scholarly journals “Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier”: Pola Negri, Wartime and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-176
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Girelli
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Narrative Function

This article focuses on Pola Negri, one of the most iconic stars of the silent era, and concentrates on her performance and image in the Hollywood film Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927). Assessing Negri's character within the wartime context of the plot, her screen presence and narrative function are analysed in relation to wartime anxiety, gender roles, and the role of the home front. Specifically, this article argues that Negri's exceptional display of anxiety, in contrast to the acting of her male co-protagonists, can be fruitfully understood as a distinctly “female”, empowering quality, aiding her role of main agent in the film. In the light of selected texts by Sigmund Freud, Charles Bachelard, and Lindsey Stonebridge, this article offers a close reading of Negri's performance, showing that Negri productively unblocks and mobilises the inherent anxiety of the film's time and place. Positioned in traditionally female locations, the home front and the domestic space, Negri acts upon the former by controlling the latter, enabling not only her own rescue, but also that of her menfolk: her soldier lover and, indirectly, the whole Austro-Hungarian army. This discussion is linked to the dramatic shift in Negri's image in Hotel Imperial, a shift which has traditionally been criticised as a weakening of her persona; this article instead argues that, far from being “tamed” by the shedding of her vamp connotations, Negri emerges as the film's strongest presence, gaining agency and power while explicitly rejecting patriarchal constructions of female sex-appeal.

Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.

Amazonian Landscapes : Gender, War, and Historical Repetition

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Dowler
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Exceptional Case ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
The Military

It has been speculated that legends and myths are usually born out of everyday life. Surprisingly, it could be argued that the legend of the Amazons mirrors contemporary life in that women who actively participate in warfare are considered “out of place” with the normative landscape. As Enloe argues, the Amazonian world is a place apart, where gender roles are inverted, or worse, “what is wrong about the Amazons is not only that they are women who fight using military equipment and tactics, but that they live without men.” However, unlike the Amazons, Western societies are comforted by men being the soldiers, warriors, and heroes of war, while women are either victims or seraphic icons of war. As a society, we are consoled by nurturing images of women in the role of nurses on the battlefield or, most important, as champions of the home front. Cock contends that when people go to war, they do so specifically as men and women, rather than in nationalist solidarity. She argues that the military, as a masculine power structure, actually magnifies how masculinity and femininity are defined within society. This seems to hold constant even in the exceptional case of the Amazons. Many feminists argue that throughout history representations of these female warriors have been dichotomous in nature. On the one hand, Amazonian images mark women’s emotional and physical strength while simultaneously rendering them erotic, thereby reinforcing men’s virility. As Kleinbaum argued, “As surely as no spider’s web was built for the glorification of flies, the Amazon idea was not designed to enhance women.” In his book War and Gender Goldstein details some popular representations of the myth to illustrate this point. In the 1931 play The Warrior’s Husband, Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of the warrior queen Antiope radically challenged contemporary understandings of gender roles of her time. However, the play’s reviews overlooked these questions of identity in favor of essentializing Hepburn’s body with such statements as the play where “she first bared her lovely legs.”

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic ‘Dispensation’: Rereading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kilcoyne
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Peasant Farmer ◽  
Nineteen Forties ◽  
Death Knell

This essay posits a challenge to the continued reading of The Great Hunger (1942) as a realist depiction of the Irish small-farming class in the nineteen forties. The widespread critical acceptance of the poem as a socio-historical ‘documentary’ both relies upon and propagates an outmoded notion of authenticity based upon the implicit fallacy that Kavanagh's body of work designates a quintessence of Irishness in contradistinction to his Revivalist predecessors. In 1959 Kavanagh referred to this delusion as constituting his ‘dispensation’, for indeed it did provide a poetic niche for the young poet. Kavanagh's acknowledgement of this dispensation came with his rejection of all prescriptive literary symbols. While this iconoclasm is widely recognised in his later career, the relevance of The Great Hunger to this question continues to be overlooked. In fact, this poem contains his strongest dialectic upon the use of symbols – such as the peasant farmer – in designating an authentic national literature. The close reading of The Great Hunger offered here explores the poem's central deconstruction of ruralism and authenticity. The final ‘apocalypse of clay’ is the poem's collapse under the stress of its own deconstructed symbolism; the final scream sounds the death knell to Kavanagh's adherence to his authentic dispensation.

