scholarly journals “Not Orphée.” “No, Never Him.”: Reclaiming Female Agency From Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” in Alice Munro’s “the Chidlren Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlene Chow
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Orpheus And Eurydice ◽  
Anne Carson ◽  
Portrait Of A Lady ◽  
Cultural Forms

[Introductory paragraph] In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. —Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours Metamorphoses can be understood as “the action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance [and especially] transformation by supernatural means” (OED). Ovid’s Metamorphoses focuses on the changing of bodies to other physical forms, but Ovid’s tales of transformation have themselves been transformed into other literary and cultural forms. This paper will pull together different disciplines such as classical, literary, and film studies to examine Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” from the Metamorphoses, and the formalist and feminist adaptations of the tale by women about women: Alice Munro’s short story “The Children Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Munro and Sciamma give their female heroines the agency and voices they lacked in Ovid’s text, where there is a pattern of violence against women, who are silenced usually through some form of destructive transformations of their bodies.

scholarly journals “Not Orphée.” “No, Never Him.”: Reclaiming Female Agency From Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” in Alice Munro’s “the Chidlren Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlene Chow
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Orpheus And Eurydice ◽  
Anne Carson ◽  
Portrait Of A Lady ◽  
Cultural Forms

[Introductory paragraph] In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. —Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours Metamorphoses can be understood as “the action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance [and especially] transformation by supernatural means” (OED). Ovid’s Metamorphoses focuses on the changing of bodies to other physical forms, but Ovid’s tales of transformation have themselves been transformed into other literary and cultural forms. This paper will pull together different disciplines such as classical, literary, and film studies to examine Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” from the Metamorphoses, and the formalist and feminist adaptations of the tale by women about women: Alice Munro’s short story “The Children Stay” and Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Munro and Sciamma give their female heroines the agency and voices they lacked in Ovid’s text, where there is a pattern of violence against women, who are silenced usually through some form of destructive transformations of their bodies.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “Hypertext” About the Female Warrior. Article I

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Veronika B. Zuseva-Ozkan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Male Character ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Horse Riding ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
Rural World ◽  
Physical Abilities ◽  
The Woman Warrior

This article deals with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “hypertext” about the female warrior, i.e. with the totality of her manifestations in the works of the writer and the semantic continuum that they form. This type of character is defined as a heroine with outstanding physical abilities (such as strength, horse-riding and shooting skills, etc. - and also great beauty), a strong, proud personality, persistence, ability to fight back, determination to gain the upper hand, to win at all costs - especially in the game of power and armed conflict with the male character that is in love with the heroine and/or is loved by her. The author identifies Zamyatin’s works in which the woman warrior appears, analyzes the plot functions and the characteristic motif complex associated with this image. The author demonstrates that the female warrior represents a very frequent type of heroine in Zamyatin’s works: the image appears at the beginning of his career as a writer, in the short story “Kryazhi” (1915), and accompanies him until the end, manifesting itself in the screenplays written in the 1930s. The author reveals that a specific variant of the plot featuring the female warrior is implemented in Zamyatin’s works: the heroine is shown as equal in strength with the male character, and the test of power happens, in particular in the form of a literal duel. Whatever its outcome is and whoever wins, the storyline usually finishes with the death of one or both characters - either during the combat or as its remote consequence. While the type of the plot is usually the same, the female character itself shows a wide variety: there are Valkyrie-like heroines (Ildegonda in the play Atilla), polenitsas from Russian bylina songs (such as Nastasya Mikulishna in the screenplay “Dobrynya” or Marya in “Kryazhi”), Mongolian women warriors (Borte, Ulek), and even contemporary heroines of this type (Zinaida in the screenplay “The God of Dance”). Usually such characters are attributed in Zamyatin to the legendary epic past or rooted in “folk archaics”; they belong to the rural world, to the Russian village. The constant topoi and the evolution of the female warrior in Zamyatin’s artistic works are revealed; in particular, such motifs as love-hate, test of strength (in the form of a duel or a competition), mutual intendedness of two “strong ones” and their tragic non-encounter are considered. The author notes that the supervalue of the female warriors in Zamyatin’s works is love, while for some other writers of the Silver Age, for instance, for Marina Tsvetaeva or Lyubov Stolitsa, such values were female agency, independence, control over one’s life, freedom, or even spiritual salvation. The play Atilla and its heroine Ildegonda are analyzed in this article in particular detail; the sources of this image are revealed.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Recording Device ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Literature And Film

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.

When Supper was Ended

Imbizo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Erhuvwuoghene Onokpite
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Parish Priest

This short story engages with the urgency around violence against women. It tells the story of Enita, a 14-year-old girl who finds herself in a web of sexual and physical abuses in places where she should gain protection. She is raped by her Parish priest, Fr Xavier, who her mother had willingly allowed her to go help with settling into his new rectory. Her boyfriend's brother, Siomanu, caught Fr Xavier raping her. Siomanu would rape her too in exchange for keeping Fr Xavier's rape as a secret.

