Critical Acclaim Research Articles

Field work: Ogawa Productions as farmer–filmmakers

This article considers the value of the leftist filmmaking collective Ogawa Productions’ interdisciplinary practice, which combined filmmaking and farming as an activist project of advocacy for social and environmental justice in 1980s Japan. It argues that Ogawa Pro, as the collective was known, integrated agriculture and film culture to construct a radically inclusive ecosystemic understanding of humans, plants, animals and the climate. Viewed today, their approach exemplifies an early model of ecological thinking that speaks to the recent multispecies turn in the arts, humanities and social sciences. But Ogawa Pro’s turn to the land is also riddled with ambivalence: the films harbour agrarian romanticism bordering on a politics of nostalgia and ethnic environmentalism. Torn between what we might today call progressive and reactionary traditionalist politics, Ogawa Pro’s enmeshed filming and farming practices constitute an important example of what I call Land Cinema – that is, film entangled in territorial, ecological and aesthetic aspects of land. Though the collective’s earlier and more militant films have received critical acclaim in recent years, its later land-based work merits further attention for the way it exposes political tensions over how to cultivate, represent and share space responsibly.

Olive Moore: a new biography

ABSTRACT In 1942, it was concluded simply that there was “no recent word” of writer Olive Moore even though her three novels, Celestial Seraglio (1929), Spleen (1930), and Fugue (1932), had been met with great critical acclaim just a decade prior. Upon the republication of her novels in the 1990s, it was stated that “she mysteriously disappeared from the literary scene in 1934 after which nothing was heard of her,” a conclusion which has largely gone unchallenged ever since. This article seeks to provide a complete revision of this biography, utilizing never-before published archival material to extend Moore’s timeline of work by almost three decades. It reframes Moore’s experimental fiction as a small, early component of a remarkable and resourceful career in which she would hone her craft as a writer and journalist. By highlighting the significance of Moore’s early journalism at John O’London’s Weekly, the Sunday Pictorial, and the Daily Sketch, and by introducing her newly discovered journalism at Scope from 1942–1959, this article proposes that the renewed vigor in feminist modernist studies, in combination with Moore’s newly extended biography, marks a pivotal moment in which the long-overdue academic revival of Moore and her work can finally gain proper momentum.

The Snake Pit: Mixing Marx with Freud in Hollywood.

In 1948, the motion picture The Snake Pit was released to popular and critical acclaim. Directed by Anatole Litvak, the film told of the mental illness and recovery of one patient, who survived overcrowding and understaffing and was treated by a neo-Freudian psychiatrist known as Dr. Kik. It was based on a novel of the same title by Mary Jane Ward, who had been treated at Rockland State Hospital in New York. Building upon exposés of horrid hospital conditions in the press, The Snake Pit helped motivate reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill. Via unpublished correspondence and drafts of the film's screenplay, this article explores the populist and antifascist themes in The Snake Pit, which came from the director, screenwriters, and the politics of the immediate post-WWII era. It also describes the case history of Mary Jane Ward and her treatment by Gerard Chrzanowski, the real "Dr. Kik." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Jacqueline du Pré as 'The Cellist' (2020)

Few musicians of the twentieth century are as recognisable as Jacqueline du Pré. Her dazzling and distinctive talent, said to have enraptured audiences the world over, was overcome by a tragic diagnosis of MS. This sense of tragedy was all the more heightened by Du Pré’s famed physicality on the stage, leading critics to use all manner of analogies in describing her playing as a physical (and even sexual) experience. Her status as a musical celebrity, further intensified as she became one half of a classical music power couple, has led to numerous dramatic retellings and reimaginings of her biography, played out in film and TV, and now on stage. The most recent example of this fascination with Du Pré is the ballet The Cellist, Cathy Marston’s new work for the Royal Ballet, premiered in February 2020 to much critical acclaim. Its score, composed by Philip Feeney, features a cello soloist and interweaved repertoire extracts that have become so associated with Du Pré. Along with the characters of Barenboim, Du Pré, and her family, her 1673 Stradivarius cello is given a starring role in the form of Marcelino Sambé, a new take that makes this a distinctive contribution to media representations of Du Pré. This article examines the interactions across this complex web of musical representations of musical personae engrained in the cultural consciousness. It considers acts of musical performance, the musical instrument as living companion, and the representation of classical musical culture of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing attention to key features of Du Pré’s narrative re-presented in a new artistic form.

