Romantic Narrative Research Articles

To Love and Freedom: Post-martial Law Subjectivity in Detention and Your Name Engraved Herein

This paper investigates the contemporary cinematic representation of the White Terror period (1949–1987) in Taiwan. The government started the process of Transitional Justice in 2017, uncovering and articulating the violence of the martial law period, which has coincided with Taiwan’s search for visibility and recognition on the international stage. Meanwhile, the PRC’s military threat to annex Taiwan turns the collective memory of White Terror into a cautionary tale of dictatorship. Considering this historical and political context, I examine two commercial films set against the martial law period, Detention (2019) and Your Name Engraved Herein (2020). I argue that the two films, in their criticism of authoritarianism, construct antagonism between a paternalistic state apparatus and innocent, idealistic youth in melodramatic romantic narratives. With their hyperbolic expression of physical and psychological struggles, the pursuit of love and freedom is upheld as the ultimate expression of humanity. The romantic subjectivity formed in the melodramatic love stories eventually displaces the historical trauma, turning into escapism or gender binarism. Rather than locating and mediating the complexity of trauma, the two films celebrate liberalism by perpetuating stereotypes and exclusionism.

JEDNA PREDAJA O PADU SREBRENIKA POD OSMANSKU VLAST I HISTORIJSKA IMAGINACIJA SREDINE 19. STOLJEĆA

Abstract The subject of this paper are the diary no- tes of the Bavarian botanist Otto Sendtner published in the German magazine "Das Ausland" regarding the medieval fortress of Srebrenik and the tradition about its fall under the Ottoman rule, which were completely unknown in the literature. This Munich university professor stayed in the Bosnian ejalet/Province in 1847, and on that occasion, he visited a significant number of cities, starting with Split, Livno and Travnik as the main destination. From the vizier's city and the seat of Ejalet, he went to Bosanska Posavina due to his botanical research, and on that occasion he passed through Srebrenik. Sendtner wrote in detail about the fortress, inspired by its features, and also left a note of local folklore tradition regarding its fall under the Ottomans, which deserves special attention. Also, in Send- tner's exposition, romantic narratives and orientalism ele-ments can be observed in the descriptions of the Srebrenik fortress and the landscape surrounding it, which can be attributed to the features of the imagi- nation about the Middle Ages presented in the European intellectual circles during the middle of the 19th century. Keywords Srebrenik, Bosnia, Middle Ages, oral tradition, travelogue, Otto Sendtner

越劇과 女性國劇의 비교 연구 - 발전과정과 특징을 중심으로

Yue-ju Opera and Female Gukkeuk are representative traditional theater styles in which only actresses perform. In the 20th century, women’s social advancement had become more frequent, so women’s stage performances are no longer unfamiliar. Yue-ju Opera and Female Gukkeuk are popular and traditional plays developed in Seolchang(說唱), and have similarities such as the actress’ male costume acting and romance narratives. The history of Female Gukkeuk and Yue-ju Opera is a process in which women, who were excluded from stage performances and were taboo, became the central body of the stage.BR First of all, I reasearched the process of women becoming the central body on the stage. Yue-ju Opera and Female Gukkeuk were theatricalized from Seolchang Art. Changgeuk was established by the Joseon(朝鲜) Vocal Music Research Association, and Yue-ju Opera was established as Yue-ju Opera through Nakji Changseo, Sogaban, and Shaoxing-Munhee. Both theater styles had performed only by men at the beginning period. Since then, Changgeuk has partially performed by Ki-saeng or female singers of Pansori, but Yue-ju Opera had established a female troupe and let male troupe push out.BR Since Female Gukkeuk and Yue-ju Opera are performed only by actresses, the actress’ male costume is the core of these two styles. Female Gukkeuk was established by Im-Chun-Aeng, who participated in the early days, and Yue-ju Opera was established by YIn-guifang through various resuscitation actors in the late 30s and 40s. Unlike the Female Gukkeuk established actress’ male acting and then the other actors’ acting was highlighted, the Yue-ju Opera was centered on the Huadan(花旦) at first and later on, Xiaosheng(小生) became centered. In terms of makeup, costumes, romance narratives, and singing method, Female Gukkeuk has a relatively strong and powerful images, compared to Yue-ju Opera which has a soft images.BR After liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Female Gukkeuk had a desire to become the representation of national theater with the motto of establishing a nation- state and national musics. This desire was also expressed in a national formation narrative. However, the Female Gukkeuk, which wanted to be the representation of the nation-state, became marginalized when Korean society had rebuilt the traditional gender order again.BR In Shanghai, many immigrants from Zhejiang(浙江) and Jiangsu(江蘇) province accounted for the majiority, and Yue-ju Opera had the locality to put them together. After the establishment of People’s Republic of China, thanks to the marriage law campaign, romance narrative-oriented works gained popularity nationwide and even were introduced to foreign countries, functioning as the representation of the nation-state.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯ ФАНТАСТИЧЕСКОГО СЮЖЕТА В ЖАНРОВЫХ СТРУКТУРАХ ТАНЦЕВАЛЬНОГО ИСКУССТВА ОТ ЭПОХИ РЕНЕССАНСА К РОМАНТИЗМУ

