Young Lovers Research Articles

Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton

Reviewed by: Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Clayton, Dhonielle Blackout; by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon. Quill Tree/Harper-Collins, 2021 [256 p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780063088092 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780063088115 $14.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 7-10 When the lights of New York City go out, the romantic lives of a dozen teens take a few surprising turns in this delightful collection of interconnected stories of young love and city life by a powerhouse set of Black YA authors. With most of the transit system down, exes Kareem and Tammi have to make their way back home together after competing for the same internship; stuck on the subway, basketball player JJ spots his crush and contemplates making a move and coming out as bi; Nella is grateful for Joss' help in keeping the elderly residents of Althea House entertained in the blackout—and her assistance in getting Nella over a humiliating breakup. Lana might finally tell her childhood friend she loves him as they sneak through the closed stacks of the New York Public Library; on a school visit from Mississippi, Kayla's got to figure out her boyfriend problems and herself; and Grace is going to tell her ex-boyfriend off, just as soon as her very cute Ryde driver can get through traffic. The teens bump up against one another in different stories, and NYC landmarks and neighborhood quirks are seamlessly interwoven, making this an ode to the hustle and bustle of city life and the endless possibilities of human connection it offers. Readers see characters put front and center in one story only [End Page 420] to become background in another, an effect that feels much like people-watching on a busy street, catching glimpses of peoples' stories, and yet the authors manage to convey enough backstory to give the teens depth and richness. There's plenty to smile, sigh, or swoon at here, and readers will happily keep the lights on to see these charming romances to the end. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Жанровое разнообразие и особенности композиционного построения узбекских короткометражных фильмов

Основной целью работы было изучение короткометражных фильмов. Несмотря на то, что это направление кино становиться все более популярным, до сих не хватает исследовательских работ, касающихся этой области. Раньше короткие метры, рассматривались лишь с точки зрения композиционного построения и жанра. Методы, как часть статьи, включают в себя мысли о композиционном формировании короткометражных фильмов. В этой работе приводятся теоретические взгляды греческого энциклопедиста Аристотеля о структуре произведения и о том, что рассматривается современными специалистами. Также в статье анализируются короткометражные фильмы молодых режиссеров с точки зрения жанра и композиционного построения. Анализируются такие узбекские короткометражки, как «Мама» (режиссёры Абдуазим Ильхомджонов и Ботир Абдурахмонов, 2017 г.), «Жертвы свободы» (режиссёры Санджар Султонов и Хасан Алиджанов, 2015 г.) и «Белое облако» (режиссёр Хабибулло Лутфуллаев, 2015 г.). В данной работе каждая вышеперечисленная короткометражка подвергается подробному анализу. Обобщённо короткометражку «Мама» можно отнести к жанру драма, которая характеризуюется демонстрацией реально существующих конфликтов и их правдоподобным разрешением. Короткометражка «Жертва свободы» относится к жанру исторической трагедии. Фильм рассказывает о трагических событиях, постигших местную интеллигенцию, стремящуюся пробудить ум людей. Речь идет о человеке, который нашел силы, чтобы бороться за независимость узбекского народа, и подвергался жестоким мучениям во времена репрессий. Короткометражка «Белое облако» посвящена молодой любви и решена в жанре мелодрамы. Дискуссия показала, что короткометражки последних лет, снимавшиеся в разных жанрах, в большинство отталкиваются от жанры драмы. Автор статьи приходит к выводу, что молодые кинематографисты предпочитают именно этот жанр. Ключевые слова: короткометражный фильм, композиция, кульминация, режиссёр, жанр, драма, мелодрама, трагедия.

The obvious — the incredible. Moebius tape

The attraction to mathematics and mathematical abilities are manifested at a fairly early age.But these abilities must be developed systematically and skillfully. The path to mathematical sciencelies not through memorizing mathematical rules, but through conscious comprehension of mathemat-ical facts.If you ask any mathematician why he loves this science, he will most likely answer: “Because itis beautiful.” A little imagination and skills – and you can turn an ordinary tape into fascinatingworks of art, incredible inventions, even try to make unusual trips on it.The purpose of the article is to interest young lovers of mathematics. The article is based on aspeech to students of the Junior Academy of Sciences of Kyiv region.