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music (edited by Danijela Špirić Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen) is a fascinating study of how popular music developed in post-World War II Yugoslavia, eventually reaching both unsurpassable popularity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and critical acclaim in the West. Through the comprehensive discussion of all popular music trends in Yugoslavia − commercial pop (zabavna-pop), rock, punk, new wave, disco, folk (narodna), and neofolk (novokomponovana) − across all six socialist Yugoslav republics, the reader is given the engrossing socio-cultural and political history of the country, providing the audience with a much-needed and riveting context for understanding the formation and the eventual demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Women Navigating the Climate Catastrophe: Challenging Anthropocentrism in Selected Fiction

Summary This article explores how two authors represent female characters who engage with the impending climate catastrophe by exposing and challenging anthropocentrism, albeit in very different ways. The selected novels, Weather by Jenny Offill, and The Last Migration by Charlotte McConaghy, were published in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Both novels were met with significant critical acclaim and both announce their central authorial impetuses in their titles. Offill’s main character, Lizzie, lives a life of middle class privilege with her husband and young son in New York while McConaghy’s protagonist, Franny, has lost her husband and child and scrapes a living as she moves between Ireland, Australia and Greenland. I use a theoretical framework that can broadly be described as feminist ecocriticism as a lens for my analysis and I mobilise conceptual interventions by scholars working in a range of fields related to climate change and critical animal studies. I will explore how the female characters in my selected novels navigate the impending climate catastrophe and I will argue that scholars can gain insight into their experiences by paying close attention to how the authors challenge anthropocentrism in their representations of these experiences. In order to work towards staunching the damage human beings are doing to the natural world, we need to build interactions that honour, respect and affirm the lives of all inhabitants with whom we share the earth. The relationships I investigate in this article mostly fall far short of these goals and these failures can be traced back to the stubborn insistence or, at times, unquestioned assumption, that human beings have greater value than the rest of the world we inhabit. This inability to relate meaningfully and empathetically to the rest of the natural world allows humans to wreak the havoc that has resulted in the contemporary climate crisis. I will illustrate that the glimmers of hope that the texts do offer can be found in the instances where the human characters at least attempt respectful interactions with their nonhuman counterparts in ways that honour and affirm the value of their animal lives.

“An Indigenous Sovereignty of the Imagination”: Reenvisioning the Great Australian Novel in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria

Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria, received critical acclaim upon its publication by Giramondo in 2006. As the recipient of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007, Carpentaria cemented Wright's position as the country's foremost Indigenous novelist. This article places Carpentaria within contemporary discussions of “big, ambitious novels” by contemporary women novelists by examining the ways the novel simultaneously invites and resists its inclusion into an established canon of “great Australian novels” (GANs). While critics have been quick to celebrate the formal innovations of Carpentaria as what makes it worthy of GAN status, the novel nevertheless opposes the integrationist and homogenizing myths that accompany canonization. Therefore, the article finds that Wright's vision of a future Australia involves moments of antagonism and mutual understanding between white settler and Indigenous communities. This article uses the work of Homi Bhabha to argue that Carpentaria demonstrates the emergence of a third space wherein negotiation between these two cultures produces knowledge that is “new, neither the one nor the other.” In so doing, Wright shows the resilience of Indigenous knowledge even as it is subject to transformation upon contact with contradictory ideological and epistemological frameworks.

