Breakthrough: Wendy and Lucy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Dawn Hall
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Disaster Victims ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Political Statement

This chapter is a close reading of Wendy and Lucy, a film loosely based on the depictions of disaster victims and the perceived governmental failing to provide and protect those affected by Hurricane Katrina. It is Reichardt’s political statement about being homeless and female in America. Highlighting distribution details, the chapter explores the necessity of a micro-budget that dictate and contribute to many independent filmmakers’ aesthetics. The chapter discusses her use of “slow cinema,” ecofeminism, and the rejection of a capitalistic and patriarchal “American Dream.” Reichardt highlights the overlooked or marginalized in America: women, the working classes, and the poverty stricken. Influenced by the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, the film addresses current issues of poverty juxtaposed with consumerism in America. Finally building on work of Anita Harris and Sherry Ortner’s analysis of lower class women’s representation in independent film, the chapter situates Wendy and Lucy in relation to post-feminist and third wave feminist concerns.

Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream

Screen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Tzioumakis
Keyword(s):  
American Dream ◽  
Independent Film

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

The Body Politic(s) of the Jezebel Spirit

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Jonathon O’Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Warfare ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Good And Evil

‘Third wave’ neo-charismatic evangelical discourses of spiritual warfare envision the world as caught within a struggle between good and evil, in which demonic forces play an active role in shaping the lives of individuals, institutions, and nations. In contemporary American spiritual warfare discourse one demonic spirit has gained particular notoriety: the Jezebel spirit. Through a close reading of American spiritual warfare manuals, this article explores constructions of the Jezebel spirit and her place in third wave demonology. Constructed as a spiritual force reigning over an errant United States, the figure of Jezebel facilitates a discursive conflation of personal and social bodies in which the ‘present absences’ of ‘deviant’ (gendered, sexualised, racialised) bodies within the nation become figured as threatening to both national and spiritual survival. Drawing on poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer theory, the article unpacks how Jezebel is constructed as a figure of feminised absence and multiplicity, whose ‘illegitimate’ possession of ‘deviant’ places and persons renders them as territories of absence that must be restored to normative presence through the reinscription of God’s will.

scholarly journals ‘Useful Knowledge’ versus ‘Wastes of Print’: Working-Class Education and Edward Lloyd

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-139
Author(s):  
Manon Burz-Labrande
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Educational Environment ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Public Concern ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Urban Street ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Relationship

This article delves into the dismissal of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls as “wastes of print” (Oliphant 1858: 202) on the grounds of public concern for education, and relies on a close reading of an Edward Lloyd unstamped penny publication in order to reassess the relationship between education and the wider world of penny periodicals. The first part examines the upper classes’ attempts to establish an educational environment aimed at the working classes in the first part of the nineteenth century, among which the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and proposes to reconsider the reasons for the relative failure of such initiatives in relation to popular penny publications. I then draw on Edward Jacobs’s analysis of ‘industrial literacy’ and urban street culture to analyse the rejection of such publications as Edward Lloyd’s, by disentangling the mechanisms to which contemporary critics consistently resort. Finally, in keeping with Louis James’s statement that “periodicals are cultural clocks by which we tell the times” (1982: 365), I explore the various pieces contained in a full 1846 number of Lloyd’s penny publication People’s Periodical and Family Library contemporary to the failure of the SDUK, in order to understand the potential dialogue in place with publications and criticism advocating ‘useful knowledge’. This article aims to prove that Lloyd’s penny publications were, in fact, an undeniable point of contact between the working classes and education.

Third Wave Capitalism: How Money, Power, and the Pursuit of Self-Interest Have Imperiled the American Dream / Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis? / The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community / People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy / A Harvey Cox Reader / The Full Serverity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai / Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940sThird Wave Capitalism: How Money, Power, and the Pursuit of Self-Interest Have Imperiled the American Dream / Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis? / The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community / People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy / A Harvey Cox Reader / The Full Serverity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai / Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940sThird Wave Capitalism: How Money, Power, and the Pursuit of Self-Interest Have Imperiled the American Dream / Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis? / The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community / People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy / A Harvey Cox Reader / The Full Serverity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai / Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s

Tikkun ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-73
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Community People

Why Are You Talking Like That, Sir? Il-Limbi, Phonology and Class in Contemporary Egypt

Arabica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 260-277
Author(s):  
Islam Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Correspondence Rules ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Urban Working ◽  
Cairene Arabic

Abstract This article investigates the phonological patternings in the speech of il-Limbi, an immensely popular character in Egyptian comedy; and it stands therefore at a crossroads between cultural studies and linguistics. Il-Limbi represents the urban working classes, and his speech often mocks social conventions through ludicrous parody of educated speech. Masquerading as socially superior personas, his speech highlights the diglossic situation in Egypt as well as the pretentious use of English into the elite register. My examination of il-Limbi’s pronunciation in four movies reveals a number of systematic patterns in both consonants and vowels, which construct a unique code. This code is based partly on exaggerated features of Cairene Arabic and partly on genuine features of illiterate, lower-class vernacular. And it is often the interplay between various registers via correspondence rules that creates humor in the films.

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