Constructing a Biopic Screenplay: Fictional Invention in the Biopic with Scant Evidence

<p>As a creative practice research project, this thesis sets out to write a screenplay about Suresh Biswas (1861-1905), a little-known Bengali adventurer who was a wild-life trainer and circus-performer in Europe and later became a Captain in the Brazilian army. The early biographies of Biswas, based on limited and unreliable evidence, pose a challenge to the screenwriter in terms of narrative reconstruction of his life as a biopic. While more information has become available recently, this project examines the creative and critical issues associated with researching this figure, overcoming the problem of scant evidence and positioning him within a presentist context. Drawing on Rosenstone’s conceptual model for understanding how historical knowledge manifests in fictional narratives, it investigates the nature and function of fictional inventions in biopics and the ways in which screenplays make creative use of evidence. In writing Biswas’ biopic, I use the microhistorical research method, knowledge about biopic script-drafting processes, and Bhabha’s notion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ to present Biswas as a non-Western, non-elite 19th century cosmopolitan, thereby constructing a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism as a matter of exclusive Western, elite privilege. I argue that it is through a judicious mix of fictional invention and a diligent study of evidence that a screenwriter can get closer to the historical subject. The thesis thus initiates in practice, moves to biopic history and criticism, reverts to practice with knowledge about research and writing that not only enables me to overcome my screenwriting problem but also leaves behind a set of insights for other screenwriters working with scant biographical evidence.</p>

Constructing a Biopic Screenplay: Fictional Invention in the Biopic with Scant Evidence

<p>As a creative practice research project, this thesis sets out to write a screenplay about Suresh Biswas (1861-1905), a little-known Bengali adventurer who was a wild-life trainer and circus-performer in Europe and later became a Captain in the Brazilian army. The early biographies of Biswas, based on limited and unreliable evidence, pose a challenge to the screenwriter in terms of narrative reconstruction of his life as a biopic. While more information has become available recently, this project examines the creative and critical issues associated with researching this figure, overcoming the problem of scant evidence and positioning him within a presentist context. Drawing on Rosenstone’s conceptual model for understanding how historical knowledge manifests in fictional narratives, it investigates the nature and function of fictional inventions in biopics and the ways in which screenplays make creative use of evidence. In writing Biswas’ biopic, I use the microhistorical research method, knowledge about biopic script-drafting processes, and Bhabha’s notion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ to present Biswas as a non-Western, non-elite 19th century cosmopolitan, thereby constructing a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism as a matter of exclusive Western, elite privilege. I argue that it is through a judicious mix of fictional invention and a diligent study of evidence that a screenwriter can get closer to the historical subject. The thesis thus initiates in practice, moves to biopic history and criticism, reverts to practice with knowledge about research and writing that not only enables me to overcome my screenwriting problem but also leaves behind a set of insights for other screenwriters working with scant biographical evidence.</p>

Creativity in Jazz

<p>Common discourses around jazz generally acknowledge the centrality of creativity to the music, but scholarship on what precisely creativity is in jazz, and how it might best be enhanced is not well developed. Building on the important work in this area begun by scholars such as Ed Sarath and R. Keith Sawyer, I first investigate the extensive scholarly literature on creativity, drawing predominantly from social science and education contexts, and then apply some of the most relevant frameworks to jazz. These frameworks draw several key aspects of jazz practice into sharp relief, in particular the respective roles of individuals and ensembles and the ways they work in common, and the provenance of musical materials in creative jazz practice. With these key ideas acting as a theoretical lens, I view the historical practice of three unquestionably creative jazz musicians: Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. The choice of these musicians in particular is important because their example, when understood through the lens of creativity, in part authenticates some of the traditional tools by which we investigate jazz, historically, while at the same time pointing towards some different, less commonly discussed attributes. Most important, the creativity lens reveals important ways in which creative practice can be attributable to understandable procedures that are available to all accomplished musicians, not just a few “great men”. Thus my conclusions call into question more traditional modes of jazz history and criticism which, while acknowledging the music’s collective nature, tend to emphasise the roles of individuals as primary in jazz. Instead, my research suggests that creativity is best achieved in group contexts where diversely gifted participants work collaboratively in egalitarian, interactive, improvised settings. Individuals do make significant contributions to this mix, and in terms of creative advances in jazz – and in terms of achieving meaningful self-expression – the most important quality individual musicians can pursue is the development and expression of unique musical voices. In addition to improvised interactivity among unique individual voices, the adoption of musical materials from outside of jazz and their transformations (along with similar transformations of musical materials already common currency among jazz musicians) can be shown to serve both the expressive goals of musicians and propel jazz in creative and potentially fruitful directions. It is the improvised colloquy of such individual voices, transforming received and newly acquired musical materials in the service of self-expression, that contributed to the lasting allure of the music attributed to Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek is proposed as a contemporary musician who has made use of all of these strategies in forging jazz music that demonstrates fidelity to the core processes of jazz while only provisionally embracing some of the style features of earlier forms of the music – style features that common jazz discourses have tended to emphasise at the expense of the processes that gave rise to them.</p>

