Romantic Comedy Research Articles

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Hannah Chaskin (bio) Angry at Fitzwilliam Darcy for his role in disrupting her sister's courtship, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813) looks on his alleged intended with a sarcastic bite in her voice: "I like her appearance. … She looks sickly and cross.—Yes, she will do for him very well. She will make him a proper wife."1 The "sickly and cross" woman is Anne de Bourgh, cousin of Darcy and daughter of the overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In the context of Pride and Prejudice's primary marriage plot, Anne is Elizabeth's most direct structural foil: both are imagined as potential future wives for Darcy. Yet Anne is not a real obstacle to Elizabeth's ultimate success; she exists in the narrative primarily to delineate the difference between the marriage of interest (in which Darcy marries Anne to consolidate his wealth) and the companionate marriage, or marriage for love (in which Darcy and Elizabeth enter into a partnership based on mutual esteem and compatible personalities). The novel's critique of aristocratic greed and the marriage of interest is figured through Anne's under-defined illness; her elitism and her illness are conflated, as though "sickly" and "cross" are synonymous. This essay concerns the roles of sickness and health in the construction of Pride and Prejudice's heterosexual marriage plot. My title pays homage to Marilyn Farwell's work of queer feminist narratology, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, in which Farwell argues that normative narrative [End Page 313] structure "encode[s] heterosexuality … in its very mechanics."2 I will suggest that the mechanics of Austen's most influential marriage plot operate by deploying an idealized femininity that is essentially healthy and by defining ill femininity as narratively unviable. We are generally accustomed to a gendered ideology that understands dependency, passivity, and femininity to be interlocking terms that are set against self-sufficiency, agency, and masculinity. It is not, therefore, surprising that a propensity towards illness has often been conceived of as a feminine trait. Symptoms of specific illnesses, like consumption, intersect with norms of feminine beauty, and sentimental literature often represents acute or fatal illness in the wake of trauma as indicative of feminine virtue.3 However, by the end of the eighteenth century, feminist critiques of sentimental femininity were becoming prevalent, and these critiques were often framed in terms of illness and illness's effect on companionate heterosexuality. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, indicted a system of sentimental education designed to keep upper-class white women weak, beautiful, and essentially ill. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that due to "inattention to health during infancy … dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind; and how can she be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickliness?"4 Wollstonecraft and Austen are often cast as political foils, but Pride and Prejudice manifests Vindication's pathologizing strategy to critique sentimental, aristocratic femininity, with the result that it paints healthy and resilient femininity as essential to the companionate marriage plot. All of Austen's novels are invested in exploring the lines between health and illness, and between illness and character flaw.5 I focus on Pride and Prejudice in this essay because the relationship between the healthy heroine and the ill foil is so stark and so central to the plot itself and because it is perhaps the most influential of Austen's novels, insofar as it provided both plot and character types that have become ubiquitous in Anglo-American culture. If we accept that Pride and Prejudice has had an outsized role in the replication of what we now call the romantic comedy, the fact that Austen understood narrative structure through the lens of health and illness matters. While Austen's novels do not evince uncomplicated relationships to their own marriage plots, it is the narrative and characterological structures—often flattened out or simplified—that have made their way through the centuries in many forms. These structures have impacted our modern assumptions about the role of health and wellness in happy...

The Importance of Realism, Character, and Genre: How Theatre Can Support the Creation of Likeable Sociable Robots

Stage plays, theories of theatre, narrative studies, and robotics research can serve to identify, explore, and interrogate theatrical elements that support the effective performance of sociable humanoid robots. Theatre, including its parts of performance, aesthetics, character, and genre, can also reveal features of human–robot interaction key to creating humanoid robots that are likeable rather than uncanny. In particular, this can be achieved by relating Mori's (1970/2012) concept of total appearance to realism. Realism is broader and more subtle in its workings than is generally recognised in its operationalization in studies that focus solely on appearance. For example, it is complicated by genre. A realistic character cast in a detective drama will convey different qualities and expectations than the same character in a dystopian drama or romantic comedy. The implications of realism and genre carry over into real life. As stage performances and robotics studies reveal, likeability depends on creating aesthetically coherent representations of character, where all the parts coalesce to produce a socially identifiable figure demonstrating predictable behaviour.

