Tragedy Of Love Research Articles

All We Own Is Ourselves

All We Own Is Ourselves Noelle Garcia (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Email print-out, 2009. Courtesy of Noelle Garcia [End Page 405] What We Inherit In 2011 I created an exhibition titled What You Left Me, at the Clark County Cultural Center. I showcased photographs, artifacts, and documents that told the story of my dad. Or rather the exhibit told the story of my research on my father and my understanding of where he fit into the history of the United States of America. I exhibited his private documents, his letters, photos of him posing with his prison baseball team, and family portraits shot in a Nevada prison visiting area. One of the most important artifacts was a printout of an email I received from the Nevada Department of Corrections that described the crime my father committed that landed him in prison. Yet the exhibit’s aim was beyond the life of my father: it was a gesture or an attempt to tell a story of contemporary indigenousness. I wanted people to consider that the mistreatment of American Indians is not something that happened in the distant past. And I wanted to ask, why was I left with this resounding emptiness? When I planned this exhibition, I was uncomfortable. Was it okay to tell my dad’s story? As many love tragedy, I knew What You Left Me would get attention. Yet if he were alive, he would have been mortified. I was airing his, and our family’s, dirty laundry. During his life he never told me why he was in prison. If he didn’t want his daughter to know, I doubt he would want strangers to know. I was also concerned that one of my family members might hear of the show and reprimand me. I thought about my discomfort surrounding this project for a while. Legally, perhaps, I do “own” the rights to my father’s story. I inherited this painful story from him. I was born with a broken heart. Perhaps it was not only my right to tell this story, but it was my responsibility to tell this story in the context of a history that tries to disappear Native Americans. I wanted the viewer to consider why being Native American had anything to do with my father being in prison. I wanted the viewer to see the image of my father as a young boy in an Indian boarding school and ask how that trauma may have affected his future alcoholism and rage. In creating this exhibition, I asserted some power in a narrative where I was previously erased. My work asks audiences to recognize that how the US government treated my father shaped his predisposition to depression, substance abuse, and violence. Yet will audiences make a connection between my father’s histories of violence and, for example, the images of the children in US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) camps? How will the young children forcibly taken away from their families develop into adulthood? Would a stronger collective [End Page 406] recollection of past forms of structural violence perpetrated by the state in any way create a stronger tool kit to intervene in contemporary, and parallel, atrocities? Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Detail from What You Left Me Installation (Prison Visit). Courtesy of Noelle Garcia Who Owns Your Stories? In 2014 I had an artist residency at ACRE Projects in a rural community in Steuben, Wisconsin. Many other artists in residence and staff members loved going tubing down the river. Although I was invited a few times, I said no. I was scared of water babies. Water babies are spirits in Paiute communities that pull people into the water. Why should Paiute folklore scare me? I’m not religious or spiritual. When I was little, the other Paiute kids would tell frightening stories about water babies. I never went water tubing. A few years later one of the white ACRE staff members drowned while tubing. Something in me whispered, “water babies.” I learned about water babies in Nevada. Do they exist also in Wisconsin? I met the ACRE staff member [End...

Диалоги в лирике иранской и русской поэтесс: Парвин Этесами и Анны Ахматовой

В статье исследуется использование диалогических форм в лирике двух поэтесс – Парвин Этесами и Анны Ахматовой. В творчестве персидской поэтессы показывается связь древней традиции и новых идей, воплощенных в ее моназере, диалогические формы которых служат утверждению нравственно-философских идеалов и отрицанию личных страстей перед лицом судьбы. Парвин – поэт высокой проповеди, общественных идеалов и аскетической безупречной нравственности и самоотрешенности. В стихах русской поэтессы воплощается именно отрицаемый Парвин опыт индивидуальных чувств и страстей, взаимодействия двух душ, не слышащих друг друга, и та мудрость, которая никогда не звучит моралистически, но интимно и лично. И диалоги двух душ в ахматовских стихах обостренно выявляют трагизм любви, не дающей гармонии. Сущность диалогов у Парвин – это рождение истины из сопоставления двух позиций, у Ахматовой обмен репликами есть диалог непонимания. В итоге исследование диалога как поэтического приема подчеркивает глубину различий между двумя поэтическими системами, двумя типами творчества и духовного мира поэтесс-современниц, которые, тем не менее, поверх времен и культур перекликаются друг с другом в противостоянии своей трагической эпохе и утверждении своих ценностей.