The author refers to the Renaissance era – mainly to the Italian region, which is associated with the development of theatrical dance. In Europe, it appeared a little later and French courtyards, mostly became a source of exquisite stylization and baroque beauty of this kind of art. It is noted that such rulers of Italian city-states as L. Medici, M. Sforza, the Este and Gonzaga dynasties began to pay more and more attention to magnificent spectacles. Using approaches and methods of system analysis, the article analyzes the main features of the development of dance from the Renaissance to the Baroque of the XVII century.then to the XVIII century and ballet Romanticism of the XIX century. The problems of transformation of dance vocabulary into the plot fantastic structure of performances and choreographic compositions are considered. As a result, having brought the existing transformations of the fantastic plot in the ballet into a single whole, it is indicated that in this transformation of the plots the connection of the times from ancient mythology to the fantastic refraction of the romantic narrative is revealed. Special attention is paid to the main types of theatrical dances at the court, which contributed to the development of stage choreography. The article also analyzes the main issues of the development of ballet in the period, mainly from the late Renaissance to the XIX century, in particular, the history of the opening of the First Ballet School in Paris, which influenced the composition of the technique of classical dance and the aesthetics of the formation of movements. It is noted that the increase in the level of classical dance technique enriched the artistic potential of ballet and largely expanded its thematic and genre range. As a result of the work, the author draws conclusions about the significant influence of the Renaissance era on the transformation of fantastic plots in the ballet theater of the subsequent time.

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

Effects of depression on the life of the main character in Her movie by Spike Jonze

People are coping with various problems in life that may influence their mental health if they fail to manage them. One kind of mental illness is depression that is frequently marked by the feeling of helplessness, disliking oneself, and shame for being weak. Being aware of depression signs by learning from any kind of media including movie will help people to control their mental and emotional condition. This study attempts to find out the effects of depression on the main character in Her, a two-hour-five-minute movie that is said to be a romance narrative about the relationship between Theodore, a sensitive, depressed and lonely guy with his computer operating system (OS) called Samantha. This study applied a qualitative descriptive method that was realized through observation and content analysis technique. To reveal the psychological exploration focusing on Theodore�s depression, the obtained data were classified based on the relevant categories describing effects of depression. The results show that there are five effects of depression taking place on the life of the main character, Theodore, namely (1) self-blame (2) low self-esteem, (3) loss of appetite, (4) trouble concentrating and (5) trouble sleeping. These five effects are triggered by Theodore�s helplessness due to his divorce that he makes him difficult to move on and the surrounding environment that frequently mocks him.�

1920년대의 정서적 페르소나들

This essay examines the contrastive ways in which The Sheik and If Winter Comes constitute a particular system of affective circulation while at once reflecting and reinforcing certain ideas, desires, emotions, and fantasies of the 1920s British reading public. While the lowbrow romantic narrative of The Sheik mediates the social flow of joy with a sort of strategic ambiguity in addressing conventional ideas about gender and race, the middlebrow sentimental narrative of If Winter Comes creates the current of sadness around the figure of an ineffectually unconventional man. The discussion of these two best sellers suggests that popular fiction, rather than a record of unchanging human experiences, is a response to and intervention in specific historical situations, and that, in such a practice, the mediation of the social circulation of emotions has a central significance.

