Stock Characters Research Articles

A classification scheme for literary characters

There is no established classification scheme for literary characters in narrative theory short of generic categories like protagonist vs. antagonist or round vs. flat. This is so despite the ubiquity of stock characters that recur across media, cultures, and historical time periods. We present here a proposal of a systematic psychological scheme for classifying characters from the literary and dramatic fields based on a modification of the Thomas-Kilmann (TK) Conflict Mode Instrument used in applied studies of personality. The TK scheme classifies personality along the two orthogonal dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. To examine the validity of a modified version of this scheme, we had 142 participants provide personality ratings for 40 characters using two of the Big Five personality traits as well as assertiveness and cooperativeness from the TK scheme. The results showed that assertiveness and cooperativeness were orthogonal dimensions, thereby supporting the validity of using a modified version of TK’s two-dimensional scheme for classifying characters.

Representations of CEO narcissism in films by Ethan and Joel Coen

Abstract Business executives are stock characters in the film narratives of the Coen brothers. In nearly every Coen brothers film we find a business executive of some type, from small business owners to corporate CEOs. These characters are men of wealth and power, typically corrupt, often criminal, and always antagonistic to the endeavors of the story’s protagonist. Drawing on recent research in business and organizational management science focused on the narcissistic aspects of contemporary corporate leadership, this article explores CEO narcissism and applies it to characters in Coen brothers movies. Blood simple, Raising Arizona, Fargo, The big Lebowski, and The Hudsucker proxy satirize business moguls as “blustering titans,” possessed of an inflated sense of self-importance and superiority, a willingness to manipulate others for personal gain, and a constant demand for self-validation.

Geography and Law in Almayer's Folly

In his preface to Almayer’s Folly, written soon after the novel’s completion Conrad takes issue with Alice Meynell’s recent article on “decivilisation.” “I am content to sympathise with common mortals” he writes, “no matter where they live; in houses or in huts, in streets under a fog or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea” (Conrad, Almayer’s Folly 3). At first reading, Conrad seems to peddle the very same prejudices he critiques in Alice Meynell: Jim-Eng, the Chinese opium wreck; Taminah, the impassive oriental woman inured against pain; Almayer himself, the Indo-European ruined by his own fantasies of fortune and unable ever to return to the European world he reveres. Each are stock characters amongst many more in the novel playing a part little different from those given to them by the popular authors whose works Meynell dismisses. What distinguishes them is the narrative context into which they are put, whose machinations throw into relief the instability of the rule of law and of the “civilizing” mission of colonialism. Conrad’s time in South East Asia was one of particular political and legal transformation for Borneo, the repercussions of which Conrad translates directly into Almayer’s Folly. My argument is that his sympathies with the colonized are expressed less through individual characters but rather through the complexities, frustrations and indeterminacies that arise out of the colonial enterprise. A key concern for Conrad, therefore, is the problem of justice in an international setting. As I argue, long before the publication of “Geography and Some Explorers,” Conrad’s fiction was already illuminating the inconsistencies that emerge in the process of putting (international and transnational) law into practice in the indeterminate spaces of colonial geography.

