From Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Muharat: Film Authorship and Transcultural Adaptation

In her book A Theory of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon uses the term “transcultural adaptation” to illustrate different context in which literary or other cultural texts are adapted. This relocation of text through adaptation often adds multiple interpretations or alters textual politics. Hutcheon further argues that transcultural adaptation can transform the text in unpredictable direction. The paper seeks to explicate eminent Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003) which is influenced by Agatha Christie’s (1890-1976) novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962). The essay untangles Ghosh’s strategy to add Indian socio-cultural background in the western text. He expresses authorial intensions when he re-narrates of the novel on screen. The paper argues that the transcultural adaptation creates a “Third Space of enunciation” where the auteur uses the traits of detective film and repeats authorial intention. Following Janet Staiger’s reinterpretation of auteurism the essay argues that duplication of authorial impulse is Ghosh’s “technique of the self”.

How Can My Poem Be True?

How can a poem be true? This autoethnographic study uses poetic inquiry to explore the boundaries between fiction and reality within poetic experience. A series of poems composed during, and about, the current COVID-19 pandemic, provides a means of understanding the experience of having one’s everyday reality overturned by crisis. A central theme of the author’s poems and accompanying reflections is how art can be used to explore psychological experiences, such as melancholia and depression, and, in turn how the experience of suffering can be used to facilitate artistic expression. Using poetic inquiry, the author examines the complex interplay between speaker and authorial intention, fiction and truth, text and the performance of writing, reading, and poetic interpretation.

Biblical Criticism

The Bible as a text can be read with or without reference to its compilation as a theologically constructed collection of sacred Jewish and Christian books. When read without such framing concerns, it may be approached with the full range of literary and theoretical interpretive tools and read for whatever purpose readers value or wish to explore. Less straightforwardly, in the former case where framing concerns come into play, the Bible is both like and unlike any other book in the way that its very nature as a “canon” of scripture is related to particular theological and religious convictions. Such convictions are then in turn interested in configuring the kinds of readings pursued in certain ways. Biblical criticism has undergone many transformations over the centuries, sometimes allowing such theological convictions or practices to shape the nature of its criticism, and at other times—especially in the modern period—tending to relegate their significance in favor of concerns with interpretive method, and in particular questions about authorial intention, original context, and interest in matters of history (either in the world behind the text, or in the stages of development of the text itself). From the middle of the 20th century onwards the interpretive interests of biblical critics have focused more on certain literary characteristics of biblical narratives and poetry, and also a greater theological willingness to engage the imaginative vision of biblical texts. This has resulted in a move toward a theological form of criticism that might better be characterized as imaginative and invites explicit negotiation of readers’ identities and commitments. A sense of the longer, premodern history of biblical interpretation suggests that some of these late 20th- and early 21st-century emphases do themselves have roots in the interpretive practices of earlier times, but that the Reformation (and subsequent developments in modern thinking) effectively closed down certain interpretive options in the name of better ordering readers’ interpretive commitments. Though not without real gains, this narrowing of interpretive interests has resulted in much of the practice of academic biblical criticism being beholden to modernist impulses. Shifts toward postmodern emphases have been less common on the whole, but the overall picture of biblical criticism has indeed changed in the 21st century. This may be more owing to the impact of a renewed appetite for theologically imaginative readings among Christian readers, and also of the refreshed recognition of Jewish traditions of interpretation that pose challenging framing questions to other understandings.

Authorship

Questions of authorship bring into play many of the central questions of literary theory: questions as to what constitutes the unity and coherence of texts, the interpretive relevance of authorial intention, the relation of oral to literate cultures, the regulation of writing by church and state, the legal underpinnings of literary property, the significance of forgery and plagiarism, and so on. At the heart of many of these questions is a distinction between two different orders of phenomena. Writers are not necessarily authors: authorship requires recognition and attribution, and these depend on institutional processes of publication, textual stabilization, criticism, education, and appropriate legal, regulatory, and economic conditions. Those processes and conditions vary from culture to culture, as do the particular historical forms that authorship takes. In the contemporary world authorship tends to be cast as though it were directly expressive of a personality, an inner core of selfhood, that underwrites the coherence of the texts attributed to it; the commercialization of that form gives rise to a cult of the author in both academic and popular culture.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

What’s in a Title: The Long-debated Question on the Title of Sacchetti’s Novelle

Franco Sacchetti (1332–1400) may be considered Boccaccio’s most important follower in the ‘golden century’ of the Italian literary language, and his Novelle rank among the undisputed classics of early Italian literature. However, with no extant autograph witness, their text must be reconstructed from manuscripts copied almost two centuries after (second half of the sixteenth century). Thus, the authorial form of the collection title has been long disputed, but often with little attention paid to period documentation. This essay attempts to outline the main issues of the discussion, which has been recently reopened with new arguments, and to reassess it in the light of the work’s reception history as well as authorial intention.