Flawed Characters Research Articles

“What a tale we have been in”: Emplotment and the Exemplar Characters in The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter Series

AbstractLinda Zagzebski's theory of moral exemplarity emphasizes the importance of admiration in developing ethical behavior. This essay argues that admiration involves wonder and distance and is best evoked by mixed or flawed characters; it demonstrates this through discussion of the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Using Paul Ricoeur's taxonomy of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration in narrative work, it discerns a self‐reflexivity in the protagonists of these fantasy novels, which is echoed by that of the readers, who are brought to realize their own emplotment in larger narratives. Features in Tolkien and Rowling that aid this exploratory reading include the length and depth of the novels, the decentering of the reader's own reality, and their open endings, which offer an invitational role to further interpretation. Virtue is viewed more teleologically than in Zagzebski, for moral realism is woven into the metaphysics of these novels, which allows mimesis of flawed characters to be ethically productive.

Death and the Plague in The Story of Wanderings

ABSTRACT Little known beyond the Russian speaking world, The Story of Wanderings is a dark fantasy film produced in the late period of the Soviet cinema. The film was classified as a children’s film by the director, film critics, and the state. Produced by Mosfilm, the third oldest and the most influential film studio in Soviet Russia, it is a rare example of Soviet children’s horror, featuring several death scenes and a personified plague. Death’s presence in The Story of Wanderings stands in contrast to idealised Soviet pioneers self-sacrificing themselves for the good of others, by presenting a world of flawed characters stymied by the ambient ever-presence of death. In post-Soviet Russian-speaking territories, the film is understood critically as a masterfully constructed ‘adult’ horror disguised as a state-sponsored family film. This article examines the way Alexander Mitta’s film serves a ‘dual audience’ in the context of a socialist ‘cultural industry’ that lacked an established horror genre. It also highlights how the contradictions of late Socialism are revealed in the specific power dynamics between the adult and child characters of the film.

Religion without doctrine or clergy: the case of Ancient Greece

AbstractThe paper examines doctrinal and political reasons to explain why the Ancient Greek religion did not feature a distinct class of professional priests as suppliers of religious goods. Doctrinal reasons relate to worshiping a multitude of powerful anthropomorphic gods with flawed characters; absence of a founder of religion and of a scripture; lack of religious doctrine and of a code of moral behaviour and piety manifested as mass participation in rituals. These factors denied religious suppliers the opportunity to form a monopoly acting as an autonomous intermediary between humans and gods. Political reasons relate to the supremacy of the demos which watchfully guarded its decision-making powers and prevented other actors like a priestly interest group to challenge its authority.

Servants and Animals in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

In Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë employs animals and servants to provoke moral responses from her readers. Unfailingly, those characters Anne Brontë — and her reader — approve of are humane in their treatment of animals and servants. Similarly, her most morally flawed characters largely expose themselves to criticism through their behaviour and treatment of their dependants. Animals and servants are briefly considered in Agnes Grey. This is followed by an extensive exploration of these features in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Brontë creates her own individual manifestation of a moral code and this is an important factor in the success of the novels in engaging the reader.

Staging Sincerity in Renaissance Italy and Early Modern China; or, Why Real Lovers Quarrel

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in China and the West saw a wave of skeptical approaches to metaphysics, ethics, and the physical sciences, including a related interest in “playing devil’s advocate” for seemingly weak propositions. This article analyzes two works of musical theater from these geographically remote traditions to argue that use of historically problematic romances to explore the relationship of ethics, emotion, and reason resulted in novel depictions of attachment emotions as neither purely selfless “gut reactions” nor calculating facades. Scenes depicting lovers’ quarrels and morally flawed characters may paradoxically strike audiences as more authentically romantic because they dramatize an aspect of attachment emotions’ functioning recently elucidated by cognitive science, namely, that of “body budgeting” (allocation of energy resources by the brain). Monteverdi and Busenello’s Coronation of Poppaea and Hóng Shēng’s Palace of Lasting Life use contrastive poetic and musical styles to dramatize the debate-like quality inherent in such negotiations, further revealing a strong connection between the affective “ingredients” that make up socially mediated emotion states and the mechanisms by which music and prosody affect them.