The Union of Eros and Thanatos

The Union of Eros and Thanatos Stu Watson (bio) I recently attended a staged reading of Lord Byron's verse drama, Manfred (1816-1817). This was, despite my having been interested in the topic for almost twenty years, the first time I had actually seen a Romantic verse drama performed in any form. It was apparent, as Manfred appeared and began his first soliloquy, why this was the case: the play almost completely lacks plot, moves only with the whims of the protagonist, and features weakly-filled-out stock characters aside from said protagonist, whose motivations throughout are left largely mysterious. Byron seems to have realized this about his own play, saying it was "mental theater", i.e. drama not meant for an actual stage, but rather a play to be imagined in the mind. If this is the case, why adopt the dramatic form? Byron had already enjoyed enormous success writing long narrative poems by the time of Manfred's composition; was he merely looking to shake things up, try on a new formal costume for his readers, or is there something else at work? I would contend that verse drama, "mental theater," is the mode of poetical writing Byron and later Romantics turned to in order to address the issue eroticism, and more specifically, that of sexual perversity. In Manfred, it is hinted that the protagonist's motivating sin is an act of incest with a sister, a situation that closely mirrors Byron's own affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, rumors of which drove him into exile from England. Percy Bysshe Shelley's tragedy The Cenci (1819) deals similarly with the taboos of incest and parricide. The dramatic mode is ideal for treating on this subject because of its essentially voyeuristic nature. Even "mental theater" implies a distinction between actor and audience, creating the kind of distance that is characteristic of sexual fantasies. Thus mental theater lends itself naturally to the playing out of fantasies, to the sublimation of socially unacceptable forms of desire into literary art. Freud postulated in an early version of his essay "The Ego and the Id" that in addition to libido, the erotic drive that he understood to be a fundamental aspect of the human psyche, there is a death drive, embodied in his concept of thanatos, that is possessed of a similarly coupled "death energy" that he called destrudo. Though he would later discard this conception of a kind of "death energy" in order to keep his focus more squarely on libido and to avoid what he worried was an unnecessary dualism, the notion in itself is still useful, in that certain artists seem to manifest exactly such an energy in their works; one thinks of the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, the explorations of evil to be found in the Chants de Maldoror (1869) of Lautréamont, or even the skull-riddled paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The notion that this "death energy" might exist additionally presents the possibility that it might be confused with, or compounded into, the erotic drives of libido. For a contemporary of Lord Byron, the verse-drama became the medium for exactly such a conflation. I am alluding to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, sublimely strange poet of eroticized death. His bizarre masterpiece, Death's Jest-Book (1849), is a verse drama seemingly ripped from the Jacobean era yet shot through with an even more superabundant perversity. Like Manfred, it was pragmatically unstageable in the era when it was written due to its content, and it has been seldom staged since, critics deeming it more a collection of interwoven monologues and convoluted plot twists than a proper play. Despite these objections, verses from the work display a curious erotic energy in their hymns to death: "Song from the Waters" The swallow leaves her nest,The soul my weary breast;But therefore let the rain On my graveFall pure; for why complain?Since both will come again O'er the wave. The wind dead leaves and snowDoth hurry to and fro;And, once, a day shall break O'er the wave,When a storm of ghosts shall shakeThe dead, until they wake...

“Straight out of the button-molder’s own ladle”: On the complexity of characters in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night

<p>This paper discusses the complexity of female and Arab characters in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night. Through an analysis of three main characters (Dina, Ellen and the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh) and several minor ones, it shows that the allegation of contemporary reviews, and some works on Arthur Koestler ever since, that the novel is excessively built on stock characters is untenable. In fact, the representation of women and Arabs is both specific and detailed, in addition to the fact that these characters show a clearly detectable line of development, even if their initial presentation might in some cases be reminiscent of Petrarchan or other types.</p>

Wittgenstein's Slapstick

In “Performance Philosophy — Staging a New Field,” Laura Cull approaches performance as a source of philosophical insight and philosophy as a species of performance (Cull 2014, 15). This calls for a radical transformation of philosophy and its practices. What form might this take? Wittgenstein’s later philosophy provides one example. The language games presented in the opening remarks of the Philosophical Investigations (PI, [1953] 2001) are meant to be played out. They involve improvisation based on general scenes, stock characters, and linguistic play. When enacted, they are slapstick. As such, they offer a method of philosophical investigation in which clarity and insight are inherent in the performance itself. Wittgenstein’s language games were directly influenced by the subversive practices of Austrian commedia dell’arte and slapstick (through the works of Johann Nestroy and Karl Kraus). By their very nature, they challenge the pretensions of philosophical explanation and theory. Unlike attempts to compare Wittgenstein’s philosophy to theatre, enacting language games is a form of philosophical performance. Andrew Lugg notes that recent attempts to compare Wittgenstein’s philosophy to theatre problematize the opening remarks of the Investigations. However, enacting language games as a form of philosophical performance makes what is hidden, in all of its simplicity and familiarity, obvious, striking, and engaging.