Mastering second language humour: the ultimate challenge

This small-scale study on verbal humour takes place within a larger project entitled “From perception to oral production”, which aims to identify the links between comprehension and production processes and the sources of difficulty for French learners of English. The data consist of three comparable corpora of filmed semi-structured interviews with first (L1) and second (L2) language students: French-French L1; English-English L1; and English L1 with L2. The interviews revolve around the same extract of an American romantic comedy, which the students were asked to describe and comment upon. Instances of spontaneous humour were found to occur in all corpora and were analysed using the cross-cultural comparative model previously used for French-English comparative studies of verbal humour (Béal & Mullan 2013; 2017a; Mullan & Béal 2018a).The humour used by the native speakers of French (N=7) and English (N=7) served as the initial basis for comparison with the L2 English speakers (N=34). It was found that the humour and laughter in the L1 interviews were employed by both parties to achieve certain pragmatic functions related to this particular institutional setting: the participants used humour primarily to create a connection with the interviewer (often through implicit references, and especially where both participants were female). The French students speaking English as L2 tended to use self-oriented humour as a face-saving device to deflect from their production or comprehension difficulties.The use of humour by all L1 and L2 participants nevertheless reflected specific cultural tendencies outlined in Béal & Mullan (2013; 2017a) and Mullan & Béal (2018a), such as the prevalence of third-party oriented humour in French interactions and of self-deprecating humour in English. In sum, and perhaps unsurprisingly, we show that the French learners of English have mastered some aspects of humour in their L2, but still exhibit most of the characteristics of verbal humour from their native French.

“Billions in Debt and Still Surviving”: Curing the Female Shopper in Confessions of a Shopaholic

This paper analyses P.J. Hogan’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) in three sections. In the first section, it studies how the film maps shopping as an illness that needs to be cured onto the body of its female heroine. It does so, as is argued here, by portraying her as a patient suffering from Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD). In the second part, it traces how Confessions necessitates the cure of the female shopper, given its background of the Great Recession and how this holds generic significance for the romantic comedy. The paper then concludes by charting the heroine’s cure in group therapy as predicated upon the principle of the Foucauldian confession and how this then resolves the narrative as, what Diane Negra calls, one of “adjusted ambitions.”

“Billions in Debt and Still Surviving”: Curing the Female Shopper in Confessions of a Shopaholic

This paper analyses P.J. Hogan’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) in three sections. In the first section, it studies how the film maps shopping as an illness that needs to be cured onto the body of its female heroine. It does so, as is argued here, by portraying her as a patient suffering from Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD). In the second part, it traces how Confessions necessitates the cure of the female shopper, given its background of the Great Recession and how this holds generic significance for the romantic comedy. The paper then concludes by charting the heroine’s cure in group therapy as predicated upon the principle of the Foucauldian confession and how this then resolves the narrative as, what Diane Negra calls, one of “adjusted ambitions.”

The Temporality of (Serialized) Romantic Comedy

Romantic comedies have a temporal structure based on suspense that I call temporality of the almost: the micro-narrative structure that repeatedly makes erotic resolution almost happen at several points in the story. This article analyzes how this temporality of constant and continual deferral functions as a retardatory structure posing obstacles apparently in order to keep characters apart, but, in fact, increasing the desire between them, and also between narrative and spectators.

