Summary

2015 ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
Emily Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Approaches

This chapter summarises the study of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). Talk to Her is a film that reflects the social and historical context of Spain and demonstrates many of Almodóvar's auteur characteristics. Its award-winning screenplay defies traditional conventions in genre and narrative structure whilst still creating something that is aesthetically pleasing and accessible to view. The interpretations cited in this book are not the only interpretations. This is a film which becomes richer through discussion and analysis and by approaching it from different critical approaches such as: auteur, genre, narrative, gender, and psychoanalytic film theory. Indeed, the film leaves the viewer with many interesting questions to consider. Ultimately, it is important to look at the film within the body of Almodóvar's work, particularly through exploring his depictions of rape.

Articulating Bodies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linear Movement ◽  
Body Positioning

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and the body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies shows the mutability of the Victorians’ understanding of the human body’s centrality to identity—an understanding made mutable by changes in science, technology, religion, and class. It also demonstrates how that understanding changed along with developing narrative styles: as disability became increasingly medicalized and the soul increasingly psychologized, the mode of looking at deviant bodies shifted from gaping at spectacle to scrutinizing specimen, and the shape of narratives evolved from lengthy multiple-plot novels to slim case studies. Moreover, the book illustrates that, despite this overall linear movement from spectacle to specimen in literature and culture, individual texts consistently reveal ambivalence about categorizing the body, positioning some bodies as abnormally deviant while also denying the reality or stability of normalcy. Bodies in Victorian fiction never remain stable entities, in spite of narrative drives and the social, medical, or scientific discourses that attempted to control and understand them.

scholarly journals On the construction of an artificial paradox: A critical commentary on Diefendorf and Bridges’ ‘On the enduring relationship between masculinity and homophobia’

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 1285-1298
Author(s):  
Mark McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Attitudes Toward Homosexuality ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Trend ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Citation Practices ◽  
Qualitative Literature

The social trend of decreasing homophobia and liberalizing attitudes toward homosexuality is a contentious sociological issue. In a recent article in this journal, Diefendorf and Bridges contend that differences in findings of quantitative and qualitative research related to masculinities and homophobia demand new theories and methods to chart the enduring relationship between homophobia and masculinity. In this critical commentary, I demonstrate the flaws of the methodological framing and refute the characterization of qualitative literature provided. I argue that the theoretical errors in the original article are a result of inattention to social and historical context. Drawing attention to problematic citation practices, I call for critical approaches that recognize both positive social change and contexts where problematic dynamics persist.

scholarly journals Lesbianism as Another Alternative for the Other: A Punishment or an Escape? The Saudi Novel "al-Akharun/The Others" as a Sample

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-55
Author(s):  
Hanan Bishara
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Saudi Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
New Phenomena

World Literature has witnessed the appearance of many novels that focus on the physical experiences of the “body” and deal with sexual themes. In their historical context, these novels represent a protest against the social moral values and search for alternatives. Among these novels are Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary. In Arabic literature, the Egyptian writer Ihsan Abd al-Qudous laid the foundation for this type of novel.  Literature has developed through breaking the barrier of taboos and adopting different forms. One of the controversial issues, whose red lines literature has crossed, is the issue of sex, which exists in every human relationship between males and females. The Arabic novel has addressed sexual taboos and dealt with them as an adventure still in its initial stages despite numerous significant contributions that have appeared in the 20th century.   Recently, Saudi Arabian women writers have broken various taboos and dealt with the problems that they confront as women in the Kingdom by employing the themes of sex, the body, and other taboo issues. Some critics accused these writers of trying to draw attention to themselves by exploiting these subjects to increase their readership. In fact, these novelists have exposed new phenomena in conservative Saudi society and broken the stereotypical image of conservative Saudi women. This study deals with Saba al-Herz’ novel al-Akharun/The Others as a sample of these novels.

scholarly journals On the construction of an artificial paradox: A critical commentary on Diefendorf and Bridges' 'On the enduring relationship between masculinity and homophobia'

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Attitudes Toward Homosexuality ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Trend ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Citation Practices ◽  
Qualitative Literature

The social trend of decreasing homophobia and liberalising attitudes toward homosexuality is a contentious sociological issue. In a recent article in this journal, Diefendorf and Bridges contend that differences in findings of quantitative and qualitative research related to masculinities and homophobia demand new theories and methods to chart the enduring relationship between homophobia and masculinity. In this critical commentary, I demonstrate the flaws of the methodological framing and refute the characterization of qualitative literature provided. I argue that the theoretical errors in the original article are a result of inattention to social and historical context. Drawing attention to problematic citation practices, I call for critical approaches that recognize both positive social change and contexts where problematic dynamics persist.

The Social Body of Béla Balázs

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Erica Carter
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Expressive Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
Politics Of The Body ◽  
Film Aesthetics

Abstract Focusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.

