scholarly journals Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Claudia Bernardi
Keyword(s):  
Female Desire ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Noir Fiction ◽  
Romance Narratives

This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance narratives. By establishing a complex dialogue between noir and rosa, and by offsetting both traditions with female protagonists who question in different ways the heterosexual paradigm, Campo’s crime novels occupy a unique place in her production, especially in regard to the representation of female desire.

Cross-border Implications: Transnational Haunting, Gender and the Persistent Look of The Eye

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Ajuria Ibarra
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Visual Preference ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Eastern Traditions

The Eye (Gin Gwai, 2002) and its two sequels (2004, 2005) deal with pan-Asian film production, gender, and identity. The films seem to embrace a transnational outlook that that fits a shared Southeast Asian cinematic and cultural agenda. Instead, they disclose tensions about Hong Kong’s identity, its relationship with other countries in the region, and its mixture of Western and Eastern traditions (Knee, 2009). As horror films, The Eye series feature transpositional hauntings framed by a visual preference for understanding reality and the supernatural that is complicated by the ghostly perceptions of their female protagonists. Thus, the issues explored in this film series rely on a haunting that presents textual manifestations of transposition, imposition, and alienation that further evidence its complicated pan-Asian look. This chapter examines the films’ privilege of vision as catalyst of a transnational, Asian Gothic horror aesthetic that addresses concepts of identity, gender, and subjectivity.

Margaret Mahy: An Adlerian Reading

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
KATHRYN WALLS
Keyword(s):  
Young Female ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alfred Adler ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Magical Power ◽  
Margaret Mahy ◽  
The Individual

According to the ‘Individual Psychology’ of Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Freud's contemporary and rival, everyone seeks superiority. But only those who can adapt their aspirations to meet the needs of others find fulfilment. Children who are rejected or pampered are so desperate for superiority that they fail to develop social feeling, and endanger themselves and society. This article argues that Mahy's realistic novels invite Adlerian interpretation. It examines the character of Hero, the elective mute who is the narrator-protagonist of The Other Side of Silence (1995) , in terms of her experience of rejection. The novel as a whole, it is suggested, stresses the destructiveness of the neurotically driven quest for superiority. Turning to Mahy's supernatural romances, the article considers novels that might seem to resist the Adlerian template. Focusing, in particular, on the young female protagonists of The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984), it points to the ways in which their magical power is utilised for the sake of others. It concludes with the suggestion that the triumph of Mahy's protagonists lies not so much in their generally celebrated ‘empowerment’, as in their transcendence of the goal of superiority for its own sake.

Celluloid Bohemia? Ken Russell's Biopics of Visual Artists

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens ◽  
Steven Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Visual Artists ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Artistic Genius ◽  
Genre Conventions

Few directors are so closely associated with the genre of the artist biopic as Ken Russell who made several films dedicated to composers, dancers and writers. Only three of these, however, have visual artists as their protagonists: Always on Sunday (1965), Dante's Inferno (1967) and Savage Messiah (1972), dealing with Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska respectively. There has also been relatively little critical commentary on these films compared with the discussion devoted to Russell's films dealing with the lives of composers. This article attempts to remedy this situation by considering the ways in which Russell tackles some of the thematic and formal challenges inherent to the genre of the artist biopic, such as the representation of the artist's personality, the visualisation of the process of artistic creation, and the relation between the style of the film and that of the artist portrayed. We will argue that, to a large extent, Russell's protagonists in these films conform to the romantic stereotype of the tormented and alienated artist. However, and perhaps contrary to what one would associate with the director, we will demonstrate that Russell's biopics also demystify this cult of artistic genius by focusing on the mundane or laborious activities involved in the process of artistic creation, which is at odds with genre conventions that normally glorify this process.