REVISIONISM: CHALLENGING THE CANON THROUGH THE REVISIONARY NARRATIVES OF WIDE SARGASSO SEA AND FOE

Revisionism is the exercise of revising or reforming of one’s point of view to a previously held belief or accepted viewpoint of a situation. In literature, revisionism is the retreading of a canonical text through a different point of view. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is one such retelling of the story of the canonical text of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, from the viewpoint of the minor character Bertha Mason. While Jane Eyre tells the story of a simple girl, Jane Eyre, and the happy ending of her romantic narrative, this paper will study Wide Sargasso Sea as a revisionary text that picks up the minor narrative of Bertha Mason as Antoinette, a Creole heiress, making it a tragic feminist grand narrative of postcolonial response to the romantic tale of Jane Eyre. Similarly, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe is a revisionary text based on the canonical text Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Placing a woman in a male dominated world, the novel Foe highlights the issues of patriarchal oppression, colonial oppression, authorial tyranny, and language and power, which remain hidden in the romantic canonical narrative of Crusoe’s adventurous life and his valorous escape from the island where he was stranded for twenty eight years. This paper will trace the difference of a woman’s life and journey than a man’s in a world ruled by patriarchal laws. Moreover, this paper will establish the novel Foe as a revisionary text that retells Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from a realistic and colonial point of view instead of a heroic tale.

FPIC, international law, social space, and indigenous territories in FPIC during extractive projects in Latin America. A romantic or tragic story?

The development and implementation of the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) can be understood both as a “romantic” and “tragic” story, using a sharp reflection made by Susan Marks (2012) regarding Human Rights. Following this idea, this essay intends to analyse the main developments of FPIC international human rights in the last three decades (the successful story) and the clear and strong limitations of its use in Latin America (the tragic side to it).Despite the fact that the romantic narrative tells us about a progressive recognition and protection of indigenous rights in international law, especially with instruments such as the ILO Convention 169 (ILO-C169) and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), these advances have been and are currently deactivated. Through the revision of postcolonial literature and an analysis of relevant research in Latin America, this essay explains how the supposed progress is clearly limited by imbalances in the history of international law itself and in the territorial governance system that is configured in large-scale extractive projects, where FPIC is applied or not. In this manner, despite apparently overcoming colonial times against indigenous peoples, the permanent structure of neo-colonization of indigenous territory prevails for an ever-growing global market.

Caste and gender in Tamil Cinema: Phallic Rehabilitation in the Neo-Native film Dharma Durai

ABSTRACT Dharma Durai/Lord Dharma [Seenu Ramasamy, 2016] makes significant departures from the fundamental tenets of the neo-nativity cinema genre whose moorings, as Sundar Kaali argues in the context of a select study of Tamil films in the late 1970s, are in the phallic injury of the hero and the disciplining of the heroine, phenomena that continue to inform a large number of New Wave blockbusters since 2004. I discuss the subversive tendencies that disrupt the hegemonic narratives of caste and culture in neo-native films such as Dharma Durai as well as in path-breaking predecessors such as Veyil/Sunshine (Vasanta Balan, 2006), Naadodigal/Vagabonds (Samuthirakani, 2009) and Aadukalam/Playground (Vetrimaaran, 2011) in the sphere of romantic narratives. I argue that the “actantial energy/agency” of the village that injures the hero in the Neo Nativity Film in Kaali’s thesis (Kaali, Sundar. 2000. “Narrating Seduction: Vicissitudes of the Sexed Subject in Tamil Nativity Film.” In Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi Vasudevan, 168–190. Oxford and New York: Routledge.) is revised in Dharma Durai as the narrative ultimately transfers agency from the rural caste community to the companionate romantic relationship, especially onto the figure of the modern heroine.

“Soon as I saw him, my heart skipped a beat.” A structure analysis of romantic narratives by young Ghanaian women

Research on how young women in urban African cities talk about their love moments with their romantic partners is rare. This study examined the narrative structure of romantic love narratives as told by 12 first year Tourism and Hospitality Management female students in an English-medium public university in Ghana. The analysis showed that the background component of the stories was used by the young women to conceptualize about love, guard against heartbreaks, and/or to be adventurous. The study identified two types of complication, circumstantial complication and complication of intent, which led the narrators to evaluate the situations surrounding their associations with their partners. The study has implications for understanding the logic of love, cultural, and sexual development among young Ghanaian women.

Romantic Narrative in the Film The Battle at Lake Changjin

Chen Kaige, a famous Chinese “scholar-type director”, usually contains rich cultural connotations in his films and his works are always full of Chen Kaige-style romanticism. Although he is good at narrative, making The Battle of Changjin Lake a pure war film is a challenge. Therefore, this article takes the film as the research focus. The analysis of aesthetic elements, such as scenes and scope, picture composition, color and so on, expounds into detail the narrative style of romanticism displayed by Chen Kaige in the film.