Progression and Return in Västanå Theatre’s Retelling of the Edda (2019)

In 2019, Västanå Theatre staged Jon Fosse’s Edda, a theatrical adaptation of myths from the Poetic Edda. This essay focuses on a number of formal devices used to adapt the Norse myths at Västanå, the dumb show convention perhaps offering the most stylized form of expression of these. The essay shows how the production helped the audience negotiate between a linear and a circular understanding of time, through formal and structural means: staging, selection and ordering of episodes signalled a strong initial focus on the inevitability of Ragnarök, while circularity and return were highlighted through the ending in which the world was reborn, but also through other features that stressed repetition and retelling. The essay argues that the dumb show convention could be taken as emblematic of the production’s negotiation between the two timelines, but it also shows how the device helped adapt female characters into more powerful agents, how it added hope in the form of young love, and how it functioned to draw attention to narration, words, and poetry.

Rumo aos "mundos secundários" na ópera Elegy for Young Lovers de Henze

Este artigo tem por objetivo traçar as origens dramático-musicais da ópera em três atos Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), com música do compositor alemão Hans Werner Henze e libretto de Auden e Kallman. Através da pesquisa de fontes literárias e teóricas sobre esta obra, com ênfase nos escritos dos próprios autores, foi examinada a existência de recursos extrínsecos que contribuíram para a constituição da estrutura dramática interna. Estes recursos se tratam, por um lado, de influências culturais que interagiram na construção da identidade artística da obra e, por outro lado, de convenções emprestadas de outras tradições, tais como os tópos do repertório lírico, os conceitos de mundos primários e secundários da literatura de ficção, e possíveis referências a personalidades conhecidas, as quais serviram de inspiração para a caracterização de personagens. Verificou-se que recursos extrínsecos, além de contribuírem para os processos de dramatização na ópera, também desempenham um papel importante na elaboração de um discurso didático subjacente.

‘Ein sonderbar’ Ding’: Music, the Historical and the Problem of Temporal Representation in Der Rosenkavalier

AbstractDer Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, as the composer supposedly retreated from the modernity of Salome and Elektra to a more conservative idiom. The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. In this self-styled ‘novel of time’, Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music. Disputing the contention of the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot ‘narrate time’, I show that Strauss's music in fact exemplifies music's capacity to express ‘the historical in time’, using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art. I argue that Der Rosenkavalier – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways ‘an opera about time’ – the temporal and the eternal, the historical and what I call the ‘metahistorical’.

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

Comparison of Pessimistic Character of Spasse’s Jon Zaveri and Goethe’s Werther

This paper aims to compare the pessimistic character of Spasse’s Jon Zaveri and Goethe's Werther. Although the novels were written in different periods, “Why?!” (Albanian: Pse?!) by the Albanian author Sterjo Spasse, in the thirties of the twentieth century, and “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), by the German author Johan Wolfgang Goethe, in the seventies of the seventeenth century, they have their similarities and contradictions, which is natural given the fact of the social and economic circumstances of both the Western European and European Balkan areas. Goethe's Werther, although much earlier in time than Spasse’s Jon, lived in an environment that bears no resemblance to the environment in which Jon was born, raised, and formed. Werther, was traditionally rich, educated, and wandered around different places. His social circle was of an intellectual and artistic level. There is talk of ballrooms, pianos, music, novels, drawing, travel, and great writers...while, in Jon's social circle, especially where we deal with family and social conventionalism, it is completely different even though we are almost in the second half of the twentieth century. Jon is the only villager who leaves the village and goes to the city to get educated, while all the villagers are not only in mentality, but also in their clothes they wear still traditional. This is also beautifully portrayed at the time of John's wedding, when his family arrange a marriage getting him married to his wife Aferdita! She is a bride in traditional village style clothes, as described by Jon, just like all the wedding guests, with the exception of Jon, who had changed his dressing style, getting dressed as a citizen. The most obvious commonality in the characters of the novels “Why?!” and “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, is the pessimism of both and the suicide of both. John commits suicide in the lake by disagreeing with the marriage and fails to understand love, while Werther is madly in love, a love that leads him to suicide. So, Jon commits suicide by not finding the WHY of life and young love, which he never managed to understand or experience, while Werther fails to find the WHY of not making true the dream of his love, love which blinds him and takes him to the peak of pessimism, to suicide! Goethe's Werther is influenced as a personality by the world of art, while Spasse’s Jon is influenced by the world of philosophers.

