Dario Argento

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Andrew Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Marquis De Sade ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Mystery Novels ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
Dario Argento

Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. The book uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, the book places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock. It reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.

Incongruous and illegitimate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kuperberg
Keyword(s):  
Women In Politics ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Female Politicians ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
Experiences Of Women

Abstract Violence against women in politics encompasses physical, psychological, economic, sexual, and semiotic forms of violence, targeting women because their gender is seen as threatening to hegemonic political norms. Theoretical debates over these categories and empirical applications to global cases often overlook that backgrounds and lived experiences of women in politics can differ considerably. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, in this article I analyze different manifestations of online semiotic violence – violence perpetrated through words and images seeking to render women incompetent and invisible (Krook 2020, 187) – against female, religious-minority politicians. Through a qualitative discursive approach, I identify patterns and strategies of violence in an original dataset of Twitter posts that mention the usernames of seven prominent Muslim and Jewish female politicians. Results show that multiply-marginalized politicians are exposed to both sexist and racist rhetoric online. In this case, semiotic violence functions to render women incompetent using racist disloyalty tropes as well as to render women invisible by invalidating their testimonies of abuse.

scholarly journals The Case of Mór Jókai and the Detective Story

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Péter Hajdu
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Love Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Exclusive Focus

While from the viewpoint of typology it is often stated that the genre of detective fiction originated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this statement can be challenged from the standpoint of literary or reception history. Several recent histories of detective fiction emphasize the importance of employing a wider generic view, yet they hardly expand their perspective beyond English literary traditions. This paper examines how the usual, theorized requirement for detective fiction concerning the work’s exclusive focus on the crime committed and its detection was not characteristic of nineteenth-century detective stories written in Central Europe. Even though the detective story pattern is recognizable in Mór Jókai’s short story, “A három királyok csillaga” [‘The Star of the Magi’], it does not dominate the entire depiction, but rather represents one strand woven into a tragic love story as well as the history of national resistance, aspects bearing equal significance in this very sophisticated work.

scholarly journals The Most Poetic Subject in the World

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Su-Lin Wee
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Snow White ◽  
The World ◽  
Madame Butterfly

THE MOST POETIC SUBJECT IN THE WORLD: OBSERVATIONS ON DEATH, (BEAUTIFUL) WOMEN AND REPRESENTATION IN BLADE RUNNER WESTERN culture has a long tradition of associating death with femininity and sex. Whether it is Snow White or Bluebeard's wives, Clarissa or Madame Bovary, Carmen or Madame Butterfly, representations of dead and dying women fascinate and disturb. A Greek motto from Palladas states that "Every woman is as bitter as gall; but she has two good moments, one in bed, the other at her death" (quoted by Mérimée, 181). According to Edgar Allan Poe, "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic subject in the world" (19). Thomas de Quincey acknowledges ". . . with the love that burns in depths of admiration . . . that you [sister woman] can do one thing as well as the best of us men -- a greater thing than even...

Tracking Daniel's Steps

2020 ◽  
pp. 262-295
Author(s):  
Margarita Rigal-Aragón
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Teaching Learning ◽  
The Impact

This chapter shows the results of a teaching-learning experience carried out for over 15 academic years. Since it is usually agreed that Edgar Allan Poe is the father of detective fiction, students are embarked in a deductive process to explore some key antecedents to “The Murders of the Rue Morgue.” This starts with the analysis of a few lines of Daniel's Book, Aesop's “The Fox and the Old Lion,” and some sections of Oedipus Rex. Afterwards the students enter the modern world, examining Hamlet, learning about Voltarie's Zadig, Vidocq, and The Newgate Calendar. Thenceforth, the impact of “Murders” among the 1840s public, together with its two sequels (“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter”) is investigated, completing the Dupin Trilogy and assisting to the birth of “serialized” ratiocination narratives. Finally, students study “Thou Art the Man,” a non-Dupin detective story in which country manners are called into question.

Italian Horror Cinema and Italian Film Journals of the 1970s

2016 ◽  
pp. 207-221
Author(s):  
Paolo Noto
Keyword(s):  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Exploitation Films ◽  
Dario Argento ◽  
The Way

This chapter will focus on the domestic reception of Italian horror cinema in journals and magazines during the 1970s in order to begin a process of understanding the ways in which the genre was valued, discussed and (less commonly) analysed by Italian critics of the period. Although Italian horror in general has been subject to a considerable amount of scholarship, in fact, little has been written (in English, but also in Italian) about the criticism it aroused, and the way it was used by Italian critics to deal with genres and popular cinema. Given the entire history of Italian horror, the decision to focus on the 1970s is not casual and merits some preliminary contextualisation. Compared with the previous decade, which witnessed the blossoming of Bava, Ferroni, Freda and Margheriti’s gothic genre, and the subsequent one, which accompanied the work of Dario Argento as a director and a producer of both his and others’ films, the brief but intense season of the cannibal movie and the exploitation films of directors like Fulci, Massaccesi and Lenzi, the 1970s were relatively ‘empty’.

Dramatic Monologue, Detective Fiction, and the Search for Meaning

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218
Author(s):  
Britta Martens
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Reading Process ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Dramatic Monologue ◽  
Reading Processes ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Stimulation Of

Abstract This essay compares the genres of the dramatic monologue and detective fiction in terms of their contemporaneous development and respective reading processes. Drawing on narratological categories, it examines the emphasis in both genres on the withholding of information and the stimulation of the reader's desire to establish meaning and exert judgment. Despite these similarities in the reading process, the genres’ epistemologies seem opposed: the relativist dramatic monologue clearly challenges the belief in absolute meaning, while the classic detective formula depicts the problematic process of arriving at an apparently unambiguous truth. On a subtler analysis, however, detective fiction echoes and diversifies the dramatic monologue's questioning of stable meaning. Both genres explore questions of relativism, both invite their readers to engage in modes of investigative reasoning and a problematized process of “solving,” and both can be read as critiquing the literature of subjectivity and reflecting the transgression of norms in a society where key values are shifting. Considering the origins of both genres, the essay asks whether a further relationship might derive from the debt that their founding figures, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Browning, owe to the Gothic and from their shared interest in the individual psyche.

scholarly journals Men Without Fingers, Men Without Toes

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Kit Dobson
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Rural Environments ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
Real Forms ◽  
Do So

What happens once the rogue rides off into the sunset? This cross-genre essay considers the figure of the rogue’s decline and gradual dismemberment in the face of the pressures of the world. Beginning with the “rogue” digits and other body parts lost by the men who surrounded him in his youth—especially his grandfather—Dobson considers the costs of labour and poverty in rural environments. For him, the rogue is one who falls somehow outside of cultural, social, and political norms— the one who has decided to step outside of the establishment, outside of the corrupt élites and their highfalutin ways. To do so comes at a cost. Turning to the life of writer George Ryga and to the poetry and fiction of Patrick Lane, this essay examines the real, physical, material, and social costs of transgression across multiple works linked to rural environments in Alberta and British Columbia. The essay shows the ways in which very real forms of violence discipline the rogue, pushing the rogue back into submission or out of mind, back into the shadowy past from whence the rogue first came. Resisting nostalgia while evincing sympathy, this essay delves into what is at stake for one who would become a rogue.

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