An Invitation to the Table

Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Mind

Children’s literature is filled with foods to eat, reflecting the pleasure humans take in taste, which occurs as much in the mind as in the body. Food studies as a field has grown since the 1990s, crossing boundaries from the social sciences into the sciences. Within literary studies, work has shifted from seeing food as a literary trope to using material culture as an approach to what food signifies in a socio-historical context. Table Lands is a broad survey of food’s function in children’s texts, showing how comprehending the socio-cultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the child and children’s agency and enriches the interpretation of such texts. In roughly chronological order, it examines a variety of texts from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics—many from the Anglo American tradition but enriched by several books from multicultural traditions (Native American, Jewish American, African American, and immigrant Vietnamese)—and including a variety of genres, formats, and age-group audiences. These include realism (both historical and contemporary), fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, young adult novels, and film.

Listening with the Body, Seeing through the Ears: Contextualizing Philo’s Lecture Event in On the Contemplative Life

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 447-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew David Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemplative Life ◽  
Learning To Listen

This article compares Philo’s portrayal of the lecture event among the Therapeutae with other reading and philosophical communities throughout the high Roman Empire. It shows how learning to listen properly plays an important role in constructing and defending one’s masculinity in certain elite communities of that time. Philo constructs a portrayal of the Therapeutae that places them well within the social codes of lecture listening and proper masculine virtues of the time, describing the Therapeutae, especially their ideal masculinity vis-à-vis their lecture event, with imperial mimicry and resistance. Situating Philo’s portrayal of the Therapeutae’s lecture event within its historical context enhances our understanding Philo within the Roman Empire as well as his portrayal of the ethos of the Therapeutae.

scholarly journals O PESO QUE NÃO APARECE NA BALANÇA: SOFRIMENTO PSÍQUICO EM UMA SOCIEDADE OBESOGÊNICA E LIPOFÓBICA

polemica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Monica Vanderlei Vianna
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Excess Weight ◽  
Sociocultural Environment ◽  
Keywords Obesity ◽  
Psychological Suffering ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

Resumo: O presente artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre o sofrimento psíquico possivelmente instaurado pelo processo de subjetivação e construção da identidade experimentados em um ambiente sociocultural obesogênico e com valores paradoxalmente lipofóbicos. Partindo do preceito que as psicopatologias trazem em si traços do contexto social e histórico no qual estão inseridas, buscou-se através de um referencial teórico psicanalítico, pensar como um ambiente que promove a obesidade e concomitantemente condena os que sucumbem ao excesso de peso contribui para o aumento de manifestações psíquicas relacionadas ao corpo e a alimentação. Para tanto, abordamos questões referentes aos estigmas arreigados à obesidade, à edificação da lipofobia na contemporaneidade, assim como as relações com declínio dos conflitos psíquicos em detrimento dos sintomas corporais na atualidade.Palavras-chave: Obesidade. Sofrimento Psíquico. Corpo. Abstract: This article proposes a reflection on the psychic suffering possibly established by the process of subjectivation and identity construction experienced in an obesogenic sociocultural environment with paradoxically lipophobic values. Starting from the precept that the psychopathologies bring in themselves traces of the social and historical context in which they are inserted, it was sought through a theoretical reference psychoanalytic, to think like an environment that promotes the obesity and concomitantly condemns those who succumb to the excess weight contributes to the increase of psychic manifestations related to the body and the feeding. In order to do so, we address issues related to the stigmas attached to obesity, the construction of lipophobia in contemporary times, as well as the relationship with the decline of psychic conflicts to the detriment of current bodily symptoms. Keywords: Obesity. Psychological Suffering. Body.

The Hands of the Projectionist

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Black Box ◽  
The Body ◽  
Laboratory Studies ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Look

ArgumentThis essay considers the work of projection and the hand of the projectionist as important components of the social space of the cinema as it comes into being in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. I bring the concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the place of the body as an entity that applies itself to the world “like a hand to an instrument” into a discussion of the pre-cinematic projector as an instrument that we can interpret as evidence of the experience of the work of the projectionist in the spirit of film theory and media archaeology, moving work on instrumentation in a different direction from the analysis of the work of the black box in laboratory studies. Projection is described as a psychological as well as a mechanical process. It is suggested that we interpret the projector not simply in its activity as it projects films, but in its movement from site to site and in the workings of the hand of its operator behind the scenes. This account suggests a different perspective on the cinematic turn of the nineteenth century, a concept typically approached through the study of the image, the look, the camera, and the screen.

scholarly journals Surveillance and the Body in the Millennium Trilogy

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-169
Author(s):  
Jeff W. Marker
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Race Ethnicity

A growing discourse in surveillance studies is leading the field away from socially neutral theories and introducing methodologies that account for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. However, scholarship on surveillance in the arts, among which voyeurism and panopticism remain dominant, has been slower to adopt models that address these sociological dimensions of surveillance. This interdisciplinary article argues for expanding the theoretical and sociological scope of scholarship on surveillance in the arts, using Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels and the Swedish films adapted from them as a case study. This series of narratives features three scopic regimes: the state’s surveillance apparatus, the protagonist’s own surveillant gaze, and the male gaze, each of which operates on and through the body of the central character, Lisbeth Salander. These representations, as so many others, demand that we break away from the panoptic model and employ a theoretically intersectional approach. The author integrates theories from surveillance studies, feminist film theory, and the social sciences to develop such an approach.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document