between genotypes and phenotypes. Evolutionary theory, in particular, will require re-assessment. To succeed in this, computational and systems biology will need to develop the theoretical framework required to deal with multilevel interactions. While computational power is necessary, and is forthcoming, it is not sufficient. We will also require mathematical insight, perhaps of a nature we have not yet identified. This article is therefore also a challenge to mathematicians to develop such insights.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Flynn

Abstract Twenty first century film evokes a new topology of the body. Science and technology are the new century’s ‘sovereign power’ which enforces biopolitics through bodies which, by virtue of being seen at their most fundamental level, have become docile surfaces. The film body is at once manipulated and coerced into an ethos of optimization; a thoroughly scientific and ‘molecular’ optimization which proffers ‘normalization’ and intimately regulated bodies. In the film bodies of this millennium, bodily intervention results in surveillance becoming internalized. Now the body is both a means and an end of social control. This essay applies the philosophies Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose to twenty first century Hollywood film, elucidating a new tropos, a new film body/body of film.


Author(s):  
Stephen Purcell

This essay considers three movements in twenty-first-century Shakespearean performance in light of Philip Auslander’s influential study Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999): (1) the live broadcasting of theatre productions; (2) the increasingly popular genre of immersive theatre as spectator sport; and (3) the body of practice emerging from, and centring on, the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. It considers the ways in which each of these movements constructs ‘liveness’, paying particular attention to the implications of these constructions for Shakespearean performance. The first movement is examined through the lens of the National Theatre Live broadcast of Nicholas Hytner’s Othello, whose ‘liveness’ involves an interplay of filmic and theatrical registers; the second, through a discussion of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More; and the third, through the modern practice of finding ‘liveness’ in game-like theatre techniques and in the responsiveness of the actor at Shakespeare’s Globe.


Author(s):  
Nalina Wait

In the twenty-first century, improvisation as a mode of performance has gained momentum in Western theatre dance. Yet its theorization remains challenged, not only by the ephemerality of the subject but also by the ways that its corporeal knowledges resist language and elude codification. This is because the practice does not comply with a dualistic hierarchy of ‘mind-over-matter’ but instead proposes body-mind unification as a core principle of the practice. Drawing from examination of the author’s own practice-based research, this chapter qualitatively examines a key methodology of improvised practice described as embodied consciousness. This chapter articulates how the bifurcation of embodied consciousness, as thinking-through-the-body and the body’s mind, can operate in an improvised performance and how it can be cultivated and refined through practice. Furthermore, it interrogates how the model for articulating composition needs reframing in an improvisational context, from a language based on formal logic to one based on attending to fluctuating, formless ‘intensities’.


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