scholarly journals DEMYTHOLOGISING SOCIAL FICTIONS IN ANGELA CARTER’S REINTERPRETATIONS OF FAIRY TALES

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-190
Author(s):  
Anna Z. Atlas ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Structure Analysis ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Beauty And The Beast ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Recurrent Motifs

The paper focuses on culture stereotypes embodied in fairy tales and the ways of their representation in twice-told tales. The awareness of pressure of stereotypes in culturally central texts led to their persistent revision by the 20th century women writers. In “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories”, Angela Carter appropriates some of Charles Perrault’s classical plots calling it a “demythologizing business”. The paper studies “social fictions” regarding women scrutinized in Carter’s reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast plot. As their overall structure analysis testifies, critical approach to conventional culture’s concepts of gender predetermines the mode of narration - “stories about fairy stories” and female character perspective. These allow for the use of metacommentary that centres on economic issues concerning young women. Alongside with their fears, these issues are thematised by foregrounding recurrent motifs and law words. As the research shows, the major female character’s motivations that their flat prototypes lack are exposed; the 1st person narration also absent in the pretext permits the author to articulate criticism of “social fictions” underlying classical fairy tales through the female character’s mouthpiece in feminist terms. The introduction of a foil triggers the female character’s self-discovery and the multiple reinterpretations of the same plot shattering its ruthless changelessness provide new life scenarios for her.

Kropparnas poesi

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Anna-Klara Bojö
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Different Types ◽  
New Type

The Bodies’ Poetry: Eva Runefelt, Eva Ström and Swedish Poetry in the Late 1970’s In the mid 1970’s a new type of poetry, associated with the body, emerged in Sweden. Especially young women writers appeared to take Swedish poetry in new aesthetic directions, exploring questions regarding experience and language. This article focuses on two prominent writers, Eva Runefelt and Eva Ström, and discusses how their different types of poetry can be said to be a bodies’ poetry, and how it was discussed in contemporary literary critique. It also reflects on why this strand of poetry has been granted such a peripheral place in literary history.

scholarly journals Śmierć porwana. O terezińskiej sztuce Hledáme strašidlo Hanuša Hachenburga z 1943 roku

2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 327-335
Author(s):  
Agata Firlej
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Zygmunt Bauman ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Puppet Theatre ◽  
East And West

The stolen death: About the play Hledáme strašidlo by Hanuš Hachenburg from 1943The puppet theatre play Hledame strašidlo by Hanuš Hachenburg was written in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943 and over 50 years was hidden in the archive until it was presented to readers and viewers in the 1990s — but it turned out to be still surprisingly valid and cogent. The author, a 14-year-old prisoner of the ghetto, used the conventions of the puppet theatre, the carnival and the fairy tales. The mythical or fairy-tale-like “timelessness” allowed him to show the absurdity of Nazism and — yet unnamed — the Holocaust. The main character of the play, the King, captures Death itself, which soon becomes so ordinary and kitschy that no one is afraid of her. The confinement of Death — a motif known, among others, from the myth of Sisyphus — is an important theme of the theatre in Terezín; it appears also in the German-speaking opera by Peter Kien and Viktor Ullmann, Der Keiser von Atlantis Emperor of Atlantis. In this article, I show how the old themes of enslaved Death and the dance macabre between extasy and destruction become the symbols of the war, and indeed of the 20th century, which culminates in the devastating forces of the great ideologies and in which there can be found the origins of retrotopia, which is now, according to Zygmunt Bauman, the dominating point of view in East- and West-European and in American discourse.  Únos smrti. O terezίnske divadelnί hře Hledáme strašidlo Hanuše Hachenburga z roku 1943Divadelní hra Hledáme strašidlo od Hanuše Hachenburga byla napsána v ghettu Terezín / Theresienstadt v roce 1943 a více než padesát let byla ukryta v archivu, aby v 90. letech si našla cestu pro své čtenáře a diváky — a ukázalo se, že je překvapivě platná a přitažlivá. Autor, čtrnáctiletý vězeň ghetta, využil konvencí loutkového divadla, karnevalu a pohádek. Mýtická nebo pohádková „nadčasovost“ mu umožnila ukázat absurditu nacismu a — tehdy ještĕ nemenovaného — holocaustu. Hlavní postava hry, Král, zachytí samotnou Smrt, která se brzy stane tak obyčejnou a kyčovitou, že se ji nikdo nebude bát. Únos smrti — motiv známý mimo jiné i z mýtu Sisyfa — je důležitým tématem divadla v Terezíně; objevuje se také v německojazyčné operě Petera Kiena a Viktora Ullmanna Der Keizer von Atlantis Císař Atlantidy. V tomto textu ukazuji, jak se staré motivy zotročené Smrti a danse macabre mezi extázi a zničení stávají symbolem války a celého dvacátého století, v který vyvrcholily ničivými sily velké ideologie a kde lze nalézt počátky retrotopie, která je podle Zygmunta Baumana dominantním hlediskem ve východním, západoevropským a americkým diskurzu.

