Home and the Range: Spencer’s Mountain as Revisionist Family Melodrama

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Pomp
Keyword(s):  
Values Education ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
John Ford ◽  
Female Audience

Joseph Pomp offers an analysis of Spencer’s Mountain, a film Daves’ adapted from the novel by Earl Hamner Jr. He observes that Daves’ lack of recognition by auteur theorists was that he often delved into melodramatic themes in his Westerns, themes out of favour with those who preferred the course masculinity of a John Ford or a Raoul Walsh, and who associated the melodrama with a female audience. Pomp suggests that Spencer’s Mountain provides a key window into Daves’ views on American family values, education, and class, arguing that Daves deconstructed melodrama’s ‘classic realist’ paradigm by considering a nascent feminist agenda that undermines the patriarchal underpinnings of the source novel. This, argues Pomp, creates an unusual mix – rendering Spencer’s Mountain different from most other Westerns of the period but also different from most melodramas. Ultimately, Pomp argues, Spencer’s Mountain suggests that fierce, heroic individualism has no place in Daves’ cinematic universe.

scholarly journals Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Family ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
National Space ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Communal Healing

Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national space— following Winthrop’s foundational ideology. As I will argue, the novel contends that the revamped concept of communal home and familial bonds —echoing Winthrop’s emblem of national belonging— recasts the trope of biblical refuge as a potential tenet to foster selfassertion and to rethink the limits of belonging and acceptance.

scholarly journals Analysis of Sino-American Family Education Differences: Collectivistic or Individualistic?—Taking the Glass Castle as an Example

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Liu Yang ◽  
Yang Congzhou
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Education ◽  
Chinese Family ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Core Content ◽  
Individualism And Collectivism

Family education is the earliest, longest and the most common way of education, which has a deep influence on the growth of human beings. Due to the differences in value between China and the United States, the concepts of family education in both countries are also different. Value is one of the important parts of culture, whose core content is individualism and collectivism. Based on the two kinds of value, this paper takes the novel Glass Castle as an example to compare Chinese family education with American family education and finally proposes ways to improve Chinese family education.

Untimely Developments: Genre Drag and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Wendy Allison Lee
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Intergenerational Conflict ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
American Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Past

Abstract Through a reinterpretation of Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), this essay makes the case for the queer possibilities immanent to the most conservative “family values” Asian American genre—the bildungsroman organized around intergenerational conflict. In a decade obsessed with the question of what shifting racial and ethnic demographics meant for the national future, Mona’s content tempted 1990s readers to interpret its vision of the 1960s as a timely meditation on the present. Read in such a way, the novel resolves anxieties about demographic change by reproducing the “timeless” values of family and nation. However, Mona’s form tells a different story. Rather than using the historical past as a mere backdrop to tell a timely story about national progress, Mona is reflexive in its preoccupation with its relationship to the past. Jen’s novel shows us what a coming-of-age story looks like when it does not assimilate its subject into national time. Instead, Mona draws “untimely comparisons” between past US imperial formations that are the present’s condition of possibility. I examine how the novel disrupts the bildungroman’s formal and ideological relationship to national futurity by evoking the past as a drag on progress and the novel as enacting a formal corollary to queer drag performance. I read Mona as a novel of untimely development that reinvents the coming-of-age narrative so that the Asian American subject becomes not a figure that exemplifies a certain future subject or nation but instead one that generatively obstructs national fantasies of progress.

scholarly journals The Cinematic Depiction of Conflict Resolution in the Immigrant Chinese Family

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-159
Author(s):  
Qijun Han
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Chinese Family ◽  
American Family ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Chinese American Families ◽  
Wedding Banquet ◽  
To Come

Both emphasising dilemmas that have been confronted by the Chinese- American family, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) highlight the image of homosexuality as incompatible with traditional Chinese family values. Through detailed narrative analyses of these two films with a focus on the structure of the plot, the key characters, and camera work, this article aims to answer the questions of how traditional Chinese culture continues to play into and conflict with the experiences of modern Chinese American families and how each film presents and resolves the tensions arising from a culture in transition. The article argues that the importance of studying the ways in which the protagonists try to come to terms with incompatible value systems, lies in the capacity of film to reveal the complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, as well as the socio-cultural specificity of the conceptions of modernity.