Creativity in Jazz

<p>Common discourses around jazz generally acknowledge the centrality of creativity to the music, but scholarship on what precisely creativity is in jazz, and how it might best be enhanced is not well developed. Building on the important work in this area begun by scholars such as Ed Sarath and R. Keith Sawyer, I first investigate the extensive scholarly literature on creativity, drawing predominantly from social science and education contexts, and then apply some of the most relevant frameworks to jazz. These frameworks draw several key aspects of jazz practice into sharp relief, in particular the respective roles of individuals and ensembles and the ways they work in common, and the provenance of musical materials in creative jazz practice. With these key ideas acting as a theoretical lens, I view the historical practice of three unquestionably creative jazz musicians: Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. The choice of these musicians in particular is important because their example, when understood through the lens of creativity, in part authenticates some of the traditional tools by which we investigate jazz, historically, while at the same time pointing towards some different, less commonly discussed attributes. Most important, the creativity lens reveals important ways in which creative practice can be attributable to understandable procedures that are available to all accomplished musicians, not just a few “great men”. Thus my conclusions call into question more traditional modes of jazz history and criticism which, while acknowledging the music’s collective nature, tend to emphasise the roles of individuals as primary in jazz. Instead, my research suggests that creativity is best achieved in group contexts where diversely gifted participants work collaboratively in egalitarian, interactive, improvised settings. Individuals do make significant contributions to this mix, and in terms of creative advances in jazz – and in terms of achieving meaningful self-expression – the most important quality individual musicians can pursue is the development and expression of unique musical voices. In addition to improvised interactivity among unique individual voices, the adoption of musical materials from outside of jazz and their transformations (along with similar transformations of musical materials already common currency among jazz musicians) can be shown to serve both the expressive goals of musicians and propel jazz in creative and potentially fruitful directions. It is the improvised colloquy of such individual voices, transforming received and newly acquired musical materials in the service of self-expression, that contributed to the lasting allure of the music attributed to Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek is proposed as a contemporary musician who has made use of all of these strategies in forging jazz music that demonstrates fidelity to the core processes of jazz while only provisionally embracing some of the style features of earlier forms of the music – style features that common jazz discourses have tended to emphasise at the expense of the processes that gave rise to them.</p>

The Pragmatics of Cultural Codes in Literary text

The article discusses the pragmatic specificity of the cultural codes’ representatives in the literary text containing foreign language inclusions. Pragmatic approach in history and criticism of literature allows to identify the features of the decoding copyright process, their impact on the reader, as well as describe various language products and methods for coding literary communication as a whole. Ethnic identification, equated, including in person axiology, dictates the search for deep patterns in texts containing foreign language inclusions. The complex nature of such literary text is determined primarily by the fact that such text manifests assimilation aspects of the literary personality of cultural codes of other national affiliation. The consequence of the use of such lexical components is the actualization of markers of lingvoculture and deepening the pragmatic potential of the literary text. The relevance of the article is determined by the need to establish the status of cultural codes in the organization of the semantic space of literary text, in the transmission of cultural meanings, meaningful both in the individually-copyright picture of the world and in the functioning of the collective consciousness of the nation. The purpose of the article is to determine the pragmatic specificity of cultural codes in the literary text, influencing the receptive-interpretative activity of the reader, on the example of the implementation of foreign language inclusions as markers of cultural codes in the essay “Caucasian” (1841) and the fairy tale “Ashik-Kerib” (1837) by M.Yu. Lermontov. As a carrier of the world national painting, the author of the literary text, in the event of a certain literary plan, is able to use the means of two languages, and the individual-author’s picture of the world of such a literary personality is characterized by the dynamism determined by the representation of linguistic components, which also include foreign language inclusions (orequivalent vocabulary (realities, exotic, ethnographs)). The literary text, which presents other-speaking inclusions, specially reflects the historical, socio-political, cultural and ethical being of the ethnos, which ultimately determines the author’s desire to expand the aesthetic opportunities of cultural codes marked in a special way in such a text.