Keaton's Yoke

Keaton’s Yoke ALEX PRIOU Love, looking at me meltingly under dark-lidded eyes, by all manner of charms throws me into the limitless fishing-net of the Cupridian [Aphrodite]. And I tremble as he approaches, just as an aged, yoke-carrying horse that has carried off victory unwillingly walks into contest with swift chariots. (Ibycus, frag. 287)1 The resurgence of love in his old age prompts a fearful reflection in the aged Ibycus. Love sets a trap he must escape, but cannot for all its infinitude, just as an athlete’s prior victories never sate his love of competition. Ibycus discovers the paradox of his situation, that the satisfaction sought is immeasurably greater than what a finite victory could ever provide. The competition of rival lovers for the beautiful beloved appears to Ibycus to be an immediate contrivance for an ineluctably distant object. Ibycus thus learns that love is human finitude’s attempt to answer the question that it itself raises. And yet, despite his fear, Ibycus’ reflection seems more comic than tragic, for his bestial image of love’s effects subverts all pretense to participation in the divinity of Aphrodite. The thought that the ultimate object of love’s longing is spurious may engender fear, but fear, in giving us an acute sense of our mortal limits, has the potential to take us outside ourselves and so prepare us for laughter. For reasons this tattered remnant of Ibycus’ poem doesn’t give us, the apparent tragedy of love—of the simultaneous necessity of pursuing the beloved and impossibility of complete satisfaction—appears resolved by our very awareness of it.2 Thankfully, Ibycus’ vision of love as both tragic and comic has a striking corollary in the films of Buster Keaton, who arion 26.3 winter 2019 mirrors the tension between yoked racehorse and reflective poet in the determined striving of his protagonists and the reflective depth of his directing. As both actor and director, Keaton is both striving body and disembodied thought, both trapped in finitude and reflecting thereupon. Ibycus and Keaton may bear love’s yoke, but they know the yoke’s on them. Keaton’s films thus promise some glimpse into the possibility of a comic redemption to the tragedy of lover and beloved, so much so that it seems one can connect these tatters of papyrus using celluloid film. Can the finite, particular beloved ever satisfy the lover, who strives to escape the limits of finitude? Or must we resign ourselves to our own transience ? Keaton explores these questions by crafting comedies around characters who so strive. These characters—strikingly similar in their circumstances and ambitions, yet with slight but essential differences in disposition—offer Keaton a way to look for who bears easiest the weight of love’s yoke. I’ve chosen four films—Cops, College, The Playhouse, and The General—that, when ordered thus, bring us gradually from unavoidable tragedy to the unwitting self-redemption that comes when we laugh at ourselves. Discussing each in turn, I hope to offer some glimpse into what Ibycus may have had in mind when he playfully cast man’s most distinctive and serious striving as a yoked horse. CO P S (1922) the burden of love’s yoke is nowhere clearer in Keaton’s films than in Cops, as the film’s ominous epigraph warns: “Love laughs at locksmiths.” Keaton the director elegantly and humorously frames Keaton’s character as among love’s prisoners. The first shot features him behind bars, gripping them from within what appears to be a jail cell, as he and his love interest carry on a discussion with forlorn looks on their faces. Because the camera is on her side of the bars, we are invited to imagine ourselves free from Keaton’s predicament. She bids him farewell, and as she walks away Keaton the 116 keaton’s yoke director cuts to the other side of the bars and at a greater distance from the action. We discover that he isn’t in jail, but standing outside the gates to a great mansion. Keaton’s love interest turns around and speaks again, now stern rather than solemn. An intertitle finally...

The Tragic Love of the Cultural Collision--Take The Muslim’s Funeral as an Example

The Muslim’s Funeral is the first successful book in contemporary Chinese minority literature which shows traditional culture and real life of Hui people. It describes a Muslim family’s sixty-year ups and downs and the two crisscrossed love tragedies occurs in different eras, in different forms This novel, with its real and special view, reveals the Muslim’s spiritual journey under the cultural collision of Huaxia and Islam This paper aims to show the tragic love in The Muslim’s Funeral, and then further analyzes and discusses the exchange and the collision between different culture hidden in love story. A staged scene of life dram in the book not only deduces the fragile life and love in cultural collision, but also reflects the confusion and pain in the process of cultural integration.

Remaking Romeo and Juliet—A Case Study in Yue Opera

Romeo and Juliet is a world-known classic that centers on a love tragedy in the patriarchal society. Similarly, The Butterfly Lovers (梁祝》 ) in Yue opera (越剧) repeats the same tragedy. By comparing Romeo and Juliet with The Butterfly Lovers, the author finds that there are similarities as well as differences between the Western theatre and the Chinese one. Thus, this thesis focuses on the remaking of Romeo and Juliet in the form of Yue opera, applying the methodology of medio-translatology. The remake adopts the western style while adding the Chinese touches, which broadens the research on both the Western and Chinese theatre while promoting cross-cultural communication.