English Landscapes

English Landscapes

Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini

Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini Lynn Shutters Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini demonstrate how consent remains important, even to those who secure it coercively and retroactively. Women want it—or at least the tellers of these stories want women to have wanted it. However offensive, this narrative imperative disrupts present-day perceptions that female consent was utterly foreign to medieval cultures. Yet both authors demonstrate that consent alone does not ensure female empowerment. Their work aligns with Kate Manne's argument distinguishing misogyny from sexism. Sexism, Manne argues, "discriminate[s] between men and women, typically by alleging sexual differences."1 Misogyny, on the other hand, posits men and women's common humanity and potential for virtue, even if that virtue is expressed in gender-specific terms. While sexism assumes women's blanket inferiority, misogyny "differentiate[s] between good women and bad ones, and punishes the latter."2 Consequently misogyny coopts, rather than denies, female interiority: misogyny demands that women yield men "not only their bodies but also their minds, in their capacity for choice, volition, and agency."3 In The Reeve's Tale, Schwebel explains, Aleyn reduces Malyne to a tool for exacting revenge. In Manne's terms, this treatment of Malyne is sexist, a denial of women's humanity, rather than misogynist. Why, then, the need for Malyne's retroactive consent? This vengeance on women is two-pronged: first, the Reeve discounts Malyne's personhood. Second, and contradictorily, the Reeve reinstates Malyne's autonomy through retroactive consent. Schwebel convincingly argues that Malyne's affectionate leave-taking of [End Page 359] Aleyn allows her to reclaim agency and insert herself into a narrative of romance. Additionally, in imagining Malyne as consenting, the Reeve makes her conform to the model of attentive femininity that misogyny demands. Based on his prologue, the Reeve is a man who does not get what he wants from women: we might read The Reeve's Tale as an incel revenge fantasy. The feminist pay-off might be to reframe our questions about consent by considering how an agential act might, paradoxically, be imposed. Alberghini reminds us that narrative impositions of retroactive consent can also come from well-meaning women, such as Eglantine's nurse. The nurse dismisses a non-consensual kiss as "a thynge of nought" and blames Eglantine for rejecting a "gentyl man." Yet she also assures Eglantine that nobody saw the kiss but herself, and she'll never tell. If the kiss of a gentleman can—and should—be accepted, then why is secrecy required? Alberghini suggests that we need not reduce the nurse to an ideological mouthpiece. We might instead see how she articulates the complex negotiations of agency, coercion, and consent that medieval and modern women regularly face. These essays remind us that we cannot historicize consent as a march forward from premodern women who were the dehumanized victims of ideological forces, to modern women who are empowered individuals. As Linda Martín Alcoff argues, our present-day notion of consent "ignores the constrained options within which choices are too often actually made."4 In changing the narrative, we must complicate our understanding of consent and consider additional terms in which sexual violation might be assessed. [End Page 360] Lynn Shutters Colorado State University Footnotes 1. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 79. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 108. 4. Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 127. Copyright © 2022 The New Chaucer Society, University of Miami

Outsiders on the Inside: Mestizaje and the Economics of Colonial Desire in Sinibaldo de Mas and Francisco de Paula Entrala

Throughout the last twenty-five years of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, Spaniards published essays and fiction that echoed the view that the colonial project was doomed to failure, clearly expressed in Sinibaldo de Mas’s 1843 Informe secreto (Secret Report). Less attention is paid to nineteenth-century works by peninsulares that mirrored Mas’s alternative plan preparing for Philippine “emancipation” and economically incentivizing mestizaje. Among these were the fiction and essays of the self-described “aplatanado” Francisco de Paula Entrala, which suggested that any failure of mestizaje as a normalizing colonial project was due to the shortcomings of the peninsular Spaniards themselves. In his 1881 Olvidos de Filipinas (Philippines Forgotten), Entrala’s rhetorical shifts simultaneously grant him the authority of an insider to Manila culture and acknowledge his position as colonial outsider; while in his 1875 “El rostro y el alma” (“The Face and the Soul”), he plays with the conventions of romantic narrative and of costumbrismo to portray mestizaje as the economic salvation of the would-be colonizers and a “happy ending” to failed Spanish imperialism.

Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies

This essay reads French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s 2019 film&nbsp;Atlantique, a Senegalese-French-Belgian coproduction, to argue that its oceanic focus gestures at the haunting histories that suture the US and Senegal. Atlantique,&nbsp;spoken in Wolof,&nbsp;explores global and local class inequalities through a romance narrative that foregrounds the lasting effects of colonialism and economic imperialism on Senegal. Despite this distinct national context,&nbsp;Atlantique was quickly absorbed into a global media stream, picked up by Netflix and distributed to more than one hundred and sixty-five million subscribers.&nbsp;While&nbsp;Atlantique appears to tackle the ravages of capitalism on a global scale by highlighting labor migration and the disruptive effects on the women left behind, a close reading of the film reveals a more complicated and transnational story.&nbsp;Atlantique forces us to also think about the United States. The American continent in the colonial era formed the tragic third corner in the&nbsp;triangular Atlantic economy based on the slave trade. Placing Atlantique within a Black Atlantic trajectory yields a richer, more politically invested reading of the film that simultaneously helps us to rethink the political work that film can do in a globalized world.&nbsp;In particular, I posit that Atlantique’s circulation to the US and Europe helps reverse the traditional patterns of flow, North to South, West to East, as such challenging limited understandings of the US's cultural and political ties to Senegal.After a discussion of production and circulation, I therefore turn to a close reading of the film and the paratext surrounding it to proffer a theory of how films like&nbsp;Atlantique can help us rethink the potentialities and investments of transnational American Studies as a field.

Jagged Love: Narratives of Romance on Dating Apps during COVID-19.

The romance plot is one of the most pervasive narratives in Western society. It is a cultural masterplot: a story with which almost everyone is familiar, which can deeply and intrinsically shape the way we think about how we live. This article examines how people interact with the romance masterplot and how it affects their search for love on dating apps in Australia during the global pandemic in 2020. Using data drawn from interviews and focus groups, and combining sociological research and narrative theory, we explore the way the romance masterplot affects the way people approach romance in dating apps, and how this has been complicated by the pandemic. We propose that participants use of dating apps in this period was characterised by ‘jagged love’, which we have theorised in relation to Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid love’. This manifested cyclically, as participants turned to the apps seeking the security offered by the romance masterplot in a time of global uncertainty; swiped, matched, and messaged in large numbers, and lost faith in the apps ability to deliver on the romantic masterplot. While episodic behaviour on dating apps is not new, the pandemic heightened and accelerated the process as people desperately sought the certainty offered by the romance masterplot, quickly lost faith because of the limitations of the pandemic, and then returned again.

The Polish Rider: CH Alexandrowicz and the reorientation of international law, Part II: declension and the promise of renewal

Abstract This article is the second of a two-part analysis of the work of the international legal historian, CH Alexandrowicz. Part II analyses Alexandrowicz’s narrative of the decline of international law represented by 19th-century positivism and the scramble for African territory, where legal principles such as the protectorate became mere tools for acquisition, and treaties bereft of obligation. It traces his sympathy for the post-independence ‘new states’, his hope for the renewal of international law, the Romantic narrative imbuing his secular, modernist eschatology, and his continuing engagement with Indian Constitutional development.

Editorial

When I first studied the novel, the form was believed to have originated in the eighteenth century with the fiction of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and was synonymous with literary realism. The novel emerged from the Age of Reason, was closely associated with journalism, satire and conduct literature, and marked a profound break with the supernatural, fantastic and romance narratives of the past. Its perfect embodiment was to be found in the work of Jane Austen, even today an immensely popular writer, and widely regarded as a defining practitioner of the novel form. This kind of novel was/is in every respect different from Shakespeare: new, ‘novel’, not old; prose, not poetry; narrative, not dramatic; realist, not magical; fictional, not metafictional; and could deal with Shakespeare only as an objective feature of the society and culture being represented.

Stanza-Linking in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Phenomenology of Narrative

Stanza-linking, also known as concatenation, is a stylistic flourish drawn into English from French and Welsh poetry. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes extensive use of stanza-linking and turns it to unusual poetic effects, principally montage and dialogue. In some twenty-six cases, one stanza overlaps diegetically with the next, with or without repeated words. This article enumerates and discusses these stanzaic junctures, concluding that the poet uses stanza-linking to make Gawain both less and more than the continuous romance narrative that it appears to be.