Gedanken zu Genesis 46,8–27

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Wilfried Warning
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Distinct Distribution

Abstract In general, commentators consider Gen 46:8–27 as a secondary addition. Close reading brings to light the structuring role of verses 18 and 25 („these were the sons of Zilpah / Bilhah … and these she bore to Jacob, sixteen souls / seven souls”). In a ten-part outline based on the personal name (PN) „Jacob” v. 18 takes the fourth and v.25 the fourth from last positions. In Genesis 37–50 the noun נפש „soul” occurs thirteen times – now v. 18 takes the sixth and v. 25 the sixth-from-last positions. The thirteen-part table based on the PN „Ruben” stands out for two reasons: Firstly, in Genesis the term „Ruben the first born of Jacob” shows up only twice, namely in the first (34,23) and last (46,8) texts. Secondly, as regards content 37,22 and 42,22 are correlated. In the 13-part outline they take the sixth and sixth-from-last positions respectively. The distinct distribution of these terms indicates that the passage per se is well structured and, what is more, at the same time it has been skillfully integrated in Gen 37–50 and in the Jacob-Joseph cycle.

scholarly journals Biogeochemical Controls on the Redox Evolution of Earth’s Oceans and Atmosphere

Elements ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Reinhard ◽  
Noah J. Planavsky
Keyword(s):  
Redox State ◽  
Modeling Tools ◽  
Evolutionary Trajectory ◽  
Geochemical Tracers ◽  
Atmosphere System ◽  
Ocean Atmosphere ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Redox Evolution

The redox state of Earth’s atmosphere has undergone a dramatic shift over geologic time from reducing to strongly oxidizing, and this shift has been coupled with changes in ocean redox structure and the size and activity of Earth’s biosphere. Delineating this evolutionary trajectory remains a major problem in Earth system science. Significant insights have emerged through the application of redox-sensitive geochemical systems. Existing and emerging biogeochemical modeling tools are pushing the limits of the quantitative constraints on ocean–atmosphere redox that can be extracted from geochemical tracers. This work is honing our understanding of the central role of Earth’s biosphere in shaping the long-term redox evolution of the ocean–atmosphere system.

The role of female sex hormones in the development and severity of allergic and non-allergic asthma

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (10) ◽  
pp. 1477-1481 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. van den Berge ◽  
H. I. Heijink ◽  
A. J. M. van Oosterhout ◽  
D. S. Postma
Keyword(s):  
Allergic Asthma ◽  
Sex Hormones ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Female Sex Hormones

Legal Change and Stigma in Surrogacy and Abortion

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-195
Author(s):  
John A. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
Procreative Liberty ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
Good Mother

The role of stigma in limiting reproductive rights has long hovered in the air. Paula Abrams has sorted through the concept and shown how it operates in two major areas of procreative liberty — having a child through surrogacy and avoiding childbirth by abortion. Her paper is especially useful for showing how legal change initially dilutes stigma but may reinstall it with post-legalization regulation.Abrams argues that both abortion and surrogacy are stigmatized because they deviate from traditional gender roles and social expectations about pregnancy and maternity. Past restrictions have rested on a common legal and cultural paradigm of the good mother: a woman who conceives, carries her child to term, and then rears the child. Indeed, as she later argues, evidence of stigma surrounding a practice is “relevant to determining whether laws regulating abortion or surrogacy are based on impermissible stereotyping.”

scholarly journals ALL IS NOT SEXUALITY THAT LOOKS LIKE IT

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-247
Author(s):  
DAGMAR HERZOG
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Vital Signs ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Rescue Operation ◽  
French Studies ◽  
Textual Interpretation

I am grateful for the observations of these five wonderful and thought-provoking interlocutors: Camille Robcis, Todd Shepard, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Regina Kunzel, and Michal Shapira. They have prompted me to read a whole range of clarifying texts—from Jacques Derrida's reflections on Friedrich Nietzsche to the work of classicist James Davidson on Michel Foucault and George Devereux (as well as more writings by Devereux) to historian Chris Waters's recovery of Edward Glover, and from literary scholar Shoshana Felman's brilliant Jacques Lacan-inspired rescue operation for psychoanalytic textual interpretation (in the special issue of Yale French Studies she edited in 1977) to Charles Shepherdson's turn-of-the-millennium revisionist take on Lacan and Foucault in Vital Signs. They have prompted me, too, to reconsider key texts by Sigmund Freud. And I am glad that the interlocutors challenge me with questions. These include: why the Left abandoned psychoanalysis (Robcis); how I have come to think about practices and desires and the relationships between “the sexual” and other realms of human existence (Shepard and Stewart-Steinberg, each in their own way); how a more integrated and comprehensive master narrative of psychoanalysis might be written, connecting the first and second halves of the twentieth century (Shapira); and how to delve more deeply into the role of analysands in shaping what counts as psychoanalysis (Kunzel).

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