“Only I Am the Brahma”: Religion and Narrative in the Netflix Thriller Series Sacred Games (2018–2019)

Sacred Games (2018–2019), based on Vikram Chandra’s novel of the same title, is India’s first Netflix crime thriller series. This series shows how the lives of a Sikh policeman, Sartaj Singh, and a powerful gangster, Ganesh Eknath Gaitonde, weave together in a mission to save Mumbai from a nuclear attack. The series immediately received critical acclaim and viewers’ appreciation, but the way the series represents the (mis)use of metanarratives of religious and political ideologies, as they come to influence Gaitonde’s life, needs further perusal. For this purpose, this article investigates how Gaitonde’s life, and its abrupt end, are shaped and challenged by the larger ideological and religious metanarratives of his milieu. At the same time, this article examines Gaitonde’s ability to gain control over his own narrative despite the overwhelming presence of these metanarratives. More specifically, Gaitonde’s transgressive will and his desire to tell his story are brought under scrutiny. Along with the analysis of Gaitonde’s character, this article also examines how the use of various cinematic and narrative techniques heightens self-reflexivity and metafictionality in Sacred Games and emphasizes the role of mini-narratives as unique, singular, and contingent, in contrast to the generic, universal, and permanent tones of metanarratives.

In The Wake of Okwui Enwezor

This article takes a critical and intimate look at Okwui Enwezor’s work in South Africa during the 1990s and asserts that the international exhibition he curated in Johannesburg in 1997—the Second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography—is an important lens through which to explore Africa’s entangled histories. Trade Routes mattered as much for the discourse it produced as for the artworks it presented. The exhibition checklist features extraordinary works that were made between 1989 and 1997 by artists whose critical acclaim we take for granted today but who were at that time still underappreciated or emerging. Trade Routes not only challenged the status of the existing canon on African art but also proposed a new counter-canon. Additionally, Trade Routes and Enwezor’s concept of the meeting of worlds might have greater analytical potential as a metaphor for the meeting point of two indecipherable South Africas. Under apartheid, Johannesburg was two “countries,” and people lived in two different realities, depending on one’s history, geography, race, ethnicity, class, gender, culture, education, and opportunities. Enwezor constantly confronted the legacy of racism in small and big ways in South Africa. He was at the center of critical debates about race and representation. While there are all kinds of practical guidelines for how to talk about racism within the larger culture, we still do not have one for talking about racial inequality and racism in institutions, exhibition histories, curatorial practice, and the commercial art world. Instead, we have Okwui Enwezor to accompany us on our quest and to remind us to keep consulting both histories and imaginaries, theories and practices, and to continue to interrogate how cycles are reproduced or radically ruptured.

Processes, Paradoxes and Illusions: Compositional Strategies in the Music of Hans Abrahamsen

AbstractHans Abrahamsen’s recent music has been the subject of much critical and public acclaim, with his output of the last decade finding a new directness of expression even as it incorporates and develops elements of his musical language that have remained consistent over many years. This article examines the use of compositional processes within a number of these large-scale works – Schnee (2008), Wald (2009), the Double Concerto (2011) and Let me tell you (2013) – and explores the ways in which Abrahamsen generates and controls material through a variety of techniques of transformation and repetition. How smaller-scale systems interact to create music of great allusive complexity is considered through discussion of the variation form of Wald; finally, Abrahamsen’s embracing of types of paradox and illusion are presented as strategies to unlock broader aesthetic issues within his music.

The Iceman Cometh: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

<i>The Iceman Cometh</i>: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

Eloquent Artifice and Natural Simplicity: Moral Aesthetics of Painting and Eating in Chardin’s Late Food Still Lifes

Abstract Jean-Siméon Chardin’s food still lifes from the 1750s and 1760s diverge from his earlier kitchen displays by exhibiting mainly ready-to-eat fruit, baked goods, and beverages, without any suggestion of additional cooking. The emergence of this subgenre in the artist’s oeuvre corresponded to the rise of a new ethos of eating in mid-1700s France, which championed simply prepared food as the alimentary corrective to the corrupting influence of over-refined modern cookery. This moral discourse on Chardin’s subject matter ran parallel to the critical acclaim for the distinct visuality of his art as an antidote to the excess of rococo style. In light of the mid-century discourse on art and food, Chardin’s late still lifes embodied the reformist aesthetic advocated by the French intellectual elite.

Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Savagery, and War Trauma in At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

This article offers an analysis of the representation of tirailleurs sénégalais in At Night All Blood is Black (Frère d’âme), a First World War novel published in 2018 to considerable critical acclaim by David Diop. I show how Diop invokes and at the same time undermines stereotypes of African ferociousness. His tirailleur protagonist becomes an unwilling witness to European barbarity, as the war causes a radical questioning of the colonial order. By focusing on the figure of the dëmm, I offer a ‘decolonized’ approach to First World War trauma and address excess and ambiguity as strategies of postcolonial transformation in Diop’s novel. Finally, I argue that although At Night All Blood is Black commemorates the French African soldiers’ contribution to the First World War, rather than simply painting a heroic portrait of the tirailleurs sénégalais, it does so by stressing their vulnerability and their traumatic transformation at the front.

Del dominio de los fundamentos de la comedia de buenas costumbres a la práctica exitosa: Contigo pan y cebolla (1833) de Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza

Until now, eighteenth-century Spanish theater scholars and critics have considered Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (1789-1857) a minor playwright. In the present collaboration we intend to demonstrate that such an assertion does not conform to the truth. Through a contrastive study between El señorito mimado (1787) by Tomás de Iriarte and Contigo pan y cebolla (1833) by Gorostiza, we mean to show that the latter one became a renowned author of comedies of good manners on his own merits and not for being a mere follower of the guidelines of the neoclassical comedy established by Nicolás Fernandez de Moratín and consolidated by Tomás de Iriarte. In essence, the contents and arguments set forth in this article are clear evidence that Gorostiza conceived comedies that achieved a public and critical acclaim and made him worthy of occupying a relevant position both among the enlightened liberals of Hispanic origin as well as among the authors of comedies of good manners.

Blockchain in eCommerce

As blockchain technology is becoming a driving force in the global economy, it is also gaining critical acclaim in the e-commerce industry. Both the blockchain and e-commerce are inseparable as they involve transactions. Blockchain protect transactions and e-commerce activities rely on them. Blockchain technology enables a decentralized marketplace to support important business activities like secure payments, managing the supply chain and reducing the fraud to mention few. In this special issue editorial we are introducing 11 research articles in this hot area of research that were selected by our reviewers from over than 250 submissions. As blockchain technology is becoming a driving force in the global economy, it is also gaining critical acclaim in the e-commerce industry. Both the blockchain and e-commerce are inseparable as they involve transactions. Blockchain protect transactions and e-commerce activities rely on them. Blockchain technology enables a decentralized marketplace to support important business activities like secure payments, managing the supply chain and reducing the fraud to mention few. In this special issue editorial we are introducing 11 research articles in this hot area of research that were selected by our reviewers from over than 250 submissions.