The nebbish in popular culture or, how the underdog can win

ABSTRACTThis essay uses an exploration of the history of the nebbish, one of Yiddish literature’s most enduring comic stock characters, to discuss how and why this stereotype has evolved, and even been reclaimed, in contemporary popular culture. The nebbish is an interesting case study because it began as a negative, often anti-Semitic stereotype and evolved into an Everyman character with whom the audience can, and even wants to, identify. Furthermore, the contemporary nebbish is complicated by two shifts in the depiction of the character. First, nebbishness has moved from being an explicitly Jewish characteristic to a general attribute that anyone can possess. Second, all the Yiddish stock types started out as male characters, but most of them have been able to encompass women in their contemporary manifestations. The nebbish, however, has remained almost exclusively male. Women who are treated in a nebbish-like way become tragic figures, not comic relief. This essay briefly investigates some examples of potential female nebbishes to interrogate why society has been able to reimagine the nebbish as non-Jewish much more easily than as non-male. The essay concludes by arguing that only by truly embracing the idea of the nebbish as more than a hapless loser can popular culture effectively craft female nebbishes, and only by effectively crafting female nebbishes can the nebbish really be an Everyperson character.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Osip Petrov, Anna Petrova-Vorobyova and the Development of Low-Voiced Character Types in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera

AbstractThis article delves into the lives and careers of two significant Russian singers: the bass Osip Petrov and his wife, the mezzo-soprano Anna Vorobyova, who created or inspired leading roles in operas by Glinka, Dargomïzhsky and Musorgsky. Over the course of a career that spanned some four decades, Petrov would become the most celebrated Russian bass of the nineteenth century; Vorobyova, whose career was cut short by a tragic accident, would turn her attention to the private sphere and incubate a younger generation of musicians. Drawing on reviews, memoirs and personal correspondence, I chart the influence of this couple not only on individual composers and operas, but also on the development of stock characters such as the father, the buffoon, the antihero and the trouser role.

Gender, genre and intertextuality in Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la loi

This article examines the close relationship between gender, film genre and intertextuality in Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s 2010 feature film Hors la loi to argue that the film’s problematic gender politics detract from Bouchareb’s intended construction of an imagined community. Hors la loi is a historical film about Algerians’ struggle for national liberation from the French, focusing particularly on the Algerian community in Paris. Bouchareb’s multiple filmic intertexts include Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Hollywood genres such as gangster/mafia, crime, war and western movies. These film genres all tend to center on male characters, a feature also found in Bouchareb’s film. In Hors la loi, female characters are types and stock characters. The film does not reflect the historical reality of Algerian women’s active participation in the war. Bouchareb’s problematic representation of women’s role in the war is due primarily to the influence of epic Hollywood intertexts, which leave less space for female agency than The Battle of Algiers did. As Bouchareb’s war films have reached large audiences, this blind spot is of concern because women of Maghrebian descent in France are simultaneously centered and silenced in public discourse today, thus increasing the need for developing complex representations of their agency in various cultural productions.

Transforming the pantomime formula in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

In this article the author argues that J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan deconstructs the British pantomime by exploring the tension between stasis and transformation at the heart of the genre. Peter Pan draws on pantomime’s formulaic structures, plots and prescribed verbal formulas, while other Barrie texts from the same period reveal his fascination with the history of pantomime and the stock characters of the harlequinade. Peter Pan (the character) can be read as a version of a stock harlequinade character and, like the pantomime genre, finds himself caught between formula and transformation.