Begetting the New: The Marrow of Originality as Discovered from the Making of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Part 2. Creation Demystified

Abstract The paper scrutinizes the originality and novelty of pieces of art and the creative contribution of their authors. Though Shakespeare almost entirely borrowed the material of his Romeo and Juliet from literary sources, the play represents an original writing towering above all its “prototypes.” The newness manifests itself, first and foremost, in the guiding idea that makes the play at once a hymn to young love and a lament for its doom in the “down-to-earth” world of maturity. Originality consists in adjusting the material obtained to the author’s own intent, rearranging the parts and working up the individual elements, marking out the key link, and building round it another framework that fits with the mission—that for the sake of which a creative work is done. And it is just this junction of the guiding idea with the reconfigured material that constitutes the marrow of originality. In developing the argument, the author exposes Shakespeare’s view of love, his recomposition of what has been borrowed from the others’ works, revision of the elements, and elicitation of the key link and its adjustment, on one hand, to the guiding idea and, on the other, to the rest of the contents. The ways and techniques Shakespeare used to remake and supplement the material come to light. From the analysis made, the author derives a comprehensive pattern of novelty in literature and—broader—in art.

Introduction

Introduction Jim Hicks I'VE SAID THIS BEFORE, but it bears repeating. You probably know that neurologists have a term, proprioception, to describe our sense of ourselves and our body, its position and movement in space. What they haven't yet named, so far as I know, is the cultural equivalent to proprioception: our sense of the world, of history, of our place in it and our ability to move and act, within and on it. Yet such an equivalent does exist: we believe our bodies to be whole and immortal, the world to be solid beneath our feet, we know our family loves us, as does God, and we assume that our nation (race, tribe, clan, call it what you will) is where we belong—to it we pledge allegiance. Until, that is, we don't. Locke wasn't off-base when he named solidity as the first of his simple ideas, the corner or keystone for all of the rest. He had less to say about those moments when the earth moves, a family splits, gods die, or our nation declares war on itself. One day it happens. We wake up and find ourselves amputees. Or else we look back and realize too late the border has been crossed, we won't be going back. On that day, a new calendar begins. And sometimes, someday, we also find ourselves anew, someplace else. The work of imagination inscribes both sides of this dark, backward abysm—and in our Fall issue, that's what you're in for. We offer you expressions of pure love, anticipated, as in a poem from C. P. Cavafy, in Alex de Voogt's translation, or actualized, as in Gwen Thompkins's exuberant tale of two young lovers on their way to a new life in New Orleans, or remembered, as in Karen Henry's reflections on the afterlife of Shakespeare's sonnets, translated to screen and stage. We sense the solidity of stone in Pablo Neruda's XXIII, translated by Karen Hilberg, and also in an excerpt from Giacomo Sartori's novel Bug, [End Page 392] translated by a dearly lamented friend, Frederika Randall—yet in both pieces violence is present as well. No surprise, I suppose, that poets today are tracking cataclysm, both in Steven Duong's "Anatomy" and in a series of dangerous swims, with poems from Emily Van Kley, Marcela Sulak, and Emily Schulten. Elsewhere Margaret Lloyd instructs us on how, in the life of poet Jack Gilbert, home was built, not bought; in an essay on the painstaking work of repair, Philip Metres shows us how lives like Alistair McBride's are forced to seek a possible future, after a promised past is taken from them. Cody Kommers rethinks the unthinkable, meditating on the motivations of génocidaires in Rwanda, with lessons for our time as well. What it's like to leave one life behind, and perhaps find another, is explored in fiction by Alanna Schubach and retraced in memoir by Ammiel Alcalay. With "The Color of Death" and "Song of Parting," we give you two stories as dark and lyrical as their titles, the former a translation of Selina Hossain from Bengali by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, the latter of Lu Min from Chinese by Michael Day. As objective correlative, we offer the photos of Paul Shoul, marking and measuring the divisions present here in our home, Western Mass., and unmistakable everywhere else. By the time you finish this issue, we reckon, you'll already be asking yourself the question we close with, as posed by the title of Marianne Boruch's poem: "Is the Past What's Left in the Glove Compartment"? Could be, but remember, that car was totaled, then towed away. As the man said, all that is solid melts into air… [End Page 393] Copyright © 2020 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