Dupaty et l’Italie des voyageurs sensibles éd. par Jan Herman, et al

Reviews 273 d’une providence”(138),and that his descriptive intentions have moved beyond rational analysis towards a more subjective expression of the universe as a “totalité cohérente” (147).Guyot justifies his examination of Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire,already exhaustively studied by others, by the particular focus of his inquiry; indeed, there is an analogous dimension here to the Itinéraire, which by 1811 was already tracing a path well-worn by European travelers.Chateaubriand expresses boredom with the sights he encounters and recognizes that readers’expectations have begun to surpass a pedestrian, chronological narrative of date and place.Accordingly,his analogies depart from the traditional practice of comparing extraordinary phenomena observed by the traveler in foreign lands to familiar counterparts in the land of the reader: Chateaubriand seeks more personal and meaningful correspondences between the present and the past, whether drawing on his own previous travels or his encyclopedic knowledge of Mediterranean history and legend. The focus becomes the author himself: with the moi at the center of the work, Chateaubriand moves the genre firmly into the domain of literary autobiography . Guyot extends his study with a fascinating look at the use of architectural language to describe mountains and glaciers by visitors to Chamonix. Buttressed by Ricœur’s work on metaphor,Guyot asserts that the rehabilitation of figures of similarity comes about from the recognition of their power to stimulate interest and inspire curiosity in a way that sterile scientific fact cannot. While his broad conclusions may surprise no one, Guyot’s meticulously researched book provides a penetrating look into the works in question and amply documents the early development of romantic travel writing as a genre. Furman University (SC) William G. Allen Herman, Jan, Kris Peeters, et Paul Pelckmans, éd. Dupaty et l’Italie des voyageurs sensibles. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3524-9. Pp. 278. 60 a. Using their earlier work about Enlightenment popes as a model, the editors compiled and published submissions from a themed international conference for this volume. The subject concerns mostly nonfictional-inspired accounts of travels in the Italian peninsula during the latter part of the eighteenth century through the opening decades of the nineteenth. Charles Mercier Dupaty (1746–88) is the inspiration of the eighteen essays, even if his name scarcely or never appears in several. Unlike other travelers of his era, he chose to express his impressions rather than solely relate facts about what he saw and did. It is this sensibilité in his Lettres sur l’Italie, published the year of his death, which permeated pre- and post-Revolution writings about the peninsular Grand Tour. The first four pieces deal uniquely with le Président Dupaty. As a magistrate at the Bordeaux parlement, he sought out Italian examples of judicial and legal reform that might motivate institutional change in France. Visits included the usual museums and archeological sites as well as hospitals, jails, and prisons. He was not insensitive to the misery he witnessed and was impressed by reforms enacted by the good prince of Tuscany.Another two contributions discuss specific places. One concerns a practical guidebook of Rome, the Itinerario italiano (1801), and the other examines the attraction of “les âmes sensibles” (97) to Tivoli, a site that evoked nostalgia for antiquity for Dupaty and others. Three essays refer to Italy’s presence in the works of specific Romantic authors.In Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and Madame de Krüdener’s Valérie (1803–04), the culture and climate of the peninsula function as backdrops for the tragedies of love and death. Like Dupaty, Chateaubriand used the letter, not the novel, to convey his impressions. Simple notes juxtaposed with personal reactions comprised his Voyage en Italie, an epistolary memoir of his journey in 1803– 04. The remaining nine essays treat a variety of travel accounts composed primarily by persons not readily recognized. Four stand out for their content and articulate style. By order of Napoleon in 1799, the sculptor Philippe-Laurent Roland went to Italy on an art-scouting/stealing mission. His journal relates both professional and personal details. A comparison between Dupaty’s earlier and Auguste Creuzé de Lesser’s later...

Romeo i Julija - drama ljubavi i smrti

In the play Romeo and Juliet, which has become the synonym for the love tragedy, death is represented as the ultimate, all-consuming, and almost nihilistic power that cannot be conquered even by the most pure and passionate love. But, its devastating effect is reduced by the strong, transcendent, and the idealistic vision of love of the two young creatures who became immortal as the materialistic golden monuments, due to the power of the eternal art and the word of Shakespeare. Presenting it in the traditional frame of the Dance of Death and memento mori iconography, Shakespeare is showing us the different aspects of the Renaissance thought of death. The older generation sees it as the natural progression of life that cannot and must not stop everyday activities, but the younger hopes to find in death the salvation and escape from the insupportable and pragmatic world. Although there are religiously guided thoughts about life after death in the play, secular statements about death as a flight from the unbearable reality and the cure for the impossible love are more present. Even suicide is not conventionally represented as the sinful and devilish enterprise that must be condemned, but as the sacrifice and radical attempt to protect and preserve love. Shakespeare makes his lovers the owners of death, despite the rigid patriarchal effort to control both life and its opposite force. Love of Romeo and Juliet thus becomes victorious in death.