Greeting in Roman comedy: register and (im)politeness

Abstract This article investigates multiple pragmatic facets of Latin greeting as depicted in the corpus of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence). To this end, different frameworks are combined, including Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory, and the most prominent (Im)politeness Theories. The complexity of the greeting phenomenon is first demonstrated by identifying its position inside the opening section of the dialogue with possible reductions, elaborations, and substitutions. Thus a heterogeneous group of greeting tokens is retrieved from the comedy corpus, which, furthermore, fit the speech-act theoretical description of the greeting as a behabitative (Austin), expressive act (Searle) or acknowledgment (Bach and Harnish). Moreover, the paper briefly signalizes the contact-oriented (phatic) functions of the salutation ritual as access display (Shiffrin) or its use as a mechanism of (re)producing the social order (Schegloff). The main part of the investigation, however, is devoted to the greeting formulae and their linguistic variation in Plautus and Terence. After briefly presenting the classical model of (im)politeness (Brown and Levinson), the paper relates the speech-act formulation of the expressions to positive- or negative-politeness strategies. Finally, the article applies the frame-based analysis of the politeness’ formulaic language, as proposed by Terkourafi. The dialogue openings are classified according to their broader extralinguistic context (e.g. participants, temporal setting, the reason for the encounter) into several situational frames. In the last section of the paper, the (im)politeness value of the greeting expressions is revised in relation to their adequacy to a given situation type. In result, some instances of using the formulae inappropriately (i.e., out of frame) are given, which demonstrate the complex interpersonal dynamics of the verbal interaction depicted by Plautus and Terence.

Introduction to Standard Issue

This standard issue features six contributions from postgraduate and early career scholars working at the intersections of media, communications, education, sociology, and technoculture. The articles differ in their objects of inquiry – from sound in digital games, social networking sites, and digital technology in education, to broadcast journalism and romantic comedies, but they broadly converge around a common focus on temporality and time. Between them, the contributions present a good mix of empirical work and significant conceptual development, moving forward theoretical debates in the fields of media and communications. Concepts are either developed, through in-depth engagement with the extant literature (Amaral 2020; Martins & Piaia 2020), or tested through empirical studies using a variety of methods – from surveys (De Andrade & Calixto 2020) to digital ethnography (Polivanov & Santos 2020) to participant observation and interviews (Gomes, Vizeu, & de Oliveira 2020). In some cases, altogether innovative methodological approaches for analysing artefacts are proposed, as in Luersen and Kilpp (2020), whose article opens this standard issue of the journal.

The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi

The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi

Mahesh Dattani’s “Do the Needful”: An Unconventional Romantic Comedy

Mahesh Dattani is a contemporary Indian English Dramatist who gave voice to the 60 million English speakers of India through his drama. He is the first dramatist recognised for his contribution in this field. Through his plays, he raises the problems of eunuch, homosexuality, transgender, child- sexual abuse, gender-discrimination, thought towards HIV-infected people etc. To such issues, he called them ‘fringe issue’ to whom we face but never take it as a part of society. Through ‘Do the Needful’ Mahesh Dattani has presented the problems of male homosexuality. The play was broadcasted by BBC. The play ‘Do the Needful’ is actually an unconventional romantic comedy.

A Sleight of Hair

This essay considers the presence of Black women’s hair as a necessary fact of embodiment that disrupts postfeminist romantic comedies. It focuses on Something New (2006), notable as the first film in which the director, producer, writer, and star were all Black women, arguing that the ontological ruptures created by Kenya, the main character, disrupt the film’s neat classification into the postfeminist romantic comedy genre. The article argues that the Black female body, through the signifier of Black natural hair, invites a chaos into the narrative that makes the film’s contribution to the genre invisible. This calls for a critique of the social order that the genre treats as essential to its foundation.

“Cruel Optimism” and Subjectivity in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Abstract Many of the songs in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are framed as perceptions of the events and conversations surrounding the protagonist Rebecca Bunch. Due to her fragmented sense of self and mental health issues, the songs are often fantastical misrepresentations. As Jessie Fillerup has written, the songs allow the audience to share in Rebecca’s subject position and enable the show to create an empathetic portrayal of mental illness. This article incorporates this insight but expands the idea of intersubjectivity to explore the show’s other goals, such as deconstructing the musical and romantic comedy genres. Using Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), I demonstrate that many of Rebecca’s problems can be attributed not only to her childhood traumas or mental illness but to a misappropriation of musical theater ideals, which have become cruel.

