‘Hamlet through your legs’

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Kaori Ashizu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Rich

This article discusses four Hamlet adaptations produced in twentieth-century Japan: Naoya Shiga’s ‘Claudius’s Diary’ (1912), Hideo Kobayashi’s ‘Ophelia’s Testament’ (1931), Osamu Dazai’s New Hamlet (1941) and Shohei Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary (1955). Though differently motivated, and written in different styles, they collectively make something of a tradition, each revealing a unique, unexpected interpretation of the famous tragedy. Read as a group, they thoroughly disprove the stereotypical view that Japan has generally taken a highly respectful, imitative attitude to Western culture and Shakespeare. Hamlet has certainly been revered in Japan as the epitome of Western literary culture, but these adaptations reveal complicated, ambivalent attitudes towards Shakespeare’s play: not only love and respect, but anxiety, competitiveness, resistance and criticism, all expressed alongside an opportunistic urge to appropriate the rich ‘cultural capital’ of the canonical work.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

EEN POPULAIRE ARISTOCRAAT

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-169
Author(s):  
Erica van Boven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
General Public ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Cultural Hierarchy ◽  
Intellectual Elite

A POPULAR ARISTOCRAT. ARTHUR VAN SCHENDEL AND THE READING PUBLIC IN THE 1930S In Dutch literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual elite and general public were not only separate, but even opposite categories. ‘Highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ held polarized positions in matters of cultural hierarchy and literary taste, which led to fierce debates. Strikingly, one author was able to bridge this gap: Arthur van Schendel (1874-1946) appealed both ends of the spectrum and thus had an exceptional, connecting role in the cultural divides of the interwar period. This article analyses the responses to Van Schendels so-called ‘Dutch novels’ in order to find out what made Arthur van Schendel highly valued by leading professionals as well as loved by the reading audience.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

scholarly journals Recovering and Reanimating ‘Lost’ Traces: The Digital Archiving of the Rehearsal Process in Siobhan Davies RePlay

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Whatley
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Digital Archiving ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Intelligent Process ◽  
The Relationship

Siobhan Davies RePlay provides open access to a significant collection of performances, photographs, and text-based materials, and includes a large number of rehearsal tapes that offer a unique insight to the dance making process. Following the development of simple capture technologies, Davies’ dancers have recorded and reviewed their own movement experiments or ‘scratches’. These previously private memory objects enter the public domain via the archive. Though raw and unedited captures they become traces of an intelligent process that is rarely available for public scrutiny. When made available alongside films and other documents relating to performances, these scratches offer a unique insight to the choices made by the artists; what is left out and what is featured. It might be argued that these scratches accrue cultural capital through their inclusion in the archive, and when distributed online. This article examines the extent to which the tapes generate new readings of dance, transmit new knowledge, create new kinds of tools for reconstruction and/or prompt a reconsideration of the relationship between dancer, choreographer and audience to re-conceptualise the dance-making process. It will be argued that the tapes broaden expectations of what is traditionally held within an archive, revealing the rich potential for dance archives to enhance and enrich our understanding of dance.

The Modern City

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIANE E. DAVIS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shifting Balance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City ◽  
Rich History

What constitutes modern Mexico? Is there a clear distinction between the historic and modern Mexico City? And if there are, does this distinctions hold up throughout the twentieth century, when what is apparent is a mix of legacies coexisting overtime? This chapter discusses the semiotics of history and modernity. It discusses the struggle of the Mexico City to find its own image including its struggle to preserve historic buildings amidst the differing political alliances that either promote change or preserve the past. However, past is not a single entity, hence if the preservation of the rich history of Mexico is pursued, the question arises as to what periods of history represented in the city are to be favoured in its future development. In this chapter, the focus is on the paradoxes of the Torre Bicentenario and on the pressures to preserve Mexico’s past, the ways they have been juxtaposed against the plans for its future and how the balance of these views has shifted over time. It determines the key actors and the institutions who have embraced history as opposed to progress, identifies the set of forces that dominated in the city’s twentieth-century history, and assesses the long-term implications of the shifting balance for the social, spatial and built environmental character of the city. The chapter ends with a discussion on the current role played by the cultural and historical authorities in determining the fate of the city.

Montreal in the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-209
Author(s):  
Michèle Dagenais
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
Quiet Revolution ◽  
Key Industries ◽  
The City

Montreal began the twentieth century as Canada’s primary city, its major port with an emerging industrial sector, ruled by an Anglophone Protestant elite while populated by a Francophone Catholic majority—the two solitudes. Diverse European immigrant communities created a third solitude, producing a city of complex communities. Linguistic and educational segregations drew newcomers to difficult choices. The city juggled its diversity through the depression; World War II and early cold war times brought prosperity. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 ended Montreal’s primacy; Toronto rose to become Canada’s financial and industrial capital—while the Quiet Revolution for Francophone rights in Quebec propelled Montreal to become a more regional cultural capital. That movement helped Montreal protect key industries while immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic world created new ethnic diversity. Urban processes mixing separations, aggregations, and integrations allowed Montreal to grow through urban sprawl and keep solid prosperity, fair distributions, and open opportunities, limiting marginalities.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Margree ◽  
Daniel Orrells ◽  
Minna Vuohelainen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Professional Authorship

The introduction to the volume sets Richard Marsh in his historical context and argues that our understanding of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional authorship remains incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s oeuvre. The introduction discusses Marsh as an exemplary professional writer producing topical popular fiction for an expanding middlebrow market. The seeming ephemerality of his literary production meant that its value was not appreciated by twentieth-century critics who were constructing the English literary canon. Marsh’s writing, however, deserves to be reread, as its negotiation of mainstream and counter-hegemonic discourses challenges our assumptions about fin-de-siècle literary culture. His novels and short stories engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates about aesthetic and economic value and interrogated the politics of gender, sexuality, empire and criminality.

“I’m Nervous That Watching Horror Makes Me Look Stupid”

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Mathias Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Academic Study

The horror genre has traditionally struggled with an image problem, with horror films being seen as unintelligent, aesthetically uninteresting, and perhaps even morally problematic. This genre stigma has historically been extended to horror fans, who may worry about a lack of cultural capital. Horror movies rarely receive prestigious critical accolades, and the academic study of horror only emerged toward the end of the twentieth century. In recent years, an emergence of ambitious and genre convention-challenging horror movies has prompted some critics to talk about a horror renaissance or even the birth of “post-horror” or “elevated horror.” However, horror films have always had the capacity for engaging with serious themes in an artistic way, and there is often a discrepancy between critics’ evaluations of horror films and audiences’ evaluations. The genre stigma seems to be abating, but some horror fans may still worry about looking stupid—especially if they startle easily.

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