In the Atmosphere: The politics of Mati Diop's Atlantics

186 film In the Atmosphere The politics of Mati Diop’s Atlantics Lindsay Turner Atlantics, mati diop’s first feature film as director, tells the story of Ada and Souleiman, a pair of young lovers living in Dakar, Senegal. Ada is engaged to be mar­ ried to a wealthy businessman, Omar. Souleiman is employed as a worker on a construction project, an eerily out-­ of-­ place white tower up the coast from the city that sometimes looms dimly in shots of the skyline. Since Souleiman and his co-­ workers are not being paid for their work, they plan to emigrate to Europe. But before Souleiman has a chance to tell Ada about it and bid her farewell properly, the entire crew sets off secretly at night by boat. In the Atmosphere | 187 They don’t make it, but they are not quite gone: they leave behind a group of young women—Ada and her friends—whose mourning takes on a supernatural cast. The plot should be saved until you see the film, but what follows involves haunting, arson, and an unex­ pected return: a chain of loss, drama, mystery, and love. Atlantics is a pointedly contemporary film that works through a brilliant mix of genre conventions and realist themes; equal parts love story and ghost story, it is also a tale of labor, gender, inequality, exploitation, and global migration. Water—the Atlantic Ocean—is obviously one central thematic presence. But ultimately it is in the air that the film’s major themes most powerfully converge. As Diop depicts it, the air of Dakar is magnificently full: of dust, of sunlight caught in dust, of exhaust or smoke, of orange haze as the sun sets over the titular ocean. It’s no accident that a film so starkly topical is so gorgeously—literally and concretely—atmospheric. WithAtlantics,Diopemergesfromalongtraditionof Senegalese filmmakers and also takes her place in the world of European cin­ ema. Trained in Paris, she starred as an actress in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and directed several acclaimed short films and documentaries. Atlantics has been received and lauded world­ wide: in 2019 Diop became the first black woman director to be in the running for the Cannes Festival Lion d’Or, and Atlantics was awarded a Grand Prix. (Its cinematographer, Claire Mathon, also shot another acclaimed 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.) Yet especially in her most recent work before Atlantics—­ the documen­ tary A Thousand Suns (2008)—­ Diop turns back toward Senegal; the documentary centers on the classic Senegalese film Touki Bouki (1973), written and directed by her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. For viewers familiar with Senegalese cinema, Atlantics also recalls another quasi-­ supernatural movie of a shifting Dakar, Ousmane Sembène’s classic Xala. But if Diop’s background as a filmmaker, like the film’s pro­ duction and reception, bridges European and African contexts, Atlantics unfurls in one place: Dakar. The westernmost city on the African mainland, Dakar is located on a point of land that juts out 188 | Lindsay Turner into the ocean. The movie magnificently conveys a sense of the specific place and imparts a local feel. In both indoor and outdoor scenes—shots of traffic jams, shots of lace-­ curtained bedrooms— you can almost feel the salty, dusty air settle on your skin. This local atmosphere, however, is inseparable from global conditions, since in Diop’s hands, both the pollution in the air and the rela­ tionship between air and water are highly politicized, linked to contemporary economic development and the transatlantic slave trade, respectively. In other words, air is about interpenetration and in this film inseparable from history, from global inequality and disaster. Or as the poet and scholar Margaret Ronda writes, “With its uneven composition and its complex relay between corporeal interiors and exteriors, air offers an index of how nature and history interweave in an ongoing dynamic. Bearing the impress of productive relations in the form of emissions and pollutants, air expands our definition of these relations to include substances not directly generated by these processes but nevertheless entangled in them.” Dakar’s pol­ lution, for example, is omnipresent in the film, starting from...

