scholarly journals Is the Film as Empowering as the Book? Studying Empowerment in A Monster Calls

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-158
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Farnia

The aim of the paper is to discuss A Monster Calls (2016) by J. A. Bayona, a film adaptation of Patrick Ness’s novel (2011) of the same title, based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, from the empowerment theory perspective. The author of the article indicates that there are some significant changes between the book and the motion picture, especially when it comes to the ways of empowering the protagonist and the works’ potential young audience. The results of this comparative study show that the film is more affectively empowering than the novel. This is mainly because in the book, Ness skillfully uses verbal narration (accompanied by Jim Kay’s illustrations), while in the film, Bayona takes advantage of the possibilities offered by the audiovisual medium, therefore providing the audience with artistic and psychological empowerments.  

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-108
Author(s):  
Maciej Skowera

The paper discusses The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973) by John Bellairs and its film adaptation, directed by Eli Roth (2018), from queer theory and gender studies perspectives. The author of the article aims to overview and develop existing queer in‑terpretations of the first novel in the Lewis Barnavelt series, with contextual references to the cycle’s subsequent volumes, and to conduct a queer theory ‑inspired analysis of Roth’s motion picture. The genre represented by the novel and the film is also consid‑ered by taking the scholarly reflections on the queer aspects of the Gothic and the hor‑ror into account. The author concludes that although both versions of the story fail at portraying femininity in an unconventional way, they succeed in showing that queer‑ness and, more generally, the Otherness should be highly appreciated and valued.


Tekstualia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (60) ◽  
pp. 69-82
Author(s):  
Brygida Pawłowska-Jądrzyk

In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock appears to have explored the entire potential of Robert Bloch’s novel, employing a variety of solutions allowed by the polysemiotic audiovisual medium. Hitchcock made signifi cant compositional changes in comparison with the original (including the „false end” effect) and introduced new motifs, thus thoroughly modifying the symbolic implications of the story (e.g. the ornithological motifs). Another issue addressed in the article is the depiction of death, framed through references to the work of Gérard Lenne, who argues that in artistic exposures of the body, death undermines the illusion of the spectacle. The famous shower scene in Psycho solves this problem through stylistic solutions (e.g. the use of visual metaphors).


Author(s):  
Anggia Putria ◽  
Muizzu Nurhadi

The research aims to reveal how the application of dramatic elements of Dashner’s Maze Runner is transformed into its film adaptation. To achieve the purpose, the researcher analyzes seven dramatic elements by Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid which consist of exposition, inciting moment, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. The results of this research are the differences of the dramatic elements in the novel and film adaptation are not significant because only the scenes of exposition and rising action are not similar.


Author(s):  
Cha-Ming Shen ◽  
Tsan-Cheng Chuang ◽  
Jie-Fei Chang ◽  
Jin-Hong Chou

Abstract This paper presents a novel deductive methodology, which is accomplished by applying difference analysis to nano-probing technique. In order to prove the novel methodology, the specimens with 90nm process and soft failures were chosen for the experiment. The objective is to overcome the difficulty in detecting non-visual, erratic, and complex failure modes. And the original idea of this deductive method is based on the complete measurement of electrical characteristic by nano-probing and difference analysis. The capability to distinguish erratic and invisible defect was proven, even when the compound and complicated failure mode resulted in a puzzling characteristic.


Author(s):  
Chris Forster

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.


Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A Toth ◽  
Teresa Ramoni

Abstract This essay analyzes Vera Caspary’s novel Laura (1943) and the 1944 film adaptation (Preminger) in order to demonstrate an approach to adaptation studies we call fugal. If a fugue is a composition based on a ‘subject’ or short melodic phrase and its various ‘answers’—in other words, variations that maintain elements of the melody but also play with and revise it—how might we position the film as a variation on, rather than a reproduction of, Caspary’s novel? To explore this question, we analyze the sonic register of both the novel and film. Caspary doesn’t want us to merely read her novel; she wants us to listen to the voices that narrate it and the tunes that populate it. Similarly, listening to the film—not simply the dialogue but also the voiceover narration and David Raksin’s groundbreaking score—allows us to identify content not overt in, and sometimes at odds with, the visuals. When we listen critically and carefully, we can distinguish nuances that get lost in a strict fidelity approach; in particular, we can identify both works’ feminist content, especially their attempts to decentre patriarchal hard-boiled conventions and to confound notions of a singular truth.


Author(s):  
M. A. Lipina ◽  

The paper is dedicated to studying the oneiric text of S. Krzhizhanovsky’s novel “Sideline.” The topicality of the research is due to modern literary criticism interest in examining various aspects of artistic hypnology of Russian writers, as well as studying the works of “returned” authors, including S. Krzhizhanovsky. The realization specifics of the structural model of the literary dream in question can be presented as the following scheme: unconscious falling asleep – dream-journey – awakening by falling down. Different variants of artistic implementation of the main metaphors connected with dreaming are analyzed: “dream-life” in the image of briefcase-cushion and the image of “million-brained” dream of equality and brotherhood; “dream-death” in the image of the leader of a dream world, with the prevalence of thanatological vocabulary in the description of the city of dreams. The ways of imitating the space of real dreaming in the oneiric text of the novel are studied: awakening by falling, sudden muteness of characters, sudden change of location, etc. Also, the specifics of using the plot device of an unannounced dream is considered contributing to the illusion of “reality” of everything that happens to the character in the city of dreams. An attempt is made to consider the oneirotop of the novel in terms of classification by genre and function, plot and composition, images and esthetics and characters, as well as artistic functions of dreams in the literature (plot function, psychological function, idea, and symbolic function). The oneiric text of Krzhizhanosky’s novel “Sideline” is viewed as an artistic realization of the author’s original idea of the subconscious, dreamy origin of a communist utopia.


2019 ◽  
pp. 183-202
Author(s):  
Mariia Onyshchuk

The study analyzes lexemes and word combinations of colloquial style, slang and low colloquial language, performs their comparative analysis at word level, looks into the transformational patterns that the structures undergo during literary translation into English and Russian, and discusses the advantages and flaws of the applied translation strategies through suggesting adequate translation solutions. In the article, the argument is made that the translation strategies of substandard lexis reflect the interdisciplinary nature of expressive meaning and connotation which can be conveyed differently through various language levels during literary translation.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrycja Rojek

Rojek Patrycja, Konkretyzacja estetyczna w Zwierzętach nocy (2016) Toma Forda [Aesthetic Concretization in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016)]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 401–416. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.22. The subject of Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan (published in 1993) is the reader’s experience. The peculiar relationship that forms between the main female character - a reader of literary fiction – and the novel itself as well as its author, inspired in 2016 Tom Ford to capture the specifics of the same relationships using the language of moving images. This article presents the effects of studying the complex system of communication situations occurring in the novel and its film adaptation: each of them contains an additional story around which further author-reader relationships are formed. The analysis shows that a significant part of the film’s plot is not a direct insight into the novel, but its concretization projected by a female protagonist. Tom Ford’s film is therefore considered in relation to Roman Ingarden’s theory on aesthetic concretization.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document