When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey

Reviewed by: When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey Kiri Palm Gailey, Sarah When We Were Magic. Simon Pulse, 2020 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-3287-1 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-3289-5 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 High school senior Alexis didn’t mean to kill fellow classmate Josh Harper, but that’s what happens on prom night when her first attempt at sex ends in dangerous, explosive magic. Her crew of five friends, girls who have bonded over their magical gifts, are quick to try to help her dispose of the evidence and repair the damage, but nothing is working according to plan. As the girls burn, bury, and obliterate Josh’s remains, they begin to pay a high price, and Alexis is terrified that she’ll lose [End Page 303] her beloved friends in the process. Hugo Award–winner Gailey doesn’t pull any punches in Alexis’ narration, spinning a tale of consequences, flawed characters, and detailed accounts of gore. Many of the acts the girls commit should be unforgivable (and are often stomach-turning), but the strong bond they share make the characters impossible to hate. Alexis is both naïve and jaded, certain she’ll be abandoned while determined to fix everything alone by leaving her friends, a selfish plan that never succeeds. Her romantic pining for bestie Roya is sure to make readers remember their own first loves, and the constant will-she-won’t-she back and forth is as believable as it is frustrating. Thankfully, everything doesn’t work out in the end, but Alexis and her crew learn how to live with what remains and support each other in the aftermath, a lesson every reader is sure to appreciate. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Whisper of Horses by Zillah Bethell

Reviewed by: A Whisper of Horses by Zillah Bethell April Spisak Bethell, Zillah A Whisper of Horses. Feiwel, 2017 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-250-09394-3 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-250-09395-0 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 In this grim futuristic London, Serendipity lives inside a walled city; the barely literate residents there know little of the past, including the reason for the harsh conditions, and depend on the ministry to keep them safe and fed. After Serendipity’s mother dies, Serendipity escapes the city in an effort to find a symbol of all that used to be: horses. Out in the wider world, things are far different than what is claimed inside the walls: the rain isn’t poison and there are signs of true regeneration. However, the father whom Serendipity has never met is an important man, too important to let his daughter go traipsing off to change the world, and the rulers of the city have a vested interest in keeping the populace believing in the world’s permanent demise. There’s a curious mix of good intentions and power-hungry striving in the government, with even the wealthy poorly educated and largely unskilled, and Bethell does nice work creating well-rounded, flawed characters who are still sympathetic. Horses come up a significant amount as symbols for all sorts of things, but the symbolism works, and Serendipity’s eventual encounter with them is both satisfying and memorable. Dystopian fans who are too young for most of the books on the topic will appreciate this gentler, more accessible look at a society gone awry. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

“Let’s Not Homosexualize the Library Stacks”: Liberating Gays in the Library Catalog

E n c o u n t E r i n g a b o o k w i t h queer characters and storylines can be a personal or academic milestone—a transformative awakening to selfknowledge. For the more seasoned among us, such a discovery was likely fraught with pathologizing language that reflected the prevailing attitudes of the time. In libraries before the 1970s the books would have been cataloged with the subject heading “Sexual perversion” and shelved alongside books on sex crimes, incest, and pedophilia. Those searching for fictional works about gays and lesbians found themselves identifying with particularly flawed characters whose stories usually ended tragically. These readings often took place in the stacks, in stolen, secret moments. For some, this first experience was the result of directed searches in card catalogs, as Barbara Gittings describes above, while for other readers, like Lillian Faderman, the first book was encountered by accident:

Cute But Relaxed: Ten Years of Rilakkuma in Precarious Japan

Cute But Relaxed: Ten Years of Rilakkuma in Precarious Japan

Switch by T. Cohen

Cohen, Tish. Switch. Toronto: HarperCollinsCanada, 2011. Print. This novel is a light, contemporary retelling of Mary Rodgers' “Freaky Friday”, with the body-switch occurring between two teenage girls. Andrea Birch lives with her parents and varying numbers of foster-siblings in a messy, eccentric household. Her father is a kind, nerdy man obsessed with the weather channel and her mother spends her time parenting children who have come to stay with the Birches from their own troubled homes. In contrast, Joules Adams lives in a huge house with her rock-star father and seems to have everything that Andrea does not: glamour, money, and a boyfriend who is coincidentally the object of Andrea's unrequited love. When the magical switch happens, Andrea learns how much she really values her own, unglamourous home. Switch is a smooth, fast-paced read. Cohen has written a believable, likable character in Andrea, and presents nuanced portraits of other, flawed characters, such as the aging star Nigel Adams. However, Andrea comes to recognize what her family gives her almost too quickly; her eagerness to enjoy some of the benefits of Joules' life is continuously constrained by her own sense of morality and obedience. The switch seems uncomfortable for her almost from the start. I also found an irritation in the switch catalyst, a pair of “magic” red rubber gloves that Andrea's grandmother bought from a “fortune-teller” in Africa; Cohen presents the continent of Africa as a prop to explain the switch, in a way that serves only to suggest “Africa” as a mysterious, othered culture. This seems flippant and is a shame, as Cohen has written other aspects of the story in a more socially-realistic manner, such as her allusions to the stories of the Birch foster kids and parents. The ending is also summarized too quickly and too neatly in comparison to the rest of the story. Recommended with reservations: 2.5 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Allison Sivak

In Praise of Folly: Reconsidering the Functions of Lope de Vega's Saints' Play Graciosos

The gracioso roles Lope de Vega wrote into his comedias de santos are products of his imagination, unlike the roles of the saintly protagonists, whose biographies were well established by the flores sanctorum . Traditionally, the graciosos' principal function in these religious dramas has been considered to be the provision of comic relief. Indeed, Golden Age moralistas targeted their attacks on the saints' plays at the graciosos , whom they considered the chief culprits of the profane elements that "polluted" religious drama, robbing it of any evangelizing efficacy it might otherwise have. In this essay, I challenge the assumption that the graciosos represented an obstacle to the improvement of public morality that the saints' plays were designed, in part, to promote. After a brief summary of existing scholarship concerning the functions of the figura del donaire in the comedia de santos , I argue that the inclusion of certain saints' play graciosos can, in fact, be justified for the purposes of edification. In a number of his saints' plays, Lope de Vega blurs the conventional distinction of the roles of gracioso and santo, deleitar and enseñar , respectively. I argue that, because the saintly heroes can, potentially, alienate the corral spectator, Lope places some of his graciosos centre stage, inviting the audience to find religious inspiration, not just in the saints, but also in the unaffected goodness of the humble graciosos . Through these comic characters, Lope provides an alternative model for the successful resolution of very ordinary inner tensions between the worldly and the spiritual self. By tracing the comedia careers of Cosme, in La devoción del rosario and Ruperto, in San Nicolás de Tolentino , I set out internal, textual evidence of the graciosos' trajectory, carefully plotted by Lope, from irreverence to moving piety. The paper also adduces external evidence—an analysis of Lope's adaptation of certain dramatic sources—that supports the proposition that it was our playwright's deliberate strategy to put the gracioso 's conversion at the heart of those plays' edificatory intent. Lope might have sympathized with these rather flawed characters, Cosme and Ruperto, created around the time that he himself took the decision to be ordained priest.

From Shakespeare’s Kings to Scorsese’s Kingpins: Contemporary Mob Movies and the Genre of Tragedy

Following a path established in Robert Warshow’s chapter on “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” this article attempts to look at connections between the ancient genre of tragedy and contemporary mob movies. On the one hand, there are structural parallels when it comes to plot, which adheres to the formula of decline, brought about by erroneous judgments. On the other hand, mobsters are often portrayed as powerful, ruthless tyrants who retain a kind of Shakespearean grandeur. Using examples from films by Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott, my argument links contemporary American crime drama to the origins of tragedy (as laid out by Aristotle in Poetics) and some canonical examples of the genre, like The Merchant of Venice. Having established this theoretical framework, I shall offer a detailed discussion of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, one of the most successful mob movies in recent years. In this film, Scorsese toys with the tragic genre both on the level of plot and with regard to his flawed characters, who struggle to overcome guilt and tragic hubris, yet cannot escape their inevitable tragic downfall.

Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity

Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity

The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to a Growing Vaccine Crisis

In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10. Paul Offit, paediatrician and prominent advocate of vaccination, sets the `Cutter incident' in the context of the struggle of medical science against polio and other infectious diseases over the course of the 20th century. He reminds us that, within a decade of Karl Landsteiner's identification of the polio virus in 1908, an epidemic in New York killed 2400 people (mostly children) and left thousands more with a life-long disability. In the 1950s, summer outbreaks in the USA caused tens of thousands of cases, leaving hundreds paralysed or dead. `Second only to the atomic bomb', polio was `the thing that Americans feared the most'. Offit provides a gripping account of how the `March of Dimes', inspired in part by President Franklin D Roosevelt's personal experience of polio, raised funds for research and focused national attention on the disease. He profiles leading figures, notably Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin —brilliant, egotistical and flawed characters—pioneers in vaccine development and as scientific celebrities, and notorious for their bitter personal rivalry. Offit offers a balanced judgement on both the Cutter incident and on the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Reviewing failures in the manufacturing and inspection processes, he exonerates Salk from blame and concludes that `the federal government, through its vaccine regulatory agency... was in the best position to avoid the Cutter tragedy'. Three larger companies produced safe polio vaccines according to Salk's protocol for inactivating the virus with formaldehyde. The lack of experience and expertise at Cutter Laboratories, undetected by the inspectors, caused the disaster. While acknowledging Salk's mean-spiritedness towards colleagues, Offit believes that in denying him a Nobel prize, history has dealt harshly with a man who was `the first to do many things' that have contributed to the virtual eradication of polio in the USA. The Cutter incident led to the replacement of Salk's formaldehyde-treated vaccine with Sabin's attenuated strain. Though Sabin's vaccine had the advantages of being administered orally and of fostering wider `contact immunity', it could also be re-activated by passage through the gut, resulting in occasional cases of polio (still causing paralysis in six to eight children every year in the 1980s and 1990s, when a modified Salk vaccine was re-introduced). As Offit observes, `ironically, the Cutter incident—by creating the perception among scientists and the public that Salk's vaccine was dangerous —led in part to the development of a polio vaccine that was more dangerous'. The Cutter incident had an ambivalent legacy. On the one hand, it led to the effective federal regulation of vaccines, which today enjoy a record of safety `unmatched by any other medical product'. On the other hand, the court ruling that Cutter was liable to pay compensation to those damaged by its polio vaccine—even though it was not found to be negligent in its production—opened the floodgates to a wave of litigation. As a result, `vaccines were among the first medical products almost eliminated by lawsuits'. Indeed, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was introduced in 1986 to protect vaccine manufacturers from litigation on a scale that threatened the continuing production of vaccines. Still, many companies have opted out of this low-profit, high-risk field, leaving only a handful of firms to meet a growing demand (resulting in recent shortages of flu and other vaccines). The contemporary climate of risk aversion and predatory litigation deters the introduction of new vaccines and discourages innovation in a field which boasts some of the most impressive achievements of modern medicine. To protect vaccine development—and ultimately public health —Offit proposes that the option of suing vaccine manufacturers should be stopped and that compensation should only be available through the official programme.

The Flawed Characters in the Campaign: Prestige Newspaper Assessments of the 1992 Presidential Candidates' Integrity and Competence

A content analysis of New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist/editorial evaluations of the integrity and competence of the 1992 presidential candidates during the fall campaign found that explicit assessments of the candidates' character were present in about 7 percent of all news articles and one-third of op/ed items, and that, as predicted, the vast majority were unfavorable in tone. Similar character assessments appeared in the three papers, with all following a negative media “subtext” for each candidate that emphasized his character flaws. Clinton was consistently assessed as a slippery obfuscator, Bush as an inept dissembler, and Perot as an arrogant paranoid.

The Davenport Conspiracy Revisited, by Marshall McKusick, Iowa State University Press, Ames

All the components of a nineteenth century mystery novel are contained in the Davenport Conspiracy Revisited -- an elusive race of mysterious "Mound Builders", clergymen with flawed characters, pranksters who overestimated their ability to take a joke, a<br />stubborn lawyer, a near deathbed confession -- the only difference is that this is no novel, it actually happened. In this book, McKusick chronicles the circumstances surrounding the discovery by nineteenth century antiquarians of alleged "Mound Builder" artifacts in burial mounds in the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois. The discovery caused considerable debate in the scientific community at the time, and has even recently resurfaced in popular literature concerning early European "invasions" of Americas.