A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s “little book on poetry”

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-135
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Studies ◽  
The Real ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
The Prestige

In several essays concurrent with her major experimental works of the 1920s, Woolf proclaims that the novel will usurp the tools and the place of poetry. Most important among these essays is the book-length A Room of One’s Own (1929). Here Woolf identifies the lack of poet foremothers available as models to women writers. She urges young women to fill this gap by writing not poetry per se, but rather prose whose greatness qualifies it as “poetry.” Woolf wants to gain for prose, and by extension women writers, the prestige historically accorded to verse. This chapter sketches the historic link among English Studies, poetry, and patriarchy. This link contributed to Woolf’s vision of the novel as the democratic, feminist alternative to poetry. It also spurred her subtle challenge in A Room of One’s Own to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who had doubted women’s ability to write poetry. This chapter concludes by considering the real women poets who inspired Woolf’s fiction of Judith Shakespeare.

Mexican Women Writers, 1960 to the Present

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Mexican Women ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Northern Border ◽  
Mexican Women Writers ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Past

Since the early 1960s, Mexican women writers have relentlessly fought to become recognized within a traditionally male-dominated literary canon. In the 20th century, women’s writing began to flourish, in many cases emerging as a counternarrative to the patriarchal discourse that had dominated the literary scene for decades after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). The work of women writers can be examined according to three different phases: from 1960 to the 1970s, 1980 to the 1990s, and 2000 to the present, and by highlighting in particular a group of women writers from the northern border region, who have faced additional obstacles in their path to becoming published writers. All in all, each of the writers discussed here contributes to a snapshot of the literature written by women from the 1960s to today. The chronological trajectory of their literary voices underscores Mexico’s rich cultural and historical past through the eyes and voices of those traditionally silenced and marginalized in the patriarchal and hierarchical spaces of power.

scholarly journals The tradition of the procuress in Memories of my sad whores

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 187-201
Author(s):  
Hernando Motato Camelo
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

The purpose of this essay is to trace the way in which the character of Spanish brothel life is treated during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This character defines his love affairs, seduces and attracts the young women to have love encounters with their suitors through deceits and love potions. García Márquez adopts these literary traditions in the early 20th century in Barranquilla and enriches them with characters such as the procuress and maid Delgadina.

scholarly journals Introducing Critical Literacy to Pre-Service English Teachers through Fairy Tales

2021 ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Nita Novianti
Keyword(s):  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Teacher Educator ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Political Issues

The need for a more critical approach to EFL teaching and learning is undeniable, yet little has been done to prepare teachers for teaching with this approach. This article reports one of the cycles on my action research study, involving a teacher educator and 35 pre-service English teachers. Together with the teacher educator, a unit on critical literacy was developed using fairy tales as the core text. In the unit, we introduced pre-service teachers to critical  literacy through the critical reading, analysis, and rewriting of fairy tales for social transformation. They were assigned to rewrite a fairy tale as a form of social action and to reflect on the choices made in the rewriting process. The re-written fairy tales and the accompanying reflection essay were analysed using a rubric adapted from the four dimensions of critical literacy (Lewison et al., 2002). The re-written fairy tales and the reflections suggest the pre-service teachers’ growing understanding of the non-neutrality of text, ability to read from a different perspective and offer an alternative one, and ability to identify socio-political issues, such as stereotypes, and to subvert them.

scholarly journals Transformation of the Image of Japan in Murzilka Magazine in the 20th century

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 18-24
Author(s):  
Mariya Gromova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Spiritual Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Tea Ceremony ◽  
Class Nature

The image of Japan in the children’s magazine “Murzilka” has been changing depending on the relations between the USSR and Japan and the development of interliterary ties during the 20th century. During the period of the Japanese invasion to Manchuria and the Lake Khasan Battle, abstract “Japanese” are presented as aggressors, fascists, encroaching on the Soviet borders. The class nature of the Japanese-Chinese conflicts is emphasized. During the period of the Khrushchev Thaw Japan turns out to be a country with an interesting and unique culture. There are published poems and songs of Japanese poets, fairy tales, descriptions of folk holidays and everyday life, “paper theater” kamishibai there. In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Japan mesmerizes “Murzilka”’s readers with the unity of material and spiritual culture, presented in ikebana, origami and tea ceremony. It is a country that exists beyond time, and the basis of Japanese life is formed by ancient traditions and exquisite holidays.

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