Excitement lies elsewhere: Teenage film-makers and popular culture

When teenagers are given access to digital media equipment, their teachers and film club leaders may hope that they will take the opportunity to make films of personal significance. Instead, young people often choose to engage in a parodic dialogue with popular culture, in a process which feels more familiar and/or comfortable to them, providing as it does a creative space unburdened by expectations of sincere expression. From a survey of numerous short films made in Scotland, it is evident that the use of pastiche and parody facilitates both progressive and reactionary perspectives, often within the same film. Exploring a series of detailed case studies of films made by young people in Scotland in the early 2000s, this article argues that parody can provide for young people an aesthetic distance from personal expression, which, ironically, is unexpectedly revealing of generalised teenage sociocultural attitudes.

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Romantic Prayer

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?

Research on Contemporary “Chinese Theme” Fashion Design based on Aesthetic Distance Theory

Chinese theme or style has a long history in international fashion design; it is a common theme for Chinese and western designers to pursue Oriental sentiment and express Oriental aesthetics. However, for contemporary Chinese theme fashion design, Chinese and western designers have different understanding and interpretation, and there are many differences in design techniques and effects. In this paper, we propose to research on contemporary Chinese theme fashion design based on the theory of aesthetic distance, and interpret the essence of Chinese theme fashion design from different aesthetic distances. In addition, the basic principles of contemporary Chinese theme clothing design are summarized through the analysis and comparison of Chinese and western design cases. The results show that Chinese theme design, to the West, represents &ldquo;the other&rdquo; and &ldquo;exotic theme&rdquo; in a modern way; while in the eyes of Chinese people, it is a contemporary embodiment of &ldquo;retro theme&rdquo;. The clothing design in modern Chinese fashion should, based on the design elements collected in an expansive and deep way, pursue the balance and integration of &ldquo;conservative&rdquo; and &ldquo;avant-garde&rdquo; elements and the harmony of &ldquo;form&rdquo; and &ldquo;spirit&rdquo;, abiding by the fundamental principle of &ldquo;absorbing tradition&rdquo; to &ldquo;create the present&rdquo;.

“So I Found Another Form of Expression”: Art and Life/Art in Life in Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader says Mishima, like Taxi Driver’s hero, “is an example of a certain pathology of suicidal glory that transcends education and culture.” But for Schrader his task is “exploration” of such pathology, while critics tend to take it as endorsement. This chapter shows that Schrader’s tactics in Mishima in fact invite misreading, through their aesthetic distance. Although the present tense of the film is carried out in what might be called a near-documentary neutral naturalism, most of the film works in other ways: the biographical flashbacks in more expressionistic black and white; the three segments of adapted novels both in lush color, and presented as deliberately, anti-naturalistic staged, in a kabuki-inflected style. The result of such aestheticizing tactics, in combination with the direction of Mishima’s own life—toward the “final action” as new “form of expression,” toward life as art—in its very Wildean tenor, strikes an “art for art’s sake” tone, suspending moral judgment. This aestheticism tends to bury the real (as opposed to Mishima’s intoned voiceover) final outcome: that this is a failed coup and a deluded act.

Translating Korean Nature. Translation Strategies in Lithuanian and English Literary Translation

World literatures today often impose a separation of narratives from their geographic and linguistic origins. Translated versions of literary texts that were created and received within local cultural contexts, when translated, enter new, foreign contexts. When translations into many other languages appear, a writer may expect many diverse valuations of one`s work. Literary texts in translation, in fact, are an inseparable from literary experiences for many readers and the study of translated texts has a long-standing tradition. The future of such texts may also lie in the emerging future reading - “distant reading” to quote Walkowitz` use of Moretti`s term. Among the strongest arguments in support of such reading is the possibility, through translated texts, to establish a more aesthetic distance towards the object of a fictional text in translation. Translation gives us as readers a new and different approach towards objects we fail to notice because of their familiarity. Nature scenes and objects may be included among such features of the narrative that could be more aesthetically appreciated in the translated versions. The paper compares translations of nature scenes and objects of Shin Kyung-Sook`s novel into English Please Look After Mom (2011) and into Lithuanian Prašau, pasirūpink mama (2019). The paper reveals the scope of translation strategies of domestication and foreignization through comparison of translation of nature scenes and items into Lithuanian and English.