Jan Chapman is part of a generation of Australian lmmakers and producers who emerged in the wake of what became known as the Australian New Wave of the 1970s. At Sydney University (where she studied English literature), she was part of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-Op. She met the lmmakers Gillian Armstrong and Phillip Noyce (later her husband), and gained practical experience of exhibition and distribution, as well as directing her own short lms. Chapman subsequently spent over a decade at ABC TV, directing and producing. During this period, she rst encountered Jane Campion, whose TV drama Two Friends (1987)—scripted by Helen Garner—she produced. Her rst feature lm as producer was The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), directed by Gillian Armstrong and also scripted by Garner. By then, she and Campion were already planning The Piano (1993), which was eight years in gestation. Although she didn’t produce Campion’s debut feature Sweetie (1989), or her lms An Angel at My Table (1990) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996), she was a script consultant on the last two lms. After The Piano won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, Chapman was given a development deal with Miramax. However, she preferred to nurture her own projects in Australia. Through Campion, she was put in touch with Shirley Barrett, whose Camera d’Or-winning Love Serenade (1996) she produced. With Campion, she went on to produce Holy Smoke (1999) and Bright Star (2009). Her other credits include Barrett’s Walk the Talk (2000) and Ray Lawrence’s Lantana (2001). She has also served as an executive producer on lms by talented young Australian directors, among them Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004), Paul Goldman’s Suburban Mayhem (2006), and Leon Ford’s Griff The Invisible (2010). She is currently in the early stages of development on a new feature with Campion called Runaway, based on an Alice Munro short story.

2013 ◽  
pp. 33-35
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Bright Star ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Portrait Of A Lady ◽  
Jane Campion ◽  
New Feature ◽  
Phillip Noyce

scholarly journals Researching Sex and the Cinema in the #MeToo Age

Film Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Mattias Frey ◽  
Sara Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Major Topic ◽  
Special Place ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
New Cinema

This introduction to the Film Studies special issue on Sex and the Cinema considers the special place of sex as an object of inquiry in film studies. Providing an overview of three major topic approaches and methodologies – (1) representation, spectatorship and identity politics; (2) the increasing scrutiny of pornography; and (3) new cinema history/media industries studies – this piece argues that the parameters of and changes to the research of sex, broadly defined, in film studies reflect the development of the field and discipline since the 1970s, including the increased focus on putatively ‘low’ cultural forms, on areas of film culture beyond representation and on methods beyond textual/formal analysis.

scholarly journals Gender Relations and Female Agency in Claire Keegan’s Antarctica

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisol Morales-Ladrón
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
The Family ◽  
Rural World ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Harsh Criticism

Abstract Claire Keegan is one of the most prominent voices within the contemporary Irish short story panorama. Internationally acclaimed, her prose has been praised for its frank and bitter portrayal of a rural world, whose outdated values, no matter how anchored in the past they might be, still prevail in a modern milieu. Keegan’s unsympathetic views on society, mainly on the Catholic Church and the family, are the main targets of her harsh criticism. Issues like gender and sexuality, two social constructs with which to validate an uneven distribution of power, constitute the pillars of most of her plots. Bearing these aspects in mind, my proposal focuses on the analysis of Keegan’s first collection of short stories, Antarctica 1999, in light of gender relations and female agency, in an attempt to find patterns of – often thwarted – female emancipation in the context of the rapid changes of a society that is still adjusting to a globalised world. This article will also engage in the discussion of her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields 2007, and her long short story Foster 2010.

scholarly journals Transgresiones domésticas y agencia femenina en “Las dependencias” (1999) de Lucrecia Martel=Domestic Transgressions and Female Agency in Lucrecia Martel’s Las dependencias (1999)

2021 ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Sofía Ruiz Alfaro
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Latin American Cinema ◽  
Silvina Ocampo ◽  
Cine Latinoamericano

<p align="left"><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>Este trabajo estudia la representación fílmica de la empleada doméstica en <em>Las dependencias</em> (Lucrecia Martel, 1999), telefilm dedicado a la escritora argentina Silvina Ocampo. Este documental es pionero dentro del cine latinoamericano contemporáneo por el lugar central que la doméstica ocupa como sujeto femenino complejo e idiosincrático, un protagonismo inexistente en el cine del siglo pasado. A través del análisis de los testimonios de las empleadas, de los espacios y objetos domésticos y de la intertextualidad con el cuento de Ocampo <em>Las vestiduras peligrosas</em>, exploro la representación de las diferencias de clase, la dinámica de poder en la relación afectiva entre criada-señora y las diferentes estrategias de resistencia que hacen de la empleada un sujeto con voz y agencia propia.</p><p align="left"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This article studies the filmic representation of the female domestic worker in <em>Las dependencias</em> (Lucrecia Martel, 1999), a film about the Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo. This is a pioneer documentary in contemporary Latin American cinema based on the centrality given to the housekeeper as a complex and idiosyncratic character, a portrayal not found in 20<sup>th</sup> century Latin American cinema. Through the analysis of the female workers’ testimonies, domestic places and objects, and the intertextuality with Ocampo’s short story <em>Las vestiduras peligrosas</em>, we explore the representation of class differences, the power dynamics and the affective dimensions found in the servant-mistress relationship, and the strategies of resistance that make the domestic worker a subject with a voice and agency of her own.</p>

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