scholarly journals The problem of female subjectivity in the novelized biographies by Muriel Spark

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-75
Author(s):  
Alsu Hadievna Vafina ◽  
◽  
Zhanna Georgievna Konovalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Muriel Spark

Tanaka Kinuyo

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
Japanese Woman ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema. The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author. With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.

Female Christian prose today: A failed search for new women’s subjectivity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
E. Chelpanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social System ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In her analysis of books by Maya Kucherskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva, and Yulia Voznesenskaya, the author investigates the history of female Christian prose from the 1990s until the present day. According to the author, it was in the 1990s, the period of crisis and transformation of the social system, that female Christian writers were more vocal, than today, on the issues of the new post-Soviet female subjectivity, drawing on folklore imagery and contrasting the folk, pagan philosophy with the Christian one, defined by an established set of rules and limitations for the principal female roles. Thus, the folklore elements in Kucherskaya’s early works are considered as an attempt to represent female subjectivity. However, the author argues that, in their current work, Kucherskaya and other representatives of the so-called female Christian prose tend to choose different, objectivizing methods to represent female characters. This new and conservative approach may have come from a wider social context, including the state-imposed ‘family values’ program.

Muriel Spark and Evil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Psychological Issue ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
Personal Gain ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
The Problem Of Evil

Muriel Spark gave sustained attention to the problem of evil. In her view, people committed evil acts gratuitously, merely for the sake of causing suffering. By the same token, novels are virtually unthinkable without some degree of evil—or evil in its lesser forms, such as mischief, wickedness, or wanton cruelty. Using previously untapped archival materials, this chapter focuses on manifestations of evil in two of Spark’s novels: The Comforters, in which evil is an intrusion on privacy, and Memento Mori, in which the evil characters, Mabel Pettigrew and Eric Colston, manipulate, blackmail, and threaten others for personal gain. Spark’s speculations on evil must be understood in terms of philosophical and theological discussions at mid-century. For Spark, evil was not a psychological issue so much as a moral one. In this regard, her novels can be profitably read alongside works about evil by C. E. M. Joad, Jean Nabert, and Hannah Arendt.

Nina Simone as Poet and Orchestrator

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-147
Author(s):  
Marcus R. Pyle
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Content ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Nina Simone

How do you fashion an identity in a society that, at every turn, tries to snuff you out? In this article, I address Nina Simone's praxis of renaming and reinvention to demonstrate strategies of resistance. To this point, I analyze the musico-poetic setting of Nina Simone’s songs “Images” (1964) and “Four Women” (1965) to argue that her artistic musical choices sonically orchestrate varying issues of Black female subjectivity, identity, and self-making. In Simone’s songs, she refuses to discount the materiality of the Black body; instead, she envelops the Black body with signifiance and significance. The sonic bearers of semantic content become extensions of the Self—transmutable and heterodox. The compositional and poetic subtleties in these songs claim that the gaze of the Other can potentiate exteriority and freedom—what I term the “exo(p)tic.”

Muriel Spark

2012 ◽  
pp. 203-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Ellis Hosmer
Keyword(s):  
Muriel Spark

scholarly journals ‘The Theatre of the Family’: An Irish Approach to Gender Awareness in Catherine Dunne’s Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Auxiliadora Pérez Vides
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Irish Family ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Gender Awareness ◽  
Las Mujeres ◽  
Family Ideology

Abstract:Catherine Dunne’s fiction masterly portrays ordinary themes like family relations and the process of identity formation, and she criticises the constraining elements that thwart female subjectivity in Ireland. However, as I intend to argue in this article, by bringing to the fore the diverse ways whereby women transcend the social, psychological or material barriers that the Irish family ideology and the rhetorics of maternity have traditionally set upon them, Dunne emphasizes the need to re-think the social and individual implications that these obstacles entail, insofar as the rearticulation of their conventional significance constitutes a catalyst for women’s attainment of selfdiscovery.Keywords: Catherine Dunne; contemporary Irish women’s ction; female subjectivity; divorce in Ireland; gender awareness.Title in Spanish: “El teatro de la familia”: una aproximación irlandesa a la conciencia de género en la narrativa de Catherine DunneResumen:La narrativa de Catherine Dunne describe temas cotidianos como las relaciones familiares y la construcción de la identidad, y critica los elementos que delimitan la subjetividad femenina en Irlanda. Sin embargo, como intentaré demostrar en este artículo, al resaltar cómo las mujeres trascienden los obstáculos sociales, psicológicos y materiales que la ideología de la familia y la retórica de la maternidad les han impuesto tradicionalmente en Irlanda, Dunne enfatiza la necesidad de cuestionar las implicaciones sociales e individuales de dichas barreras, dado que la rearticulación de su signi cación convencional constituye un elemento de cambio hacia la consecución de la plena conciencia femenina.Palabras clave: Catherine Dunne; narrativa irlandesa contemporánea de mujeres; subjetividad femenina; el divorcio en Irlanda; conciencia de género

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