Tove Janssons bildebok Vem ska trösta knyttet? som heltedikt

Tove Jansson’s Picturebook Who Will Comfort Toffle? as a Heroic Poem This article offers an analysis of Tove Jansson’s picturebook Vem ska trösta knyttet? (Who Will Comfort Toffle?) from 1960 as a heroic poem and dramatic monologue, representing an alternative reading to earlier studies of this picturebook as a coherent narrative. Drawing on theory about heroic poetry, poetry and picturebook analysis, we provide a reading that expands those interpretations of Vem ska trösta knyttet? that emphasize the romantic and psychological projects of the book when read as a narrative story. By reading Vem ska trösta knyttet? as a heroic poem, we explore the text as an uttered, ritualistic, and iterative event rather than solely a narrative with fictional characters. Read in the tradition of the heroic poem, Toffle is (still) the hero, where lyrical language and structures allow the reader to remember and retell the poem, letting Toffle’s deeds live on beyond the alleged time of events and the performative declaration by Toffle.

Romantic Dissolution vs. Artistic Disillusion in Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto

The present paper sets out to explore Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue introducing Andrea del Sarto (1486- 1531), a late fifteenth-century Florentine painter who was praised for his technical skills in painting but who lacked a spiritual dimension in his art, compared to the works of his contemporaries, Michelangelo Bunarroti (1475-1564) and Raphael (1483-1520).

Adaptation against Myth: Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott and the Violence of Austerity

This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of slam poetry, rewrites the classical Greek myth of Iphigenia in order to denounce the profound injustice of the sacrifices demanded by austerity policies in Europe—and more specifically, in Britain—in the recession following the financial crash of 2008. Reassessing contemporary social, economic and political issues that have resulted in the marginalisation and dehumanisation of the British working class, this study probes the dramatic and mythical artefacts in Owen’s harrowing monologue by looking back to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the classical play which inspires the title of Owen’s piece and which serves as the mythical and literary background for the story of Effie. The aim is to demonstrate how Owen’s innovative adaptation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, slurred out in verse, resentful and agonising, speaks out a desperate plea against myth, that is, against a dominant social ethos that legitimises its own violence against the most vulnerable—those who, as in the classical myth, suffer the losses that keep our boats afloat.

Insanity and Murder in Robert Browning’ and Robert Lowell’s Dramatic Monologues

The study aims at fathoming Robert Browning’ and Robert Lowell’s intentions of choosing the dramatic monologue as a means of exploring human psyche. Significantly, the themes of insanity and murder are not ideal from an esthetic perspective, but for Browning and Lowell it provides the key to probe into human character and fundamental motives. This study examines Browning’ and Lowell’s dramatic monologues that address crime and the psyche of abnormal men. Browning’ and Lowell’s poetry in this regard unravels complicated human motivations and delineates morbid psychologies. Their monologues probe deep down into the mind-sets of their characters and dissect their souls to the readers. The main character of each of Browning’s dramatic monologues, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover; discloses his true self, mental health, and moral values through his monologue in a critical situation. Ironically, each monologue invites the reader to detect the disparity between what the character believes the story to be and the reality of the situation detected through the poem. In Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs, the monologue is delivered by the victim herself. Yet, the fact that the poem reflects Lowell’s individual experience and trauma indicates that the monologue is delivered by the poet-victimizer as well.

Insanity and Murder in Robert Browning’ and Robert Lowell’s Dramatic Monologues

The study aims at fathoming Robert Browning’ and Robert Lowell’s intentions of choosing the dramatic monologue as a means of exploring human psyche. Significantly, the themes of insanity and murder are not ideal from an esthetic perspective, but for Browning and Lowell it provides the key to probe into human character and fundamental motives. This study examines Browning’ and Lowell’s dramatic monologues that address crime and the psyche of abnormal men. Browning’ and Lowell’s poetry in this regard unravels complicated human motivations and delineates morbid psychologies. Their monologues probe deep down into the mind-sets of their characters and dissect their souls to the readers. The main character of each of Browning’s dramatic monologues, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover; discloses his true self, mental health, and moral values through his monologue in a critical situation. Ironically, each monologue invites the reader to detect the disparity between what the character believes the story to be and the reality of the situation detected through the poem. In Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs, the monologue is delivered by the victim herself. Yet, the fact that the poem reflects Lowell’s individual experience and trauma indicates that the monologue is delivered by the poet-victimizer as well