Evidentiality and Mirativity in the Language of Roman Comedy

Summary:The paper deals with the ways of expressing evidential and mirative semantics in the language of Roman comedy. The author claims that the phenomena under consideration belong to the grammar rather than to the lexicon of the Latin language, and shows that various evidential and mirative values can be expressed by the use of verbal tenses, voices, moods and syntactic construction. It is stressed that evidential and mirative functions in such units result only from the interaction of different linguistic parameters within a certain context and does not reside in the units taken in isolation. The main focus of the study is on the linguistic techniques which were preferred by Plautus and Terence. The comparative analysis of the linguistic strategies found in the author's present and the previous research demonstrates that the choice of a particular strategy depends on a given genre. Thus, some strategies (e.g., impersonal passive, inferential perfect and future, imperfect of a truth just recognized, mirative use of the subjunctive and infinitive) are preferred by comic poets while other techniques (e.g., deductive use of debere, gnomic future as a reportative strategy, cum inversum as a mirative device) which may be used in historic or epic narrative, never occur in the language of Roman comedy.

Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the Annales by Jason Nethercut

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 335 with the concerns of the separate homicide courts, where both litigants and witnesses had to swear that their side’s case was true. Her speculative explanation is that the homicide laws, which were the oldest in Athens, were enacted primarily to replace retaliatory murders (the common response to homicide before written laws) and thus had to produce verdicts that were factually credible to the victim’s relatives. When the popular courts were established more than a century later, the same circumstances no longer prevailed. I would add one other factor to her account, namely that the popular courts were established by the new democratic government led by Cleisthenes, and democratic ideology required that the courts consider justice in their decisions. The eight contributions in this volume cover a wide range of topics. All are interesting and valuable in their own right, but only the Roman law papers really address issues concerning law and fact. University of Texas at Austin Michael Gagarin Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the ANNALES. By Jason Nethercut. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. 260. These are happy times for the study of Latin literature’s first few hundred years: dusty, “archaic” poets are starting to appear fresh and exciting;1 republican genres that once were thought to have died young now seem to have lived into ripe, imperial old age;2 and the contours of Roman literature’s very “beginning” have received renewed and probing attention.3 It might not be an overstatement to say that the history of Latin poetry, ca 240 to 40 b.c.e., is in the process of being rewritten. Enter Jason Nethercut. The first book-length study of the relationship between Lucretius and the Annales in any modern language, Ennius Noster does more than fill a “gap”: this is a bold and important work of scholarship, with provocative things to say about Lucretius, Ennius, and Latin literary history writ large. Though not every reader will buy everything on offer, Ennius Noster is sure to become a major point of reference over the coming decades. Scholars of republican literature will need to have it on their shelves, and I, at least, will be keeping it within arm’s length of my laptop. The book’s central thesis is tidy and easy to summarize: Lucretius systematically alludes to the Annales in order to dismantle the worldview that he attributes to that poem; Ennian ideology thus stands as the unenlightened foil to Lucretius’ vera ratio— Epicureanism. Nethercut argues this credible thesis over a lucid and to-the-point introduction , four chapters, a conclusion, and five valuable appendices. The prose style is punchy and readable, and the text has been carefully copy-edited throughout. It is a real pleasure to encounter scholarship written with so much love and labour. Chapter One, “Ennius and the Tradition of Republican Epic,” sets the stage. Reconsidering the hexametrical poetry written between the Annales and De rerum natura, 1 For Ennius, see J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge 2013); for Livius Andronicus and Naevius, see T. Biggs, Poetics of the First Punic War (Ann Arbor 2020). 2 On republican comedy’s afterlife, see M. Hanses, The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence (Ann Arbor 2020); C. Polt, Catullus and Roman Comedy: Theatricality and Personal Drama in the Late Republic (Cambridge 2021). 3 D. Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (Cambridge, MA 2016). 336 PHOENIX Nethercut here argues that Ennius’ influence on second-century b.c.e. epic was much less pronounced than is currently believed and that, consequently, Lucretius’ appropriation of Ennius in the mid-first century was unexpected. A version of this argument has already appeared in a recent volume on the Annales, which I reviewed in the last issue of Phoenix.4 So, I will be brief: this chapter does well to criticize the stale scholarly narrative that second-century Rome was full of Ennianisti, writing cookie-cutter imitations of the Annales. Yet the new story that it tells—that Ennius’ influence on epic before Lucretius was slight—seems to me little better, predicated, as it is, on significant omissions (e.g., Nethercut...