The Yearning Feed by Manuel Paul Lpez

Kei Miller Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies Peepal Tree Press In this essay collection, Jamaican author Kei Miller proves that no discovery comes without a story. He writes about the religion that surrounded him in his youth and how he came to terms with losing that religion. Additionally, Miller discusses migration, family, friendship, and nation, all with a humorous twist Maitreyabandhu The Crumb Road Bloodaxe Books Inspired in part by Maitreyabandhu’s Buddhism, this poetry collection recounts the beautiful agony of childhood, the tragedy of first love, and the mystery of memory in a structured journey into adulthood and understanding. “I want to imagine you / into this room // this morning. / I want to see you / listen to the sound / (can you hear it?) // of snow thawing, / falling, sliding / down the roof tiles. . . .” Nota Bene The anthology is divided into a quintet of enigmatically titled sections : “Zoetrope,” “The Pilot’s Almanac ,” “Gravity Leaps to the Eye,” “The Existence Certificate,” and “The Institute of Silence”—each section, like a variation, containing movements that shift subtly in pitch and register. Hoskote expands his formal space in this new book. I particularly like his explorations of the prosepoem form and poems that highlight the powerful sense of understated minimalism. “Incision,” dedicated to Lucio Fontana, is tightly wrought: “Cut quickly. There’s sky behind the flesh. / Prise up the fold. The atlas of the body is never complete.” Hoskote acts as a sutradhar in his poems, a storyteller weaving in characters and landscapes as varied as Ovid, Ghalib, Bihzad, Magritte, Fujihata , Kaleka, Claudel, Brocan, Lannoy , Turner, Srinagar, Goa, Indore, Bombay, Berlin, Dortmund, Utrecht, Kabul, and many others. There are beautifully touching verses to his beloved wife, Nancy: “Nazm” and “In the Margin of an Autumn Folio.” These two pieces are overtly for her, and there are others that feature her in an askanceveiled manner. These poems provide a strong emotional and lyrical underpinning to his otherwise largely educated and sophisticated tonality. Here are the first and last nazms from the eponymous poem quartet: “Our lives are voices in two heads. / The rest is background music.” “We lie embroidered on the mimosa. / I need no gauge of motives to tell me / why it has rained.” Unsurprisingly, Hoskote’s engagement with the fine arts is supremely evidentinmanyofhispoems.Thereare direct and indirect allusions to poets, painters, and paintings washed with vital parenthetical details and hues contained in its palette. So you will find eulogies to Dom Moraes (“Conspiracies ”), Adil Jussawalla (“Chimera”), and Charles Simic (“The Reading”); references to Bhupen Khakhar (“Painter Talking to Flowers”), Atul Dodiya (“The Guide Recalls the Mountains”), J. M. W. Turner (“The Landscapist’s Advice to His Apprentice”), and many more. Central Time contains powerfully built poems that are at the same time clever, vulnerable, lyrical, stoical, intelligent, wise, and moving. Savor the irony in the opening gambit of the prose poem “For Example”: “The saint maintains his piety through the graphic imagination of other people’s vices. We thank him for it.” Ultimately, Hoskote is wholeheartedly a Mumbaiah, a Bombay poet deeply rooted in its ethos. The poem “Tidemark” bears all the watermarks of this: “Water draws a line around the things we loved. / I pluck dead birds from the wash and burn their feathers . // This is where I belong, in tidal water / drawn up over my feet like a shell blanket. // I hate this city on the sea, but I will die here.” Sudeep Sen New Delhi, India Manuel Paul López. The Yearning Feed. Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. isbn 9780268033897 It is said that poets are the most sensitive human beings, which may explain the looming cloud of suffering and chaos in The Yearning Feed. It is enthralling and frightening to live in this book of poems: wisdom is so often derived from experience, and Manuel Paul López ladles out wisdom as if from a bottomless well. Even the cover art entrances and transports one to López’s unpredictable borderland, a close-up of a sheep with September–October 2014 • 87 reviews wiry white- and-brown wool and endless black eyes. Like Imperial Valley— the borderland where López’s poems originate...

Othello’s Sister: Racial Hermaphroditism and Appropriation in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Like any writer worth her salt, Virginia Woolf had a gift for first sentences. Her most fanciful novel, Orlando (1927), begins: He--for there be no doubt of his sex, though fashion of time did something to disguise it-was in act of slicing at head of a Moor which swung from (13). As an opening, this is on par with that of her most famous work, A Room of One's Own (1929), for its sly wit and rhetorical innovation: But, you may say, we asked you to speak about and fiction--what has that got to do with a room of one's own?(3). In each case, Woolf breaks with conventions of English composition to very different--although theoretically linked--effect, crafting on one hand an overtly self-deprecating, yet covertly sarcastic feminine persona, and, on other, a bombastic and ultimately specious male biographer-narrator. He, Woolf writes, then adds a dash--putting term under erasure syntactically, if not in strictly Sausserian sense. It is a bold move--as is her beginning her book-length essay on women and fiction with a con] unction. first sentence, though, does much more than catch our attention. The gendered pronoun immediately undercut by typographic violence of dash both introduces hero/ine and ironically foreshadows his magical transformation into a woman not quite halfway through novel's three-and-a-half century romp. In other words, Woolf's dash enacts on her protagonist's gender very sort of violence she describes (as I'm similarly doing when 1 call him a hero/ine). But genius of sentence does not stop there. For crystallized in these thirty-eight words we not only find Woolf's critique of gender norms and imperialism, but also her indictment of relationship between them. There could be no doubt--the narrator confidently declares-of biological gender because ... well, look at what he's doing, he's playing with something the color of an old football, and everyone knows only boys play with footballs. That football was once a man's head is not, in biographer's deadpan description of this puerile mock-violence, any more remarkable than the fashion of time--because Orlando's fathers ... had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders ..., as we quickly learn, and [s]o too would Orlando, he vowed (13). As I am not first critic to point out, pointless brutality with unfeeling skull parodies brutality that placed it there in rafters of his ancestral manor--and that brutality is deeply gendered, and deeply British (see, for instance, Phillips 186 and Hovey 398). For a novel Woolf herself dismissed in her diaries as a joke, as frivolous, and as mere childs Isicl play, this opening reference to racist violence is disturbing (Diary 177, 264). Sally Potter's filmic interpretation omits it entirely, choosing instead to begin with composing poetry. I myself did not know at first what to do with it--or indeed with any of other seemingly offhand references to people of color in Woolf's oeuvre. Is decapitated Moor in Orlando yet another instance of Anglophone obsession for which 1 coined term Othellophilia?' Indeed, Shakespeare's tragedy of interracial love and murder seems to be everywhere and nowhere in novel. The hero's name alludes to As You Like It (one of Shakespeare's most gender-bending comedies) as well as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (from whence Woolf derived her hero's love-madness), but it also closely resembles another seven-letter name beginning and ending in round vowel: Othello. If resemblance is accidental, Woolf's shorthand for novel in her letters-O--o--hints further at an unconscious association (Vol. 4 23, 27). Only after viewing a performance of play does Orlando determine to elope with his Russian princess, and that plan's failure sets up ensuing events of novel as a kind of anti-Othello. …