George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland

Reviewed by: George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland Sarah Chambré Lucie Sutherland. George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xiii+297 pp., $84.99 (hardback). Examining theater history and cultural practice, Lucie Sutherland provides in this work of forensic scholarship a many-faceted portrayal of George Alexander, one of the last great figures to occupy the role of actor-manager, which dominated and shaped the English stage from Richard Burbage's tenure of Shakespeare's Globe (1599-1613) through David Garrick's creation of the Garrick Theatre (1747-76) and continued with an array of famous names until the early decades of the twentieth century. Like his predecessors and peers, Alexander combined the roles of principal actor, producer, and financial director as actor-manager of the fashionable St. James's Theatre from 1890 until his death in 1918. Sutherland's detailed analysis of the financial and practical aspects of this management arrangement underpins a nuanced portrayal of Alexander's championing of new English drama with a constant assessment of its appeal to his diverse audience, segregated by class and ticket price. This book describes how Alexander's commitment to contemporary texts, nurturing of a new audience, and manipulation of their tastes by the creation of a St. James's brand was tempered by conservatism. This was partly innate, partly due to censorship but mostly the result of a cautious guardianship of his brand, defined with a careful and highly attuned eye to the fashionable occupants of the stalls and dress circle. Sutherland delineates the elements that contributed to this management style and challenges the image of Alexander as a rigid autocrat with particular attention to his collaboration with actors and playwrights. His emerging style and openness to serious new drama was shifted significantly by the events of 1895, of which Henry James's short lived drama Guy Domville (1895) was only one. Sutherland details the financial imperatives and the portfolio approach to Alexander's risk management. Increasingly, the actor-manager interspersed new works with revivals, safe romances, and market-tested offerings such as acknowledged authors or works that had premiered elsewhere. The need for long runs and this conservatively managed collaboration, exemplified by but not exclusive to Alexander, led by the [End Page E-8] time of the opening years of the twentieth century to a bifurcated marketplace—as the critic Dennis Kennedy describes it: "avant-garde suspicion of popular success eventually split [the market place] into two parts: the larger part got the audience but little lasting attention. The smaller part the critical and historical acclaim" (146). In many respects, the representative history so well reconstructed here mirrors the shifts in literary book publishing over the same period. In this history, James arguably placed himself in the wrong market for his work, although the successes of pioneers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero in the early 1890s might have seemed to augur otherwise. Sutherland's book is not primarily about James's play, which was only a brief episode in Alexander's career. He is quoted as reminiscing in 1909 about Guy Domville that "I was, and always shall be, proud, in spite of that particular audience's adverse verdict. It had a fair run, which satisfied me, for it attracted to the St James's that whole of intellectual London's audiences available for any theatre" (45). The author accepts the standard critical viewpoint that the construed failure was due to "the limited dramatic possibilities of James's text." The detailed scholarship contained in this book is nevertheless very useful for Jamesians interested in a re-evaluation of the play and consideration of its limited run in the context of Alexander's practice. The creation of the St. James's brand relied on elaborately realistic and spectacular staging, which entailed high fixed costs for a production, and success was thus reliant on long runs to create profit. The stratified audience composition meant that a play must have broad appeal, something that Guy Domville failed to offer. Sutherland demonstrates that rehearsal time was limited and that Alexander focused on choreography and mise-en-scène rather than dialogue...

The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations ed. by Dominic McHugh