scholarly journals Community and the Individual: A Note on Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
P. Eshwara Murthy
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Rohinton Mistry ◽  
Family Politics ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual

Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Mumbai, but settled in Canada, is a well known contemporary postcolonial writer. His novels portray modern India, focusing on conflicting situations and redemptive moments. His works Such a Long Journey (1991) A Fine Balance (1996) and Family Matters (2002) emphasize poverty, corruption and injustice intertwined with humour and tragic beauty highlighting the perception of life of the urban poor. Mistry uses both myriad and mixed experiences of a particular family to present the brokenness of modern society which is compounded by various and different memories and feelings. The paper throws light on community and the individual in Family Matters, it was published in 2002, and is Mistry’s third novel.  It has been rightly acclaimed as a masterpiece and also shortlisted for Man Booker Prize in 2003.  The writer’s humanity and compassion towards human beings relations and problems have been delicately portrayed. Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters focuses upon the problems of un- belongingness and preservation of family values. The novel reveals the mutual equation of family members and family politics in the post modern society. The novelist delineates the importance of belongingness and preservation of family values through the most trustworthy institution named family and reflects the psychological stance of the members of family towards their aging and dying elders. The novel is a representation of harsh realities and selfish human nature of the characters who expresses the status of an individual in relation to family, community and society.

scholarly journals COMMODIFICATION OF VALUES IN AMERICAN POPULAR FAMILY MOVIES IN 1990S

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Siti Harsia ◽  
Ida Rochani Adi
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Family Values ◽  
American Family ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Ideal Woman ◽  
Making Choices ◽  
The Family ◽  
Child Character ◽  
The 1950S

This thesis investigates the American popular family films from the 1950s to the 2000s by using Interdisciplinary approach. This approach is intended to explore the object of research from the history, sociology, and cultural background. The theory of representation and commodification are used together to examine how the films represent American family life and how the film industry commercializes American family values. By focusing on family roles that include the division of roles between husband and wife, interactions between family members, and the values adopted by children as a result of parenting practice, it was found that the family concept shown in films from the 1950s to the 2000s represented the reality of the dynamics of family life in every decade. Besides, in popular films of the 1990s, 'Hollywood Family Entertainment' commercialized the patriarchal issues contained in the 'traditional family' concept. There is an ideology of 'ideal woman' strictly as a housewife which was commodified through these films. Optimistic value in the family was also commodified through the child character consistently, shown by the emergence of child character who tends to be positive towards the future, focus on goals, strives for success and happiness and free in making choices.

scholarly journals MODELLING OF THE CHILDHOOD WORLD IN THE NOVEL “MARGHERITA DOLCEVITA” BY S. BENNI

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (9(77)) ◽  
pp. 111-113
Author(s):  
Iryna Kushnir,
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Home Space ◽  
Existential Dimension ◽  
First Time

In the article the problem of the childhood in the novel “Margherita Dolcevita” by S. Benni has been studied. The well-known Italian author shows the particular situation when the child comes into collision with the world of adults for the first time. That’s why the main character 15-year-old Margherita became an active adolescent who fights for her family and the main family values. The narrative subjectified child’s “I” reflects the world-view of the XXI century where adults are enchanted by the power of consumerism. Margherita struggles for salvation of the family because she is the only child who can find forces to resist the evil in his own pure soul. The process of modeling of the childhood world is accomplished due to the symbolization of the home space as hearth in contrast with modern soulless neighbors’ world embodied by their black house. Margherita became the core to assemble all generations of her family together. The following microdominants of modeling of the childhood world have been defined: existential dimension of home and family, discontinued connection between family generations, the way to self-identity through the life trials and growing up. The formal peculiarities of the novels such as visuality, unity of composition, burning conflict to show as if from within a difficult emotional and psychological situation in which the character is found have been investigated. This novel by its title “Margherita Dolcevita” gives the child answer to the challenge of the world which she would like to preserve as kind and joyful. The studied novel is rated between the best examples of literature on child’s problems and childhood. Unfortunately this writer remains quite unknown to Ukrainian audience. This fact shows the topicality of this research.

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