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.

Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study (review)

Reviewed by: Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study Leonard Engel Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study. By John L. Simons and Robert Merrill. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 232 pages, $40.00. Do we need another book on Sam Peckinpah? A resounding "Yes" if it is as original and provocative as Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns is. None of the previous books on Peckinpah has focused so intensely on tragic action, specifically, on "the tragically irreversible nature of time" in his films (1). Concentrating on five Westerns and acknowledging how each is different from the others, John Simons and Robert Merrill define their chief task as honoring and explaining "these differences even as we pursued the features which make our five tragic Westerns tragic" (1). This is a novel approach. Excellent studies of Peckinpah's Westerns have been made by Jim Kitses, Michael Bliss, David Weddle, and Paul Seydor, among others, but none has so closely followed the major characters' pathways to "disastrous ... tragic conclusions" (2). Peckinpah, the authors conclude, "is the only tragedian among the major Western directors" (2); none of them possessed his tragic vision. These are bold statements and, no doubt, will be vigorously debated, but Simons and Merrill provide solid arguments and cogent examples to support their views. While exploring Peckinpah's tragic vision in chapter 1, the authors render an extensive survey in which they discuss the nature of tragic action, from its classical origins to the present, and apply it to well-known and little-known Westerns (this may be the best chapter ever written on the subject). Then in the remaining five chapters they discuss each of Peckinpah's tragic Westerns: Chapter 2—"The Double Vision of Tragedy in Ride the High Country," 3—"Noon Wine: A Tragic Pastoral," 4—"The Tragedy of Love in The Wild Bunch," 5—"Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Tragedy of Pat Garrett," and 6—"Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: The Revenger's Tragedy." Time and space do not permit comment on each of these chapters, but a brief word about chapter 5 is necessary. In addition to providing a thorough analysis of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, including extensive comment on the various versions that have appeared since the theatrical release in 1973, Simons and Merrill critique the key elements of the other major Billy the Kid films (especially The Left-Handed Gun, director Arthur Penn, 1958) and show not only how these films influenced Peckinpah, but how he subtly nuanced scenes and dialogue to achieve his own artistic designs. This chapter is an amazing tour de force in film criticism. As Peckinpah's admirers know, most of his films have engendered controversy, some of it volatile (recall Pauline Kael's famous statement in a New Yorker review about fascism in Straw Dogs [1971]: "the first American film that is a fascist work of art" [vol. 47, no. 50, January 29, 1972, p. 84]), but the three films examined in the latter three chapters, Wild Bunch [End Page 224] (1969), Pat Garrett, and Bring Me the Head (1974), have also been at the storm center of heated debate on numerous occasions. In their penetrating analysis and meticulous research, Simons and Merrill integrate their own incisive exploration with the major issues raised by critics, and they also provide a valuable guide to the filming and postproduction of the films. Anyone wishing to learn about the various versions of each film, the cuts made, the material restored, followed by more cuts, and then more restorations (and, of course, the interminable battles Peckinpah had with the Hollywood money men) need go no farther. It's all here: in the discussion and in the many footnotes—a masterly piece of research, rendered in highly readable prose. Paul Seydor is probably the foremost scholar of Peckinpah, the one who has written most extensively, persuasively, and passionately about his Westerns. In their examination of the nature of tragic action and the tragic hero, Simons and Merrill have gone beyond Seydor; their analyses have opened up these five films and have provided new, in some cases stunning, insights. They have helped us see and understand how Peckinpah "transformed" the...

Characteristics of Korean Love Tragedies by Studying Geumoh-sinhwa -based on the differences between the Oriental and the Western reasons-

Characteristics of Korean Love Tragedies by Studying Geumoh-sinhwa -based on the differences between the Oriental and the Western reasons-

Dramatizing Home and Memory: Lady Mary Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth

ABSTRACTThe article discusses two plays by noblewomen: Lady Mary Sidney Herbert's translation The Tragedy of Antony (1998[1591]) and Lady Mary Wroth's pastoral tragicomedy Love's Victory (1614–16), to explore how drama, as a genre, provides unique opportunities for remaking home as a woman's space. Irigaray's vision of woman's self-dispossession within the home and Elizabeth Grosz's injunction to recover a female-centered chora, provide a framework to read the texts. Drawing on the classical idea of a memory-theater, the article analyzes how the scripts creatively manipulate relationships between domestic venues and settings in order to reshape memories and promote alternative constructions of woman's place.

