"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.

From Romero to Romeo—Shakespeare’s Star-Crossed Lovers Meeting Zombedy in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies

Since their first screen appearances in the 1930s, zombies have enjoyed immense cinematic popularity. Defined by Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as mindless, violent, decaying and infectious, they successfully function as ultimate fiends in horror films. Yet, even those morbid undead started evolving into more appealing, individualized and even sympathetic characters, especially when the comic potential of zombies is explored. To allow a zombie to become a romantic protagonist, however, one that can love and be loved by a human, another evolutionary step had to be taken, one fostered by a literary association. This paper analyzes Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, a 2013 film adaptation of Isaac Marion’s zombie novel inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines how Shakespeare’s Romeo helps transform the already evolved cinematic zombie into a romantic protagonist, and how Shakespearean love tragedy, with its rich visual cinematic legacy, can successfully locate a zombie narrative in the romantic comedy convention. Presenting the case of Shakespeare intersecting the zombie horror tradition, this paper illustrates the synergic exchanges of literary icons and the cinematic monstrous.

A CHANGE IN LIVES OF PROTAGONISTS AS THE AGENT OF PLOT-DEVELOPMENT IN BULGARIAN FILMS

A film plot is built like any other artistic narrative and includes the following parts: exposition; rising action; climax; falling action; conclusion. We find a rich and multifaceted range of plots in Bulgarian films. However, there is always a break or a change in routine of every plot. The change usually emanates from outside the routine described in the film. The external entity, which comes close to the protagonists’ routine and intervened in it, creates problems and crisis. This happens when the external changes bring new characters or events into the characters’ previous lives, or, alternately, takes them out of their previous routine into a different reality. For example, in the romantic comedy "It Happened in the Street" by the prominent film director (Yanko Yankov), the protagonist Misho (the legendary actor Apostol Karamitev) is a driver of a truck. He meets a girl called Katerina, falls in love with her, and wants to marry her. She is finally convinced that Misho is the right man for her, and accepts his offer. The establishment of a new young family is enabled by the changes that Misho is assigned to take in his life as part of his work. A change in heroes’ lives is the main motive-force in Bulgarian cinema. A variety of drastic events may happen to the protagonists, and they have to face the consequences. They often have intense, dramatic experiences which serve as a mental, psychological, social, personal, ideological, and physical test. These govern their fate, forcing them to mobilize their forces and fight for a lofty cause. The change in the heroes’ lives allows them to discover their true character and see their lives anew, in a more moral way.

The Emotional Politics of Limerence in Romantic Comedy Films

“Limerence” describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a romantic relationship, a period that is also the primary focus of many romantic comedy films. This chapter asks how filmmakers have used depictions of limerence to highlight spaces in which its potential for both disruption and loving care could be brought to political spheres. I look at a series of millennial romantic comedies that express emotional upheaval, vulnerability, and openness to change as qualities of relevance to both a romantic and a political selfhood. These “political romcoms” reveal a range of dynamic relations between notions of character competence, moral fiber, personality, and deservedness, and invite investigation of complex emotions that modify a more generalized positive affect associated with romantic comedy cinema: humiliation as a comic device and the existential fear of rejection.

Cognitive Film and Media Ethics

Cognitive Film and Media Ethics provides a grounding in the use of cognitive science to address key questions in film, television, and screen media ethics. This book extends prior works in cognitive media studies to answer normative and ethically prescriptive questions: what could make media morally good or bad, and what, then, are the respective responsibilities of media producers and consumers? Moss-Wellington makes a primary claim that normative propositions are a kind of rigor, in that they force media theorists to draw more active ought conclusions from descriptive is arguments. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics presents the rigors of normative reasoning, cognitive science, and consequentialist ethics as complementary, arguing that each seeks progressive elaboration on its own models of causality, and causal projections are crucial for any reflection on our moral responsibilities in the world. A hermeneutics of “ethical cognitivism” is applied in the latter half of the book, with each essay addressing a different case study in film, television, news, and social media: cinema that sets out to inspire moral dissonance in the viewer, satirical and humorous depictions of family drama in film and television, the politics of the romantic comedy, formal aspects of screen media bullying in an era dubbed the “television renaissance,” and contemporary problems in the conflation of news and social media. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics synthesizes current research in social psychology, anthropology, memory studies, emotion and cognition, personality and media selection, and evolutionary biology, integrating wide-ranging concepts from the various disciplines that make up cognitive theory to provide new vantages on the applied ethics of film and screen media.

Self-reflexivity and the Representation of The Indian Diasporic Community in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood

This paper discusses Deepa Mehta’s lighthearted romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood as a representation of the Indian diasporic community settled in Canada. What makes this film especially interesting is that it focuses on how, for overseas Indians, Bollywood offers the possibility of accessing the home culture in a globalised world. Bollywood as an industry is synonymous with the genre of family melodrama, and when Mehta uses this term it represents, not just the Bombay Film Industry, but also the cultural iconicity of the genre, which in turn represents the film sensibility of the entire ‘mass’ of Indians located within the country and in the diaspora. At one level, the film is a lighthearted comic portrayal of the Indo-Canadian community in Toronto and its strong connection with “our magnificent Indian culture” (B/H) through the Hindi movies churned out by Bollywood. At a closer look at a number of scenes, light is cast on the way Deepa Mehta emphasizes the cultural divides through interesting narrative and visual constructions. The actual argument of the film emerges in a dialectical reading and recognition of the oppositional forces operating within and without the narrative world. What is particularly striking about this film is its self-reflexivity. It announces itself as a Bollywood melodrama and celebrates this identity. Bollywood is thus positioned as both a subject and an object of contemplation—a world of Cinema that is a part of our memory and a vehicle of history. The critique of the formula also comes from within the formulaic narrative itself. Deepa Mehta constantly uses the genre and also plays around with it in interesting ways

Open Heart: Entering the Dynamic of Polyamorous Relationship.

Open Heart is a screenplay under a romantic comedy drama subgenre, which recounts a romantic tale about a monogamous, lonely, single man who is struggling to accept and exercise an open heart during a novel participation in polyamory that the woman he falls for is involved with. In this project, I investigated why my protagonist join a polyamorous courtship and how he handles the common hurdles in consensually non-monogamous (CNM) experiences, specifically, jealousy and stigma-based shame. I answered these problems using findings from polyamory, romantic jealousy and Gregory M. Herek’s sexual stigma concepts. The results determine that my protagonist only agrees to polyamory out of compliance. Also, in order to solve his plights, he needs to uphold particular management for jealousy and shame. Hopefully, by showcasing these issues around non-monogamy and polyamory, I wish my story could promote a wider understanding, along with uncovering the oppression still targeting them. Keywords: Polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, CNM, romantic comedy, romantic jealousy, sexual stigma

The Feel-Good Film

In film criticism, “feel-good films” are widely dismissed as intellectually undemanding and sentimental entertainment. This study identifies key characteristics, emotional effects, and aesthetic qualities of feel-good films from the audience’s perspective. Although the feel-good film does not appear to be a genre in its own right, it is more than just a rather vague category. Romantic comedy films with a substantial share of drama are shown to be the most prototypical feel-good genre blend. Fairy-tale likeness and perceived lightness were indicated as key characteristics of these films. Yet for all their focus on happiness and relaxation, the emotional trajectories also involve serious conflicts and are experienced as profoundly moving. Moreover, preferences for feel-good films differ greatly, depending on gender and age.