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations ed. by Dominic McHugh Jeff Godsey THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MUSICAL THEATRE SCREEN ADAPTATIONS. Edited by Dominic McHugh. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp. 674. Although the film version of Cats arrived too late for consideration in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations, the questions and issues surrounding the reasons for its failure loom large throughout the book. Edited by Dominic McHugh, professor of musicology and curator of concert versions of Broadway musicals at the University of Sheffield, this massive collection of twenty-seven essays brings together leading scholars to consider the qualities that make a successful cinematic adaptation of a successful stage musical. McHugh, while referring specifically to “success” in the introduction, does not define it, and the essays vary widely in their determinations of how to measure it. Some of the writers focus on commercial success while others concentrate on artistic merit or critical achievement. Still others consider the effectiveness of specific aspects of a film. While the broad array of areas in which success is considered—critical, commercial, artistic, technical, and so on—and the consequent diverging methodologies and viewpoints provide critical insights and a multiplicity of starting points for future research, they also give the book a sprawling effect and leave the reader without a central theoretical underpinning. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The ultimate value of this book is that it creates a critical survey of topics in a subfield that has rarely been studied as such. [End Page 121] The book comprises six sections: the nature of adaptation; politics; identity; stars; multiple adaptations of single works; and production, commerce, and technology. As one might expect, the reasons for any single work’s failure span multiple categories, so the groupings are more suggestive than prescriptive, but this only underscores the complicated issues surrounding the subject. Such a taxonomy does not hamper the usefulness and enjoyability of the book for musical theatre scholars and theatre and film historians as well as popular readers with similar interests. It may be less useful for craftsmen who want to know how to make better films, as these essays rarely stray from theatrical and literary criticism into film theory or discussions of the technical elements of film from the point of view of filmmakers. Likewise, only a handful consider music theory, although it does make a refreshing appearance in a few of the essays. In addition to McHugh, who contributes two pieces himself, twenty-five essayists examine musical stage-to-screen adaptations from the earliest days of talking cinema (The Desert Song, Rio Rita) to twenty-first-century film (The Producers, Hairspray). Perhaps the best known of these writers is Geoffrey Block, author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (1997). Here, Block examines the extent to which a screen adaptation “should” emulate its stage source via the 1935 film version of Roberta, which he sees as superior to the original 1933 stage version. The key to the film’s success, he concludes, is that the creative team made changes to the original material to suit the new medium while allowing the original songwriters to be part of the refitting. This arrangement was generally not in place for other musical films in the 1930s. The writers here chiefly give the reader close readings of primary sources and other archival materials and then argue their own theories regarding the success or failure of the films under study. Each essay historicizes its subject, and there is some terrific archival work in the volume. Most take a comparative approach in analyzing the film(s). Hannah Robbins acknowledges the critical acclaim received by the film version of Kiss Me, Kate (1953) but critiques its erasure of African American characters and the limitations it places on female agency, both of which had been important components of the 1948 stage musical. Amanda McQueen argues for the success of Half a Sixpence (1967) at bringing the film techniques of the Hollywood Renaissance to the musical comedy form, and consequently bringing the genre up to date while noting its critical and financial failure, at least in...

Poetry as Eternal Voyaging: In Conversation with Theo Dorgan

This conversation with Irish poet Theo Dorgan was carried out on 9 November 2019, on occasion of his visit to Granada for the performance in this city of the music / poetry show “Loco por Lorca: An Irish Celebration of the Great Spanish Poet”. This audiovisual performance – featuring a creative exchange between music, words and poetry – had already premiered successfully in Madrid in 2018, and afterwards it was showcased in various places across Ireland, also to great critical acclaim. It was...

Mental health and being smart in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon was first published as a short story in The Magazine of Fantasy &amp; Science Fiction in 1959. After the story successfully elicited critical acclaim and brought literary awards to its author, Keyes expanded the story into a novel that was first published in 1966. Daniel Keyes recounts the saddening story of Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded thirty-two-year-old man, who is chosen by scientists for an experiment that would supposedly improve one’s mental capacity in a short time span. The experiment gradually proves to be successful as Charlie’s mental health improves. Yet, as Charlie turns unexpectedly very intelligent and cultured, reaching the ability to speak several languages including Latin, he finds out that the experiment he has been through brings a temporary state of mental well-being to the subject who would quickly return to one’s initial mental state. This purpose of paper is to discuss the concept of healing and well-being and question whether being well is an ideological or medical concept in terms of madness and civilization from the perspective of Foulcault who sees madness in a certain cultural space in society which the position and definition of “healthy” individuals depend on.

Religion and the Arts in The Hunger Games

Abstract In this selective overview of scholarship generated by The Hunger Games—the young adult dystopian fiction and film series which has won popular and critical acclaim—Zhange Ni showcases various investigations into the entanglement of religion and the arts in the new millennium. Ni introduces theories, methods, and the latest developments in the study of religion in relation to state politics, audio/visual art, material culture, reality TV, and transmedia projects, whilst also reading The Hunger Games as a story that explores the variety, complexity, and ambiguity of enchantment. In popular texts such as The Hunger Games, religion and art—both broadly construed, that is, beyond conventional boundaries—converge in creating an enchantment that makes life more bearable and effects change in the world.