Love or Politics: The Man or the King? <i>Edward II</i> in Modern Performance

Directors, Actors, Audiences: Dynamism of Instability Love or politics; the man or the king: these are the polarities of choice for a director of Edward II. individual tragedy of love, with politics only the politics of sex, is the emphasis of the most widely-known modern production, Derek Jarman's film adaptation? range of focuses with which the play can be staged admits of no simple summary. Within its chronicle narrative there is a dramatized debate, complex but readily recognizable for the first audience, about the responsibilities are the obverse of the king's rights--responsibilities to the Church, to the nobility, and to the commonwealth. How far political drama is brought to the fore, how it interacts with the love story of Edward and Gaveston, and how love story itself is seen--with its mixture of on one side idyllic ideal and ruinous obsession, and on the other exploitative manipulation and real devotion--is open to a variety of presentations. Until the king's defeat any audience is likely to be alternately drawn to and repelled by each of the main characters--Edward, Gaveston, Isabella, Mortimer. This unstable network of interacting attractions and repulsions is complicated by a political conflict of complex and varying rights and wrongs which similarly stabilizes only late in the action, as legitimate power passes to Edward III, and Mortimer hardens into a pure overweening Machiavel. Instabilities of judgment in relation to character and political arguments are further complicated by the play's aesthetic variety--its mixture of chronicle-type realism with (moral) emblems or tableaux; and its partly loose structure is complemented by patterned echoes and symmetries. While all these elements give directors, actors, and audiences a good deal of freedom of interpretation and response, response is also steered by guidance written into the text about expressive action, costuming, and setting. first audiences and modern audiences equally are likely to feel Marlowe invites a range of responses to and judgments about Edward. However sympathetic the presentation, his feelings are bound to appear from the start in some measure egotistical and self-absorbed. He is cruel and violent towards Isabella; his accusations about her relations with Mortimer are, at best, no more than partially justified. He is careless of the common good in his attitudes to taxation (the use of the broad seal [2.2.146-7]) and to invasion (by the French [2.2.9-10; 3.1.66-8], elaborated in relation to the Irish, Scots, and Danes [2.2.160-66]: all in the context of his overriding pre-occupation with Gaveston). (2) Edward's failure at Bannockburn--the great national disgrace of his reign--is presented all too credibly as characteristic (2.2.178-94). His feelings leave him open to manipulation by the unscrupulous (as appears to be in his opening soliloquy; as Spencer and Baldock appear to be in their first exchanges). He sees only his rights in a complex context of rights are recognized as not absolute, but as entailing responsibilities. Limitation of the Church's power proper in Elizabethan terms (Edward's thoroughly Tudor denunciation ofProud Rome [1.4.96-103]) does not sanction unprovoked attacks on churchmen (the Bishop of Coventry [1.1.185-205]). While much draws an audience's sympathies from Edward, his homosexuality is largely treated neutrally. To Coventry, his favorite is that wicked Gaveston (1.1.175) (which must surely mean sexually corrupt), and the barons express some contempt for him as Edward's minion; but, though this can be made to appear homophobic--as it emphatically is in Derek Jarman's film--it is entangled with, and can largely be absorbed into, the barons' class antagonisms. Broadly, the play takes the view of Mortimer Senior: The mightiest kings have had their minions (1.4.390). Edward's love for is a matter of indifference so long as it does not impinge on affairs of state. …

Aural and Written Reception in Sir John Paston, Malory, and Caxton

In an essay entitled "The Pastons and Chaucer," which appears in The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf paints a portrait of the fifteenth-century gentleman, Sir John Paston: For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it that he drew from books? A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window-pane.... But Lydgate's poems or Chaucer's, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from London or piecing out from his mother's gossip some country tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it, or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the end of the story.1 The historical Sir John Paston no doubt attracted Virginia Woolf's attention because he was a great reader, lender, borrower, and collector of books. The largest family letter collection to survive from the Middle Ages, that of the Paston circle, is full [End Page 123] of references to Sir John's reading: an inventory of items stolen in an attack on Hellesdon manor lists as "taken out of" Sir John's chamber "a boke of Freynsh."2 Sir John asks his brother to send him his copy of Lydgate's "Temple off Glasse" and sends servants to collect books which he had loaned out.3 Elsewhere he asks his mother and brother for a loan so that he can have his confiscated books returned to him.4 Anxious for books but always short of cash, Sir John left his scribe, William Ebesham, begging for payment for his copying out of Paston's "book of knighthood" or "great book"—that is, a chivalric encyclopedia.5 Sir John asks his mother to send him two (unspecified) French books copied by the same scribe.6 A friend jokes with him—for Sir John was something of a lady's man—that he doesn't need to borrow his copy of Ovid's De Arte Amandi, but rather the De Remedio.7 Sir John's own inventory of his "English books" reflects a taste for the ancients, Tully in particular; for the English poets Lydgate and Chaucer, the latter of whom is represented by copies of a "Troilus," "The Legende of Ladies" and "The Parliament of Birds" (though not, as Woolf mistakenly assumed, the Canterbury Tales); for didactic moral treatises including Christine de Pizan's Othea and "in print of the Pleye of Chesse," that is, the incunable of Caxton's Game and Play of Chess; and for various Arthurian texts, including a "green Knight," a "Perceval," and a "Dethe off Arthur."8 This eldest son—known to scholars as John II since his father and brother, John III, bear the same first name—proved a disappointment to his parents (John I and Margaret), but Virginia Woolf thought that she found in him a kindred spirit. Taking a break from writing Mrs. Dalloway by reading the Paston letters, Woolf imagines in Sir John a reader who escapes from and celebrates the minutiae of life with "some string of words" that would "fix" the "present moment." Woolf praises Sir John, one of her "common readers," as occupying the boundary between...