Art and Indiscernibility: Arthur C. Danto and the Dynamics of Analytic Philosophy

Arthur C. Danto was one of the most influential and prolific philosophers of art of the second half of the twentieth century. More particularly, his encounter with the art of Andy Warhol in 1964 became a crucial moment that would catapult his lifelong attempt to spell out the theoretical conditions of contemporary art, and the implications those conditions held for art history and criticism. In this article, however, I show that Danto was in fact primed for his encounter with Warhol by the newly emerging identity of Anglo-American analytic philosophy at mid-century. Using unpublished archival material, I show that Danto's fundamental insights in his first two major essays in the philosophy of art, “The Artworld” (1964) and “Artworks and Real Things” (1973), were in place at least two years before his chance meeting with Warhol's artwork. In making this more modest historical claim, however, I argue that Danto was part of a broader generation of philosophers who were attempting to work through some of the fundamental problems raised by the naturalist tradition of American thought since the late nineteenth century, problems that became central to the emerging identity of analytic philosophy in its early stages. Among the most pressing of these problems was how values functioned in a naturalistic universe absent theological or metaphysical grounding. Drawing from this philosophical space, Danto's account of art deeply influenced the direction of Anglo-American philosophy of art during the second half of the twentieth century. In the process, he became one of the most significant theorists of contemporary art in the English-speaking world.

Reception Theory, Reception History, Reception Studies

Reception-oriented literary theory, history, and criticism, all analyze the processes by which literary texts are received, both in the moment of their first publication and long afterwards: how texts are interpreted, appropriated, adapted, transformed, passed on, canonized, and/or forgotten by various audiences. Reception draws on multiple methodologies and approaches including semiotics and deconstruction; ethnography, sociology, and history; media theory and archaeology; and feminist, Marxist, black, and postcolonial criticism. Studying reception gives us insights into the texts themselves and their possible range of meanings, uses, and value; into the interpretative regimes of specific historical periods and cultural milieux; and into the nature of linguistic meaning and communication.

L’essence éthique du dialogue culturel

The ethical essence of cultural dialogue. The definition of comparative literary studies in Slovakia. Historical poetics in the works of D. Ďurišin, focused on the typological essence of literary phenomena on the basis of interrelating theoretical and developmental aspects of national literature. The differences of Slovak methodology from Western positivist models of the study of interliterariness. Parallel existence of the principles of literary history and criticism in the reception analyses of Russian, German and French literatures by older Slovak scholars. The onset of realism in Slovak literature at the end of the 19th century (S. Hurban Vajanský). The important contribution of J. Felix’s critical reflection of universalist tendencies in European and esp. modern French writing. The complexity of organically incorporating these impulses into the context of Slovak literature as a result of the provincial character of a “small” nation. The wealth of translations from contemporary world literatures and its positive impact on the work of many Slovak writers in spite of the discontinuity of research in this area after 1989. Urgent need to return to similar forms of literary-cultural reflection and self-reflection through reviving an intensive philological, linguistic, theoretical-critical and historical study at our universities.

Hamsun’s “mal du siècle”

My paper expands on several conference themes, specifically “geographical places” and “boundaries,” and will explore the elasticity and intertextual implications of both terms as they apply to national literatures and writers, as well as their porous nature in literary studies (including theory, history, and criticism, according to René Wellek’s classic and still widely accepted triptych of literary studies [Wellek x]). Specifically, I will examine the resonance of the Romantic malaise known in France as “le mal du siècle” and how it might inform a reading of Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan (1894) and shed light on the more than eccentric behavior of its main character, Lieutenant Glahn. The French Romantic writer Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose slender novel René (1802), with which “le mal du siècle” is most closely associated, represents the epitome of the Romantic hero, who evidently had not drawn his last breath when Hamsun published Pan almost one century later. Upon a closer reading of the two novels, there is more than enough to warrant a comparison. Glahn and René are archetypes of a similar malady afflicting overly sensitive, generally upper-class young men of a nervous and indeed neurotic disposition.