On Platforms: In Praise of Escapism

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott rejects streaming recommendations aimed at edification and instead embarks on her personal quest to find and understand the distinctive and therapeutic pleasures of cinematic escapism. Noting that escapism has been neglected by film theorists and critics—dismissed as an undignified, unsophisticated form of spectatorship—she suggests that this oversight explains her difficulty in identifying films that grant that particular kind of pleasure. An overview of her past and present cinematic guilty pleasures, from the B-grade horror movie Leprechaun (Mark Jones, 1993) to romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), helps answer the question she poses: If I don't know how to articulate the value of escapism, how can I find it when I need it?

2000년대 로맨틱 코미디영화의 섹슈얼리티와 연애관의 이행기

본고에서는 2000년대 한국 로맨틱 코미디영화 흥행작에서 드러나는 섹슈얼리티의 유형을 중심으로 연애관의 이행기를 고찰하고자 한다.BR 첫째, 로맨틱 코미디영화들은 에피소드적 섹슈얼리티를 통해서 낭만적 사랑과 열정적 사랑의 혼재 그리고 타자의 시선을 보여준다. 광식이 동생 광태(2005)는 낭만적 사랑의 이상주의와 열정적 사랑의 현실주의를 보여주고, 몽정기(2002)는 낭만적 사랑의 비행동주의와 열정적 사랑의 행동주의를 보여주며, 어린 신부(2004), 엽기적인 그녀(2001)는 열정적 사랑의 포기와 낭만적 사랑의 추구를 보여준다.BR 둘째, 로맨틱 코미디영화들은 강박적 섹슈얼리티를 통해서 낭만적 사랑의 위기와 열정적 사랑의 집착을 보여준다. 색즉시공(2002)은 낭만적 사랑의 좌절과 열정적 사랑의 이분법을 보여주고, 색즉시공 시즌2(2007)는 낭만적/열정적 사랑의 변화와 은밀한 이중적 잣대를 보여준다.BR 셋째, 로맨틱 코미디영화들은 조형적 섹슈얼리티를 통해서 낭만적 사랑과 열정적 사랑에서 합류적 사랑으로의 이행을 보여준다. 내 생애 가장 아름다운 일주일(2005)은 낭만적 사랑, 열정적 사랑, 합류적 사랑의 혼재를 보여주며, 작업의 정석(2005)은 낭만적 사랑과 열정적 사랑의 자기 반영성과 합류적 사랑을 보여주며, 싱글즈(2005)는 낭만적 사랑과 열정적 사랑에서 합류적 사랑으로의 이행을 보여준다.BR 본고는 2000년대 로맨틱 코미디영화를 관통하는 핵심 주제어이자 로맨틱 코미디영화의 장르 문법이 발현되는 영화언어인 섹슈얼리티에 대한 연구라는 점에서 그 의의를 찾을 수 있다.

Twelfth Night’s “Fustian Riddle”: A Puzzle with No Solution?