Romantic Love in Norwegian Children’s Literature: Tormod Haugen’s The Georg and Gloria Trilogy

Representations of romantic love in Norwegian and Swedish texts for children are considered focusing on the humorous, ironic and parodic strategies used by the Norwegian author Tormod Haugen in a trilogy of novels, which traces the intersubjective relations of the protagonists, Georg and Gloria. Haugen's trilogy incorporates a sequence of three stages, the heroic project, the pastoral idyll, and the love tragedy, which is informed both by conventions and genre expectations in regard to love stories.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (review)

Reviews493 how the enterprise in Lille and similar theatrical experiments failed. Of special interest is the book's extensive bibliography. The "selected" list, which is primarily in German, includes books, articles, dissertations, and unpublished manuscripts dealing with topics ranging from legitimate theater to puppet shows. The entries connecting art, media, and race are invaluable; and the bibliography points to another subject barely addressed in Theatre under the Nazis: cinema. This brief overview must conclude with a return to the book's first page and London's remarks about Mephisto—the 1936 roman à clefwritten in exile by Thomas Mann's son Klaus, who points a sharp pin at his onetime brotherin -law, the actor-director and Nazi collaborator Gustaf Gründgens. Klaus Mann's finely tuned novel was officially banned in Germany until 1980; the famous film version appeared one year later. The case, as London observes, demonstrates "that it was not easy to criticize those who had been directly involved in the theatre of the Third Reich." Robert Hinkel Western Michigan University Russell Jackson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 342. $60.00 casebound; $19.95 paperbound. The study of Shakespeare on film may seem an overnight success, but, like many such phenomena, its sudden success took decades. In the 1970s, the BBC created video productions of the canon, while Bernice Kliman and Ken Rothwell established The Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, following books on the topic of Shakespearean films from Jack Jorgens, Robert Hamilton Ball, and Roger Manvell. Throughout the 1980s, these reference tools were expanded. Increasingly VCRs and video disk players were available, which meant academic critics had access to a wider range offilm productions. A string oflively film versions appeared, building on the success of Kurosawa's Ran (1985), Branagh's Henry V (1989), and Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990). A generation of academics trained in both Shakespeare studies and film analysis began to look critically at Shakespearean movies. Moreover, a new interest in appropriation and intertextuality led a number of critics to consider the way Shakespeare's 494Comparative Drama works made their way onto the screen. Today, courses and books about Shakespeare on film seem to be everywhere, although one sometimes wonders about their merits. Douglas Brode's book about Shakespeare on film (Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Today [2000] ) has been widely and correctly criticized for its carelessness, while manywho offer"Shakespeare on Film" courses seem never to have seen a movie by Kozintsev,Welles, or Kurosawa. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film should provide much help, both by providing a firm basis for undergraduate and graduate courses, and by setting a standard ofexcellence against which one may judge newer books. Following an introductory essay by Russell Jackson in which he reminds the reader that film production is always about making—or losing—money, the book has three parts. The first, entitled "Adaptation and Its Contexts," includes four essays, pragmatic in tone. One by Jackson offers an overview of the history ofShakespeare on film, another by Michèle Willems concerns videotaped versions and the special problems which they pose. Two more examine specific plays, one by Barbara Freedman describing Richard III as an index to key moments offilm history and another by Harry Keyishian presenting Hamlet as a study example for questions about movie genres. A second part examines Shakespearean "Genres and Plays." Michael Hattaway considers the comedies. H. R. Coursen returns to the special case of Richard III. J. Lawrence Guntner considers Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear. Finally, Patricia Tatspaugh discusses the "tragedies of love": Romeo and fuliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. In part 3, the volume attends to auteurs, and the readerlearns about directors.AnthonyDavies, Pamela Mason, Mark Sokolyansky, Deborah Cartmell, and Samuel Crowl write respectively about Olivier, Welles, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Branagh. In the final section, a series ofessays address "Critical Issues." Carol Chillington Rutter examines the women characters on film, and Neil Taylor examines national and racial stereotypes. Disrupting the conventional academic triad ofgender, race, and class, this volume instead offers a third essay by Neil Forsyth on the "supernatural." Finally, Tony Howard writes about Shakespearean "offshoots," films that...

