scholarly journals the Remasculation Film: Themes and Variations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Patrick Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Red River ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Masculinity Crisis ◽  
Conservative Values

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a discourse of masculinity crisis precipitated the appearance of a number of what Susan Jeffords describes as “rearticulations of screen masculinity,” which influenced the production of a group films whose narrative diegeses reaffirmed the heteronormative, hypermasculine façade onscreen. These films are identified and defined in this dissertation as remasculation pictures, or narratives that showcase the hero’s oscillation between two oppositional expressions of screen masculinity. In the rhetoric of the remasculation film, the protagonist’s emasculation initiates a quest to remasculate by reaffirming the dominance and authority of the hypermasculine archetype. Further, in a few key performances (Red River [1948], The Searchers [1956], The Wings of Eagles [1957]), John Wayne exemplifies the ultra-conservative values, imposing physicality, staunch heterosexuality, and capability of this heteronormative, hypermasculine archetype. However, Wayne’s image has been employed only as an exemplification of this façade, since this project does not suggest that the remasculation hero’s victory marks his appropriation of Wayne’s masculinity, only the archetype with which many of his performances have been associated. The remasculation picture is part of a film cluster, and not a genre because films of this category are primarily linked by similarities in narrative structure and their glorification of this hypermasculine figure. Further, to illustrate some of the themes of the remasculation picture, this dissertation features three chapters that focus on as many distinct expressions of the remasculation formula. The first of these chapters draws on Unforgiven (1992) and Law Abiding Citizen (2010) to furnish a discussion of judicial emasculation and remasculatory vigilantism. The second case study chapter looks at remasculation through pugilism with an examination of Payback (1999) and Get Carter (2000), while the final section focuses only on The Company Men (2010) to illustrate emasculative redundancy and the reacquisition of purpose as the final variation discussed in this project. While films of the remasculation cluster glorify the hypermasculine image, one cannot assume that the filmmakers responsible for their production aim to either disseminate ultra-conservative values or impose them on the audience. Similarly, the relative popularity of remasculation films does not necessarily indicate the presence of an audience seeking narrative diegeses showcasing the reaffirming triumph of the hypermasculine man. The continued production of the remasculation picture signifies only the appearance of a trend in contemporary film that is attributable to the destabilization of the normative masculine image at the end of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals the Remasculation Film: Themes and Variations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Patrick Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Red River ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Masculinity Crisis ◽  
Conservative Values

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a discourse of masculinity crisis precipitated the appearance of a number of what Susan Jeffords describes as “rearticulations of screen masculinity,” which influenced the production of a group films whose narrative diegeses reaffirmed the heteronormative, hypermasculine façade onscreen. These films are identified and defined in this dissertation as remasculation pictures, or narratives that showcase the hero’s oscillation between two oppositional expressions of screen masculinity. In the rhetoric of the remasculation film, the protagonist’s emasculation initiates a quest to remasculate by reaffirming the dominance and authority of the hypermasculine archetype. Further, in a few key performances (Red River [1948], The Searchers [1956], The Wings of Eagles [1957]), John Wayne exemplifies the ultra-conservative values, imposing physicality, staunch heterosexuality, and capability of this heteronormative, hypermasculine archetype. However, Wayne’s image has been employed only as an exemplification of this façade, since this project does not suggest that the remasculation hero’s victory marks his appropriation of Wayne’s masculinity, only the archetype with which many of his performances have been associated. The remasculation picture is part of a film cluster, and not a genre because films of this category are primarily linked by similarities in narrative structure and their glorification of this hypermasculine figure. Further, to illustrate some of the themes of the remasculation picture, this dissertation features three chapters that focus on as many distinct expressions of the remasculation formula. The first of these chapters draws on Unforgiven (1992) and Law Abiding Citizen (2010) to furnish a discussion of judicial emasculation and remasculatory vigilantism. The second case study chapter looks at remasculation through pugilism with an examination of Payback (1999) and Get Carter (2000), while the final section focuses only on The Company Men (2010) to illustrate emasculative redundancy and the reacquisition of purpose as the final variation discussed in this project. While films of the remasculation cluster glorify the hypermasculine image, one cannot assume that the filmmakers responsible for their production aim to either disseminate ultra-conservative values or impose them on the audience. Similarly, the relative popularity of remasculation films does not necessarily indicate the presence of an audience seeking narrative diegeses showcasing the reaffirming triumph of the hypermasculine man. The continued production of the remasculation picture signifies only the appearance of a trend in contemporary film that is attributable to the destabilization of the normative masculine image at the end of the twentieth century.

The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENNIS KENNEDY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Theatre Historiography

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

A Machine for Feeling: Ping's Posthuman Affect

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Affective Quality ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Natural Emotion ◽  
Archival Quality ◽  
Historical Moment

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader. The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.

Poe and His Global Advocates

2018 ◽  
pp. 596-617
Author(s):  
Emron Esplin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Rio De La Plata ◽  
Río De La Plata ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
La Plata ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Global Reputation

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

scholarly journals Integrating Global Satellite-Derived Data Products as a Pre-Analysis for Hydrological Modelling Studies: A Case Study for the Red River Basin

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gijs Simons ◽  
Wim Bastiaanssen ◽  
Le Ngô ◽  
Christopher Hain ◽  
Martha Anderson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
River Basin ◽  
Hydrological Modelling ◽  
Red River ◽  
Red River Basin ◽  
Data Products ◽  
Modelling Studies ◽  
Derived Data

Narrative Structure and Content of Vietnamese Stories Regarding Tutelary Deities of Villages (thần tích): Case Study of the Story of Yết Kiêu Spirit

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Elena V. Gordienko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
European Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Temple Community

This article analyzes the Story of a fisherman Yết Kiêu (歇驕) who is worshiped as a tutelary spirit in villages of Northern Vietnam. Yết Kiêu is a semi-mythical character and he is widely credited with supernatural abilities and merits in war against the Mongols (1288). I investigate the text that belongs to thần tích genre (神). It is a manuscript written in Vietnamese at Yết Kiêu’s birthplace, which is the central place of his worship (on the basis of previous texts of the 16th–19th centuries). The Story of Yết Kiêu has a complex structure reflecting the history of the development of this particular text and the whole genre as well. The story can be divided in four parts differing in form and content: the folk layer (the oldest part), the historical narrative (likely compiled by court historiographers in the 15th–17th centuries), the legend of Yết Kiêu’s Mongolian bride (emerged evidently in a temple community during later centuries) and the description of Yết Kiêu’s cult (which appeared under the influence of the European research methods in the early 20th century). The article contains a fragment of the story translated into Russian.

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