scholarly journals “almost invisible until now”

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-154
Author(s):  
Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

This essay discusses Sophocles’ Antigone in relation to its Hegelian legacy, engaging with the play from a directorial perspective. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Anne Carson , Bonnie Honig, Peggy Phelan and Cecilia Sjöholm, I attempt to envision a contemporary mise en scène that repositions feminine subjectivity within the dramaturgy of tragedy. Centering on the relationship between Antigone and Ismene, as well as on the possibility of revaluing Ismene’s position in terms of political and dramaturgical agency, I hope to challenge dramaturgical conventions that assume binary, heteronormative relations as the primary framework of interpretation for female characters, and death and destruction as the only possible outcome for what is positioned as feminine. This resituated reading of the drama examines the function of embodied performance in processes of meaning-making, and offers dramaturgical structure as a site for strategies of resistance.

Author(s):  
João Pedro Ribeiro ◽  
Miguel Carvalhais ◽  
Pedro Cardoso

Mise-en-jeu is the ontological equivalent of film’s mise-en-scène. As such, mise-en-jeu is a cinematographic language through which game designers communicate. It offers designers the ability to create and shape the aesthetics of videogames’ mediated space, the space of the cinematographic presentation.Our prior work on mise-en-jeu focused on the visual aspects of videogames. With that in mind, starting with an analysis of mise-en-scéne, this paper provides an understanding of how sound is relevant for meaning-making through mise-en-jeu. Since videogames make use of some of motion picture’s filming techniques, we first studied practitioners and academics in the history of film, approaching videogames afterwards.The results of this research show that sound in mise-en-jeu allows designers to provoke emotions in players and to assist those players in formulating meaning as intended by the designers. We also found that mise-en-jeu allows for the deconstruction and interpretation of the characteristics of various variables of videogames’ mediated space. Therefore it allows us to understand better the relationship between videogames as audiovisual artefacts and the potential meanings that emerge from playing them.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
CLARE HOLLOWELL

This paper examines girls and power in British co-educational boarding school stories published from 1928 to 1958. While feminist scholars have hailed the girls’ school story as a site of potential resistance to constricting gender roles, the same can not be said of the co-educational school story. While the genres share many tropes and characterisation, the move from an all-female world to a co-educational setting allows the characters access to a narrower range of gender roles, and renders the female characters significantly less powerful. The disciplinary structures of the co-educational schools, mirroring those in real life, operate in a supposedly progressive manner that in fact removes girls from access to power.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.


2019 ◽  
pp. 246-256
Author(s):  
A. K. Zholkovsky

In his article, A. Zholkovsky discusses the contemporary detective mini-series Otlichnitsa [A Straight-A Student], which mentions O. Mandelstam’s poem for children A Galosh [Kalosha]: more than a fleeting mention, this poem prompts the characters and viewers alike to solve the mystery of its authorship. According to the show’s plot, the fact that Mandelstam penned the poem surfaces when one of the female characters confesses her involvement in his arrest. Examining this episode, Zholkovsky seeks structural parallels with the show in V. Aksyonov’s Overstocked Packaging Barrels [Zatovarennaya bochkotara] and even in B. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago [Doktor Zhivago]: in each of those, a member of the Soviet intelligentsia who has developed a real fascination with some unique but unattainable object is shocked to realize that the establishment have long enjoyed this exotic object without restrictions. We observe, therefore, a typical solution to the core problem of the Soviet, and more broadly, Russian cultural-political situation: the relationship between the intelligentsia and the state, and the resolution is not a confrontation, but reconciliation.


Author(s):  
Alison James

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110129
Author(s):  
Barry Nevin

Although Jean Renoir’s oeuvre has been extensively debated since the emergence of the politique des auteurs in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, his representation of gender relations has sustained less discussion than his signature formal style. This article posits that Renoir’s films provide a valuable means of identifying how gender, specifically female identity, affects temporal trajectories in cinema. First, it illustrates Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of crystallisation and situates it in relation to current scholarship on gender representation in the director’s work. Second, it conducts a close analysis of the relationship between female identity and crystallisation through a close analysis of the central female characters of La Règle du jeu (1939) and The Golden Coach (1952). This article ultimately argues that whether these characters belong to an upper-or lower-class stratum, they are subordinated to male power, which plays a determining role in the range of potential futures available to them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica McKenzie ◽  
Lene Arnett Jensen

Drawing from qualitative analyses of interviews, ethnographic data, and a review of interdisciplinary literature, this manuscript puts forth a theory of moral life course narratives among U.S. evangelical and mainline Protestants. This theory delineates the relationship between religious worldviews and conceptions of moral behaviors, and the manner in which these worldviews and attendant moral conceptions change across the life course for community members. Grounded theory analyses of 32 participants’ divinity-based moral discourses were interpreted in conjunction with their worldviews, as well as church, home, and school contexts. Analyses indicated that evangelical children highlighted their moral transgressions because they regarded themselves as still quite close to a sinful birth. Evangelical adults, who had been saved and were moving toward God, temporally and spiritually distanced themselves from the morally wrong deeds of their youth. Meanwhile, mainline children and adolescents rarely reasoned about their moral experiences in terms of divinity. This finding is understood in light of their church’s emphasis on developing an individualized relationship with God over time. The study and resultant theory elaborate cultural constructions and transmissions of moral life course narratives that, in turn, provide a framework for understanding when, why, and how divinity enters into moral meaning making for cultural community members. We conclude by advocating for theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches that expose the cultural nature of developmentally dynamic moral selves.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107780122110260
Author(s):  
Chiara C. Packard

Research has revealed how antiviolence activism can become entangled with the state's punitive agenda, leading to what some have called “carceral feminism.” However, this scholarship focuses primarily on the U.S. context. Additionally, few studies examine the cultural battles about gender-based violence that emerge in television media, a site of cultural struggle and meaning making. This study conducts a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 46 Indian television panel broadcasts following a highly publicized rape in New Delhi in 2012. I find that elite state actors pursue punitive agendas, but feminists and other panelists engage in discursive resistance to this approach.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2110474
Author(s):  
Pedro F Bendassolli

Work is a semiotically oriented activity, that is, when working, individuals anticipate aspects of their activity using a network of signs and meanings and project themselves in time with the aim to achieve certain goals. This study proposes a discussion on the relationship between purpose and work and distinguishes purpose as objective, related to actions aimed at goals, and purpose as a glimpse or a hyper-generalized sign. Both of these purposes are related to other dimensions of an individual’s relationship, with their work that are not contained in their actions aimed at situated ends. From a methodological viewpoint, the arguments are developed based on the analysis of two fictional characters, inspired by the cultural psychology of semiotic orientation: Sisyphus, extracted from classical literature, and Bartleby, the scrivener of the novel of the same name written by Herman Melville. Based on this analysis, we propose considering the purpose–work relationship on two axes: (1) what articulates sense-meaning in the process of meaning-making, and (2) the axis of action potency and its relationship with the concepts of emptiness and contingency based on a human agent’s experiences in culture. The paper aims to contribute both to the cultural psychology of semiotic orientation and to the literature on the meaning of work.


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