Problems of Marriage and Self Surrender in The Novels of Shashi Deshpande

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dr. Indu Goyal
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Important Thing ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Family ◽  
Traditional Marriage ◽  
Shashi Deshpande ◽  
Middle Class People

Marriage is an important thing in the life of a woman. The importance that our society attaches to marriage is reflected in our literature and it is the central concern of Shashi Deshpade’s novels. In our society where girl learns early that she is ‘Paraya Dhan’, and she is her parents’ responsibility till the day she is handed over to her rightful owners. What a girl makes of her life, how she shapes herself as an individual, what profession she takes up is not as important as whom she marries. Marriage is the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. This paper attempts to probe into the problems of marriage through the protagonists of her novels where one enjoys the freedom of marriage and the other accepts the traditional marriage. Shashi Deshpade highlights the problems of marriage faced by middle-class people in finding suitable grooms for their daughters. This problem is well-illustrated through the characters of her novels. Since the girl’s mind over her childhood is tuned that she is another’s property, she tries to attach a lot of importance to it. it is indeed a tragedy that even in the modern age, Indian females echo the same sentiment where it was marriage which mattered most of them but not to the men. It is a beginning of females sacrifices in life that marriage brings to her. Shashi Deshpande encourages her female protagonists to rise in rebellion against the males in the family matters, instead she wants to build a harmonious relationship between man and woman in a mood of compromise and reconciliation.  

“The Pain Of Protagonists” Inselected Novels Of Anita Nair

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 434-438
Author(s):  
R. CELIN DIANA
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Social Convention ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Simple Life

MRS. R. CELIN DIANA A female is God's lovable creature to balance man. She is mentally and physically weak through creation itself, but she express her feelings unexpectedly in the battle against her. She is even spoiled for that. A women’s picture is a central theme to literature writings around the globe. The writings of Anita Nair is concerned with man, females, nature, true life, and social convention. She explores the existential struggle of her protagonists in most of her novels. Nair describes particularly, how Indian women are exploited, abused, marginalized even in the modern times both by individuals and by the society. Apart from the society women are tossed even by her family members. Anita Nair emphasizes the need for creating awareness in women. Her female protagonists are conscious of the injustice in marriage brought to them.Probably, the protagonists of Nair’s novels denies to flow along the current.  They seem to be adamant or aggressive, but the fact is that they underwent much pain and suffering. Apart from the pain the protagonists are the losers of life, respect, family, dignity and everything. This paper is an effort to bring to light the pathetic conditions of the protagonists,and to study the social, family and economic picture of women's suffering in life. Though the protagonist characters are brave, they seem pathetic and losers of a common simple life, they dream to live. Anita Nair defines circumstances or occurrences that harm or kill characters due to the aggressive nature of characters in her novels.

In a Glass Darkly? Narrating Death and the Afterlife in J. Sheridan Le Fanu

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Feminist Theology ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
The Demonic

Chapter 10 compares the work of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emmanuel Swedenborg. Le Fanu is closely connected to Maturin and copies a number of his tropes in ‘Spalatro’: mimetic contagion, blood for money, the demonic tempter, and suicide. Le Fanu, aware of the deathliness of his Anglo-Irish culture, seeks ways to engender life and movement through narrating and revealing death so that a transcendence beyond can be imagined. He is compared to Poe, whose female protagonists remain entrapped by materiality even as they seek to escape it, and shown to be more grotesque. He uses Swedenborg to render the afterlife itself material and real, especially through his spiritual creatures, and to make the transcendent the cause of the natural. A proto-feminist theology yokes female Gothic entrapment to the power of death, and the heroines of ‘Schalken the Painter’ and ‘Carmilla’ apocalyptically reveal the presence of death in its grotesque materiality, while the women of Uncle Silas act as agents of heavenly charity.

Rhetoric and Affect in Bilingual Latinx Literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 306-329
Author(s):  
Matylda Figlerowicz ◽  
Doris Sommer
Keyword(s):  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Guillermo Cabrera Infante ◽  
Ana Lydia Vega ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
New Space ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Constructing Knowledge

Latinx writers cross boundaries between languages, renovating the experience both of language and of literature. This article takes up the invitations of several creative/disruptive artists: Víctor Hernández Cruz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Ana Lydia Vega, William Carlos Williams, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Tino Villanueva. The analysis shows how bilingualism transforms rhetorical figures and affective structures, arguing that metonymy—understood as contiguity and as desire—is a predominant figure of bilingualism: a figure of almost arbitrary coincidence, an unintended intimacy that writers exploit. Through rhetorical and affective gestures, bilingualism alters genre conventions and opens a new space for aesthetic pleasure and political discussion, which requires and forms an alert audience with new ways of reading. The essay traces the visions of future (and its fantasies) and of past (and its memories) from the perspective of bilingualism, showing how operating between languages allows for new ways of constructing knowledge.

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