The Mighty Dynamo by Kieran Crowley

Reviewed by: The Mighty Dynamo by Kieran Crowley Amy Atkinson Crowley, Kieran The Mighty Dynamo. Feiwel, 2016 [368p] ISBN 978-1-250-07924-4 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 4-6 A ragtag sports team with pluck and determination defies the odds to eke out an unlikely victory against underhanded competitors in this Irish import that gives this established formula the soccer treatment. Determined to become a pro footballer and earn enough money to bring his dad home from the Australian mines, twelve-year old Noah Murphy desperately wants his team to win the youth World Cup. Unfortunately, billionaire Cornelius Figg is buying his incompetent son’s victory, and he has paid to get star player Noah removed from the school’s roster. When Noah’s genius friend Stevie finds a competition loophole that allows them to play for the local girl’s school, they put together a team, including the local bully, a motormouth, an African-Irish kid—you know the lineup. Interspersed player profiles shed an entertaining light on the various team members (and provide a bit of a soccer education), Noah proves an accessible protagonist long on heart if not brains, and there is some sharp humor as well as interesting soccer scenes. However, excess detail bogs the book down, and stock characters and extraneous verbiage are more likely to bore readers than inspire their imaginations. Indeed, Noah’s team’s greatest obstacle to a satisfying ending is not a fixed match but the book’s frequent forays into tedium. Still, there’s a reason we’ve seen this setup so many times before: it works. Even here, it will provide enjoyable moments and a rewarding conclusion for those diehard young footballers with the stamina to make it through. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Introducing the first topic slot in Plautine dialogues

The Plautine dialogues seem to be structured according to the conventions of naturally occurring conversation. This paper examines the transition devices from the (ritualistic) opening phase to the goal-oriented part, where the reason-for-the-talk is disclosed. Firstly, the difference between the phatic preliminary remarks (small talk) and the actual first topic is briefly discussed. Further on, the analysis of the Plautine corpus reveals various ways of making the transition to the medial phase: from multi-turn sequences to single-turn conversational moves. It is stated that the most complex negotiations over the first topic slot placement are a feature of symmetric interactions among high characters with friendly relations. Accordingly, more direct linguistic devices of introducing the reason-for-the-talk appear typically in slave-master dialogues or in aggressive or farcical exchanges between low characters. Some cases, moreover, show that also the wider context of interaction or the dramaturgical factors (depiction of a stock character, progression of the plot etc.) affects the election of the transition style. Finally, throughout the paper some tentative comments are made as well on the politeness issues strictly related to the selection of the linguistic tokens of introducing the first topic slot.

Family relations of stock characters in Atellan farce – a few remarks on the influence of palliata on Atellana

Family relations of stock characters in Atellan farce – a few remarks on the influence of palliata on Atellana

“Not a Play”: Redefining Theater and Reforming Marriage in Candida

ABSTRACT In his early plays, Shaw repurposed conventional theatrical tropes and privileged discussion over dramatic closure, redefining drama in ways that some of his contemporaries considered antidramatic. These strategies are especially important in Candida (1895), written explicitly in response to Ibsen's Doll's House, which Shaw considered the prototypical New Drama. I argue that in questioning popular assumptions about marriage and gender relations, Candida also reworks theatrical genres and devices commonly associated with these assumptions, in particular the dramatic stock characters of the preacher and the poet, and the related performance genres of religious homiletics and poetry reading. The play suggests that marriage itself is a theatrical performance modeled on these and other theatrical forms; thus, traditional theater is to some degree held responsible for faulty popular assumptions regarding love and marriage, and newer kinds of theater are called on to correct those assumptions.

Women in Roman republican drama

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. Relationships between men and women, ideas of masculinity and femininity, the stock characters of dowered wife and of prostitute--all of these are frequently staged in Roman tragedies and comedies. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists from Shakespeare to Sondheim.