Jacques Lacan: psychoanalysis and the subject of literature

General Editor's Preface Lacan from Z to L: Or Against Interpretation Lacan from A to L: Basic Lacanian Issues and Concepts From Letters to Literature, and Gide Poe and the Theory of the Letter Hamlet and the Desire of the Mother Antigone Between the Beautiful and the Sublime Sade: Subverting the Law and the Jouissance of the Other Ravishing Duras, or the Gift of Love Tragedies and Comedies of Love: Plato, Claudel, Genet Joyce's Jouissance, or a New Literary Symptom Conclusion Annotated Critical Bibliography Index

Penthesilea: a tragic drama

An army of Amazons sets out to conquer Greek heroes for purpose of stocking their women's state with new female offspring. They blast into midst of Trojan War, confusing Greeks and Trojans alike and for a moment forcing those enemies into a terrified alliance. When Achilles, pride and mainstay of Greeks, and Penthesilea (Pen-te-sil-lay-uh), queen of Amazons, meet, a chase begins, The like of which not even wildest storms Set loose to thunder across plain of heaven Have yet presented to astonished world, and it is queen who is hunting Achilles, to uncomprehending horror of Greeks. Thus begins a tragedy of love in a world governed by rules of war, on which the gods look down but from afar. For first time, in this splendidly illustrated book, an English translation recreates audaity, romance, and poetry of one of strangest and most beautiful works of Western literature.

Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime

Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime Monika Fludernik (bio) In a recent article entitled “The Iconographies of Sati,” 1 Paul B. Courtright proposed three schemata of interpretation of that most disturbing Indian practice of a wife’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre: 2 (a) the religious iconography of the sati whose blessings ensure fertility for her devotees; (b) the colonial scenario of the bigoted yet heroic widow forced on the pyre by the superstitious doctrines and demonic machinations of the Brahmin priests; and (c) the present-day feminist iconography of the practice of suttee in which the deification of satis serves as a screen for the material greed of both priests and the women’s families. 3 Another essay in the same volume, Dorothy M. Figueira’s “Die flambierte Frau,” complements Courtright’s three schemata by an additional European scenario which flourished in German and French poetry, prose, and opera during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 4 Unlike the use of suttee as a motif in British literature, where it is extremely rare before the late nineteenth century, these noncolonial European deployments of suttee are clearly exoticist and document Western clichés, fantasies, and obsessions rather than providing factual information about the Indian custom itself. 5 Indeed, the suttee love tragedy has been tailored to fit traditional Western conceptions of heroic death and saintly womanhood, symbolizing the sublimation of erotic impulse. The German and French scenario deploys, for instance, the cliché of the prostitute whose repentance and martyr-like love-sacrifice convert her into a saint (a motif that, in the figure of the fallen woman, will haunt much Victorian prose) and glorifies satis’ death as Liebestod. Thus, the German and French treatments of suttee, particularly in the melodramatic operatic versions that Figueira discusses, can be traced back to the quasi-religious portrayal of (sublimated) love, a tradition that extends from the chivalric medieval formula to Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. 6 In this article, which is written from a nonspecialist position, I want to consider early nineteenth-century British depictions of suttee as determined by English literary traditions which have, as I will argue, decisively [End Page 411] influenced the “colonial iconography” (Courtright’s term) of self-immolation. I will compare the discourse about suttee with two prominent literary traditions: the representation of martyrdom, and the aesthetics of the sublime. Accounts of suttee, first, relate to the Elizabethan tradition of hagiography, much of which is filled with detailed accounts of Catholics and Protestants bravely meeting their death at the stake. There are obvious parallels between the Liebestod motif and the heroics of martyrdom; however, the aspect that will concern me most is that of the representational choices and of the selectivity brought to bear upon the hagiographic material by the standard British literature on the subject. My second line of approach, which likewise concentrates on representational issues, involves the aesthetics of the sublime. I will argue that the bulk of British representations of suttee can be classified as an exoticist watered-down version of the generic features prominent in the eighteenth-century literary traditions of the Burkean sublime with some affinities to the sentimental novel. As has been noted by Rajan and Sabin, 7 the figure of the British officer in accounts of suttee recalls that of a would-be knight of honor come to rescue the virtuous maiden in distress. In the reality of the historical documents, on the contrary, one encounters no British heroes; British witnesses mostly engage in merely halfhearted and futile verbal interventions. More frequently the British spectator does not even attempt interference. The British witness therefore resembles less the chivalrous knight of honor than the sentimental hero whose ineffectual emotional involvement in the misery with which he is confronted renders him a laughingstock and, from a latter-day perspective, makes him subject to moral reproach and condemnation. 8 Even more centrally, witness accounts deploy the Burkean analysis of the sublime, which makes a stunning reappearance in representations of suttee, particularly in the prevalent evocation of the “horrors” of the scene. Moreover, the emotional reaction of the British bystander can be argued to reflect...