scholarly journals Counterspaces of Resistance: Peter Carey’s Bliss

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Barbara Klonowska
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Alternative Lifestyle ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
Intrinsic Feature

The article discusses how Peter Carey’s 1980 novel Bliss constructs and exam- ines various counterspaces both in and beyond the text. First, it shows how the plot jux- taposes the consumerist middle-class suburban model of life with an alternative lifestyle, presenting the attractions and limitations of both, yet preferring rather the latter. Secondly, at the level of literary convention, the text activates the strategies of comic social realism only to juxtapose them with elements of fantasy, fairy tale and myth, thus undermining the representational powers of the former and hinting at other possibilities of representation. Finally, the film adaptation of the novel shows how even rebellious or critical texts may become ‘domesticated’ or absorbed by the dominating logic of cultural production, thus once again demonstrating the ambivalent position of works of art in general, and this nov- el in particular. The article argues that the ambivalence engrained in the text is an intrinsic feature, not only of Australian culture or heterotopias but of most cultural products and practices inevitably entangled in the double logic of conforming and resistance.

Seducing-Machines

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean McQueen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Car Crashes ◽  
Primary Focus

This chapter turns to the 1973 J.G. Ballard novel Crash as well as its 1996 film adaptation by Cronenberg. It aims to make careful distinctions between Deleuze and Baudrillard and show why they gravitate to Crash. The primary focus in the novel is a cult of bored, middle-class professionals who feel alive only after modifying their bodies via staged car crashes. From here, the chapter reveals that Crash is notably quite flexible and can be subjected to many theoretical approaches, at times producing contradictory readings as a result. While Crash the novel might be a distinctly Baudrillardian creature, for example, Crash the Cronenberg film appears to lean more toward Deleuze.

scholarly journals Black Victorians, British television drama, and the 1978 adaptation of David Garnett’s The Sailor’s Return

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-224
Author(s):  
Rachel Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
British History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Black British ◽  
Historical Film

The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attracted significant public debate in recent years. In this context, this article revisits a critically overlooked British film adaptation featuring a woman of African origin as a protagonist in a drama set in Victorian England. The Sailor’s Return (1978), directed by Jack Gold, is an adaptation of a historical fiction written by David Garnett and first published in 1925. This article aims to situate the novel and its adaptation in three important contexts: set in rural Dorset in 1858, the narrative can be considered in the context of Victorian attitudes to people of African origin; written by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, the novel is informed by modernist perspectives on the legacies of the Victorian era; broadcast to a popular audience in the late 1970s, the film can be located in a politically progressive tradition of British television drama. Approached in this way, this multiply mediated cultural representation serves to generate insights into the treatment of racism in liberal left cultural production, from early twentieth century modernist milieus to the anti-racism of the British left in the 1970s. These contexts will inform close textual analysis of two motifs — the depiction of the countryside, and the role of costume — which have proved central to ongoing debates about racialized constructions of national identity in British historical film genres. This article will argue that the 1978 film adaptation of The Sailors Return presents a significant precedent when considering what Stephen Bourne has termed the “invisibility” of Black British history in British historical film.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aristocratic Culture ◽  
Modern Form

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN DASHNER’S MAZE RUNNER NOVEL AND FILM ADAPTATION

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Anggia Putria ◽  
Muizzu Nurhadi
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

The research aims to reveal how the application of dramatic elements of Dashner’s Maze Runner is transformed into its film adaptation. To achieve the purpose, the researcher analyzes seven dramatic elements by Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid which consist of exposition, inciting moment, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. The results of this research are the differences of the dramatic elements in the novel and film adaptation are not significant because only the scenes of exposition and rising action are not similar.

Materializing Ulysses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Perceived Power

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.

Agnes Grey

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Brontë ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Anne Bronte ◽  
Agnes Grey

‘How delightful it would be to be a governess!’ When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ‘myself at their age’ to win her pupils’ love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ‘unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures’. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day.

North and South

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Authority ◽  
Industrial Town ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
North And South ◽  
Obedience To Authority

`She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.’ North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the conflict between Margaret’s ready sympathy with the workers and her growing attraction to the charismatic mill ownder, John Thornton. This new revised and expanded edition sets the novel in the context of Victorian social and medical debate.

‘Their Voices Ring in My Ears’: Laura, the Fugue, and Adaptation

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A Toth ◽  
Teresa Ramoni
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Adaptation Studies

Abstract This essay analyzes Vera Caspary’s novel Laura (1943) and the 1944 film adaptation (Preminger) in order to demonstrate an approach to adaptation studies we call fugal. If a fugue is a composition based on a ‘subject’ or short melodic phrase and its various ‘answers’—in other words, variations that maintain elements of the melody but also play with and revise it—how might we position the film as a variation on, rather than a reproduction of, Caspary’s novel? To explore this question, we analyze the sonic register of both the novel and film. Caspary doesn’t want us to merely read her novel; she wants us to listen to the voices that narrate it and the tunes that populate it. Similarly, listening to the film—not simply the dialogue but also the voiceover narration and David Raksin’s groundbreaking score—allows us to identify content not overt in, and sometimes at odds with, the visuals. When we listen critically and carefully, we can distinguish nuances that get lost in a strict fidelity approach; in particular, we can identify both works’ feminist content, especially their attempts to decentre patriarchal hard-boiled conventions and to confound notions of a singular truth.

scholarly journals Becoming a Crorepati: From Glocal TV Game to Grobal Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-520
Author(s):  
Nicola Pozza
Keyword(s):  
Effective Means ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Slumdog Millionaire ◽  
Interactive Nature ◽  
Tv Show ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

AbstractNumerous studies have dealt with the process of globalization and its various cultural products. Three such cultural products illustrate this process: Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A (2005), the TV quiz show Kaun banega crorepati? (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), and Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire (2008). The novel, the TV show and the film have so far been studied separately. Juxtaposing and comparing Q and A, Kaun banega crorepati, and Slumdog Millionaire provides an effective means to shed light on the dialogic and interactive nature of the process of globalization. It is argued through this case study that an analysis of their place of production, language and content, helps clarify the derivative concepts of “glocalization” and “grobalization” with regard to the way(s) contemporary cultural products respond to globalization.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document