Beauties, Barmaids, and Ballbusters

This essay critically reflects upon a performative autoethnography presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2014; it also constitutes a continuation of a previous performative autoethnography presented at ICQI 2012, “Unseating the Myth of a Girl and Her Horse, Now That's True Grit.” In writing and performing this essay through the method of the textualizing body, as well as critically reflecting upon it here and now post performance, I find the process of embodiment offered through performance pushes me into a different understanding about the complexities concerning the cultural problematics brought about by “beauties, barmaids, and ballbusters” of the (old) West. The performative-I process revealed a simultaneous rejection and recuperation of these stock characters, revealing a futurity of gender possibilities though utopian performatives.

“Slowly Becoming Sales Promotion Men?”: Negotiating the Career of the Sales Representative in Britain, 1920s–1970s

The commercial traveler, or traveling salesman, was an agent of commercialism and modernization as well as a stock character in British popular culture. To C. Wright Mills, salesmen faced particularly challenging demands to conform to managerial direction. This article examines how British salesmen negotiated their occupational identity during the twentieth century. Developments in marketing, corporate growth, and periods of war and recession all challenged salesmen’s status and autonomy. These influences prompted a lengthy and recurring debate about how best to present, defend, and justify their work and identity. New marketing techniques and management systems evolved steadily, rather than producing sudden or uniform changes in the ways in which salesmen worked. Their culture of enterprise and individualism persisted, in part as it was shared by employers and managers. The impact of new marketing methods proved greatest in confectionery, tobacco, and other consumer goods trades as sales of branded, packaged goods expanded. Even then, salesmen contributed to shaping their work and occupational identity, proving unable to establish professional credentials and dividing over whether adopting trade union methods could improve their position.

Autism and gender: from refrigerator mothers to computer geeks

The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the media as well as within the medical, scholarly, and autistic communities. Jordynn Jack suggests the proliferating number of discussions point to autism as a rhetorical phenomenon that engenders attempts to persuade through arguments, appeals to emotions, and representational strategies. In Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks, Jack focuses on the ways gender influences popular discussion and understanding of autism's causes and effects. She identifies gendered theories like the refrigerator theory, for example, which blames emotionally distant mothers for autism, and the extreme male brain theory, which links autism to the modes of systematic thinking found in male computer geeks. Jack's analysis reveals how people employ such highly gendered theories to craft rhetorical narratives around stock characters--fix-it dads, heroic mother warriors rescuing children from autism--that advocate for ends beyond the story itself while also allowing the storyteller to gain authority, understand the disorder, and take part in debates. Autism and Gender reveals the ways we build narratives around controversial topics while offering new insights into the ways rhetorical inquiry can and does contribute to conversations about gender and disability.

The New Woman: Sexology, Literary Modernism, and the Trans Feminine Remainder

This article begins by tracing the figure of gender inversion from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's mid-nineteenth-century celebration of the “woman's soul confined in a man's body” to Edward Carpenter's early twentieth-century disavowal of the effeminate “of the extreme type,” whose gender nonconformity confirms the normativity of the mass of “normal” masculine homosexuals. Carpenter's disavowal voices both an orientalist distaste for the “mincing effeminacy” of British colonial subjects and an affirmation of the “somewhat masculine” women who are pursuing their rights in “civilized nations.” This article argues that this freighted figure of inversion obscures the theories of embodiment found in sexological case studies themselves, which ground the experience of sex in sociality and sensation. The sexological invert provides the foundation for a trans feminine stock character that modernist novels install to represent the cultural redefinition of “woman” and “man” in the early twentieth century. Aldous Huxley's Farcical History of Richard Greenow is an orienting example of this tendency. Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, in contrast, reflects a modernist current grounded in queer and trans street culture. The novel's heroine, the queen Divine, recalls the theories of embodiment outlined in the case study narratives. Ultimately, the “New Woman” demonstrates that sexology provides the narrative template for the twentieth-century medical diagnostic for transsexuality. From the early twentieth century, novels disseminate this abstract and singular definition of transsexuality and also recover the various and complex narratives of sexed embodiment first found in the case studies.