ABSTRACT This essay makes the controversial claim that it has finally solved Twelfth Night's “fustian riddle”, the riddle Maria devises to entrap Malvolio. Paying close attention to First Folio spellings, Elizabethan pronunciation, and uncommon meanings of key words and phrases, it uncovers essential hints and clues that have been obscured by the passage of time but would have been readily accessible to Twelfth Night's original audiences. The most helpful of these, it turns out, are embedded in Fabian's quip – made as Malvolio is trying to discover the correct “alphabetical position” of the letters M.O.A.I. – “And O shall end, I hope”. As Samuel Johnson long ago proposed, this remark alludes to the subject of hanging: the “O” makes a visual pun on the hangman's noose, with “end” of course being a reference to the fate of the person being hanged. In addition to this figurative meaning, Fabian's comment provides literal clues about the correct ordering of the four letters, the most obvious being to move the O to the end. When all of the clues are correctly deciphered and followed, the odd sequence of letters resolves itself into a statement containing a rebus, I-AM-O, signifying “I am hanged”. The essay then proceeds to show how this answer, which augurs the downfall of Malvolio, is thoroughly woven into the play's design. What finally emerges from this reading is a more brilliant, witty, and coherent play than even this most successful of Shakespeare's romantic comedies is now considered to be.

“Distinguishing Form”: Shakespeare, Perspective and the Heartlessness of Comedy

ABSTRACT Any discussion of comedy as a dramatic form is rendered difficult by the fact that the term “comedy” has two quite separate meanings: a work that is intended to make spectators laugh and a work that has a happy ending. In the early modern period, literary theorists were eager to make clear distinctions between the two definitions – in large part, because of the contemporary suspicion regarding the ethics of laughter, which was commonly seen as being related to cruelty. Theorists like Philip Sidney argued that we laugh at those to whom we feel superior, whereas a true comedy should aim to produce the rather different emotion of “delight”. Modern critics are similarly prone to make distinctions between the “elevated” comedy of delight and the “low” comedy of laughter: the one rooted in an audience’s sympathy towards the play’s characters; the other in its amusement at those characters’ follies. However, this essay will offer a different perspective. Through a consideration initially of The Winter’s Tale, but also Shakespeare’s earlier romantic comedies and problem plays, I will argue that the kind of ‘delight’ provoked by the end of much Shakespearean comedy often discourages a sense of true sympathy towards its subjects, and, indeed, may seem to share some of the heartlessness that Sidney saw as inherent in the comedy of laughter.

Feminism reboot: Korean cinema under neoliberalism in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT This paper examines recent feminist movements, which I am grouping together under the term ‘feminism reboot’, in the context of South Korea’s neoliberalization, with a focus on misogyny levelled against women. It first traces the emergence of social media-based feminism in Korea, following the democratization and market liberalization since the late 1980s and subsequent Korean films that used to showcase more diverse types of female characters up until the mid-1990s. But as misogyny intensified after the 1997 economic crisis, film narrative increasingly revolves around male characters, while female characters often disappear. This trope could be seen to register the gendered nature of Korean society that resulted from the rapid acceptance of neoliberal values in the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. This paper compares and contrasts the romantic comedies of the 1990s, such as Marriage Story (Gyeolhon yiyagi, Kim Eui-seok, 1992), Mister Mama (Misteo mamma, Kang Woo-suk, 1992) and the comedy of the 2010s, including Sunny (Sseoni, Kang Hyeog-cheol, 2011) in order to demonstrate how the economic crisis not only re- legitimized the gender hierarchy and has further affected the cinematic representation of gender, taking away female agency in the latter period.

Shades of Shakespeare in the Queering of Hill House

ABSTRACT In her classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson appropriates Shakespearean romantic comedies and tragedies for the purposes of lesbian gothic. Shakespeare’s plays provide signposts for leading (as well as misleading) protagonist Eleanor Vance through the fraught terrain of restrictive gender expectations, patriarchal persecution, and queer desire in Fifties America. The present article develops a queer reading of Eleanor’s relationship with Theodora. This essay pays particular attention to the ways Jackson uses Shakespeare to structure and complicate the erotic subtext of The Haunting of Hill House.