THE EXPERIENCE OF ABSURDITY: EXISTENTIALISTIC PARADIGM AND PARADIGM OF THEATRE OF THE ABSURD (WITH REGARD TO SAMUEL BECKET'S PLAY 'NOT I')

This article circles around the phenomenon of absurdity and absurd which appears to be greatly elaborated by Albert Camus and Theatre of the Absurd. The article reflects mainly upon Becket's dramatic monologue "Not I", which might be characterized as a sort of missing link between two forms of absurd. The style of Albert Camus puts emphasis on the inner experience extrapolated by means of the author. In this sense, the feeling of despair and existential crisis, typical for existentialism in general, brings into existence the absurdity of being as such. In comparison with that, the manner, in which Theatre of the Absurd presents current states of things, organizes the comic dimension of a given situation. To put it another way, Theatre of the Absurd sets up living intersubjectivity, which is a sense-formative precondition of the laughter, and dynamic omnipresence of the inner experience literally declared on the scene. Becket's "Not I" deploys, on the one hand, the existentialistic understanding of human beings, and, on the other, the theatrical representation injected with intersubjectivity. The article takes into account Deleuzian approach towards cinematography in order to conceptualize Becket's play. The notion of affection-image, which is taken from Deleuze, illustrates the structure and essentially the nature of images taking place in "Not I". Becket draws special attention to the image of the voice with regard to audial metaphors, which the main heroine uses during all the time of self-enunciation. Behind the words that she speaks there is an implicit trauma, which is unknown to the contemplators of the performance. It is noteworthy to admit that the organization of the play makes visible only the mouth of the heroine whereas everything remains in the shadows. Deleuzian affection-image deals with annihilated spatial-temporal coordinates and absolutization of the face (faceification). The quality of metaphors in the monologue and the decoration of space establish the phenomenon of absurdity in Becket's "Not I".

Sylvia Plath

This chapter analyzes the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It notes her tendency to figure or literalise the dominant critical metaphors of the time — a tendency evident in her contemporaries but is particularly pronounced in Plath. Moreover, this tendency applies even to such a seemingly abstract concept as poetic impersonality, a concept which can easily be depicted in terms of Laingian depersonalisation. With the simplifying wrong-way telescope of hindsight, Plath could be said to have moved from a paradigm of poetic impersonality to a personalised aesthetic of confessionalism or extremism. But in fact many of the intriguing and valuable tensions in her later work proceed from how she is attempting to make use of the material of the latter while still evincing considerable attachment both to the paradigm of the former and to the fashion for the dramatic soliloquy and dramatic monologue, a mode to which she kept returning, even in the last poems of 1963.

A warm and sympathetic thing: Voice and dysfluency in Robert Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’

This article takes a dysfluency studies approach to representations and expressions of voice and dysfluent speech in Robert Browning’s minor dramatic monologue ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’ (1864). Browning’s speaker, an American spiritualist medium named Sludge, is vile and repugnant in his casuistry and sophistry as he defends his deceptions after being caught as a cheat during one of his séances. While Browning’s contemporaries recognized ‘Mr Sludge’ as a mockery of the real-life American medium Daniel Dunglass Home, the monologue relies on one central metaphor of the medium’s stuttering and stammering body that challenges broader Victorian assumptions about the relationship between speech, voice and elocutionary practices. Throughout this article, G.K. Chesterton’s claim that Browning’s critique of spiritualist practices is paradoxically a ‘warm and sympathetic thing’ becomes the keystone for understanding the monologue’s contributions to modern thought about the pleasures and vitality of dysfluent speech. Fundamentally, Browning’s exploration of the spiritualist’s deceptions and conjuring of the voices of the dead reflects broader medical analogies beginning in the 1840s that linked the causes of dysfluent speech to invasive and contagious voicings.