Trans-Mediation of Gender in Elia Kazan’s Adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire

Elia Kazan is among the first directors who adapted Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for the cinema. Kazan’s film adaptation was almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams’s words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, the alterations that take place in the process of trans-mediation cannot be disregarded, since the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, the present study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2013), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie to assess how the film adaptation has incorporated the ideas of femininity, which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the literary text to film have contributed to the development of female identity.

Entrevista a Lorenzo Silva: “Todos mis libros aúnan invención e investigación”

Entrevista con el escritor español Lorenzo Silva, sobre variados aspectos: entre otros, formación, vocación, ficción frente a no ficción, la novela policiaca, la COVID y los premios literarios.

Le mythe de l’enfant dans Douze contes vagabonds de Gabriel García Márquez

Cet article se propose d’analyser, au moyen de la sociologie de la littérature, la perception que l’écrivain colombien Gabriel García Márquez a de l’enfant à travers les contes de l’anthologie Douze contes vagabonds (1992). La création esthétique de cet auteur se nourrit de fond en comble du réalisme magique et peint le personnage de l’enfant, à la fois, comme une merveille et une calamité. L’image que le narrateur présente des petits enfants varie d’un conte à l’autre et suscite la curiosité de la science littéraire. Ainsi, dans certains contes l’enfant est peint comme une bénédiction de Dieu, un symbole d’humilité, le lieu de la présence de l’innocence, de la sagesse et de la sainteté. Cependant dans d’autres contes, il est décrit comme objet de terreur épouvantable

Relief in Ignorance, Shattered Subjectivity: A Lacanian Reading of Subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet”

This paper provides a psychoanalytical account of subjectivity. It engages in a Lacanian reading of subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (1889), whose protagonist, the lawyer, illustrates Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjectivity and the subject. In the story, the lawyer develops a fragmented sense of subjectivity and experiences alienation from the society and all its allegedly logical and supposedly eternal norms, as well as loss and lack in his very being. The story reveals that subjectivity is unstable and constructed within and through language and that remaining a normal person, from the society’s perspective, requires not pondering over and beyond the language, but remaining stuck in it and never suspecting its authenticity and reliability. By contemplating whether the society’s ideologies are everlasting and what are or might be over them, the lawyer expects the society’s ideologies to bring bliss to human and thereby he develops hatred and despise towards them all. The ideas of Jacques Lacan about the development of subjectivity in the course of the mirror stage and the oedipal crisis are drawn upon.

The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices

The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.

El Epicureísmo de Pío Baroja

Este artículo estudia la filiación epicúrea del novelista español Pío Baroja. En la primera sección, se analiza su visión pesimista de la vida, rastreando esta actitud en su tesis doctoral sobre el dolor y en las influencias del irracionalismo de A. Schopenhauer y del nihilismo de F. Nietzsche en su pensamiento. A continuación, se comenta una autodefinición incluida en su ensayo biográfico Juventud, egolatría (1917), titulada “Epicuri de grege porcum”, donde el escritor expone su afinidad personal e intelectual con el epicureísmo. Una crítica negativa a sus primeras novelas, motivada por su anticlericalismo, pudo ser el principal detonante de esta definición de sí mismo como epicúreo. Se explica brevemente, a continuación, la tradición y las razones de la expresión horaciana Epicuri de grege porcum como crítica infundada y juego irónico de palabras. Luego se examinan los principios epicúreos presentes en las novelas de Baroja a través del análisis de dos relatos (“La vida de los átomos” y “Las coles del cementerio”) incluidos en su primera obra, Vidas sombrías (1900). Probablemente para estos cuentos tomó inspiración en Lucrecio o en la literatura académica y filosófica que trataba sobre el materialismo. Se concluye que Pío Baroja, presentándose como epicúreo, mostraba un autorretrato sincero de su ideal de vida.

Littera Aperta

Littera Aperta

Littera Aperta International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies Vol. 6 (2018)

Littera Aperta International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies Vol. 6 (2018)

Littera Aperta International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies Vol. 5 (2017)

International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies Vol. 5 (2017)

MARTIN M. WINKLER (ED.) (2015). RETURN TO TROY: NEW ESSAYS ON THE HOLLYWOOD EPIC. LEIDEN & BOSTON: BRILL.

Martin M. Winkler (ed.) (2015). Return to Troy: New Essays on the Hollywood Epic. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Pp. x, 284. ISBN 9789004292765.