Élans chorégraphiques & (des)espérance

N., a female dancer, with a huge melancholic mood and feelings, has an aggressive attitude facing the palliative care nurses when knowing the imminent end of life of her boyfriend, a choreographer, due to a lung cancer. Dance appears as a main Objet by a mediating role (art-therapy), sustaining a verbal psychotherapy provided by a dance-therapist who knows the major psychodynamic influence and impact of dance. Body and body Image remain omnipresent : real body slaughtered by disease; the ashes from incineration spread in a windy park in town; the expressive dancing body and psyche. This dramatic human tragedy remembered « Winterreise » (Winter journey) – a darkest inner world – produced by the Muller's poems and the Schubert's musical composition as « The lieder Cycle », linked to the German romantic literature included the « Sturm und Drang » trend/Storm and Stress. The atmosphere offers genuine moments of nostalgic situations, morbid dreams and dreadful experiences in a dark stormy nature. A contemporary genious ballet « Winterreise » is conceived by A. Preljocaj, deeply rooted in this history, retracing the deadly destiny of a young lover. It's also through the art of dance that N. finds a way to recover health and hope by creating a ballet solo called l’Hiver de l’âme (the Winter of the soul). Close to Winterreise meaning, the solo represents the different stages of mourning, helping her to cope with a mix of emotions during bereavement, to reduce grief, sorrow and suffering thoughts. As by dance movement therapy, she regains hope by art-therapeutic inner changing, restructuring and resilient processes.

Crying for my Father’s Home: Poetics of Loss of the Father’s Land and Mourning in John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing

In a disjointed narrative drunkenness that straddles oneiric language, apocalyptic vaticinations, and alcoholic delirium, the narrative of the young itinerant preacher in John Edgar Wideman’s Cattle Killing unfurls. The narrative purports to be clear in launching the young lover into an asymptotic search for his soul mate who is nothing but a spirit akin to ogbanji, successively incarnated in deified women who experience an elusive existence and a tragic death. However, it fails to dispel, in readers, a deep doubt as to the intrinsic symbolism of this soul mate, and, finally, dissuades them that it is an ordinary love story. The Cattle Killing quilts the story of the deadly prophecy of Nongqawuse, decisive in the colonial conquest of the Xhosas in Southern Africa, into that of the epidemic yellow fever in Philadephia, and plunges the protagonist into a melancholic quest on which African people’s awakening is premised. Voudoun esthetics, Lacan’s theory of desire, and Genettian narratology constitute the major paradigm on which the textual analysis of this paper proceeds. Its aim is to highlight the narrative devices by which the poetics of affliction, melancholy and regret is activated in the work, with the aim of echoing its call for the improvement of the black people’s condition in the United States and all over the world.

Libretto of the G. Presgurvic’s musical «Romeo and Juliet»: author’s original source and literary translation as an interpretation of the first text

Libretto of the G. Presgurvic’s musical «Romeo and Juliet»: author’s original source and literary translation as an interpretation of the first text

Héloïse d’Argenteuil se filosofiese uitset

The philosophical output of Heloise d’Argenteuil. This article attempts to deconstruct the overhyped erotic relationship between the philosopher-monk Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and philosopher-nun Heloise d’Argenteuil (ca. 1100–1164), by surveying Heloise’s extant texts ( Epistolae duorum amantium, Episto lae Heloissae and Problemata Heloissae ) as such, isolating three themes in her philosophical output: her concept of Cicerian love, her criticism of marriage and her notion of moral and material responsibility, which includes her understanding of an ethics of attitude and intention. When Heloise is read against the grain of the standardised Abelard-reception (which holds Heloise as at best a productive correspondent of Abelard, yet a mere muse for his extensive academic output), she is brought into perspective as an independent thinker, who deserves more intellectual respect than to be caricaturised as either Abelard’s secret young lover, or his unwilling wife. When her texts are read as independent outputs, albeit often in the form of correspondence, she steps forward as the ‘first female philosopher of the Middle Ages’. Her relationship with Abelard, important as it was for both of them, is secondary to her standing as a philosopher proper.

Natural Beauty

AbstractThis is a story of young love. A boy raised on baseball near the Bronx meets a farm girl who works and rides. Dorm days and nights are alternative music and playing hooky. Summer trips to the farm get him hooked. Set across a culture of higher education, this work of creative nonfiction with a soundtrack describes intimacies of cattle farming, horseback riding, campus life, and domesticity. About natural and cultural aesthetics, it is also an almanac entry for agrarian queerness and immense alternatives.

Young Love at Work: Perceived Effects of Workplace Romance among Millennial Generation Organizational Members

This study examined workplace romance perceptions among Millennial employees who had participated in a workplace romance and those who had observed one. Two samples (workplace romance partners and coworkers) of 18- to 29-year-old employees completed questionnaires in which they reported their perceptions of workplace romance’s positive and negative effects. The relationships between the effects and respondent role (partner/coworker), sex (male/female), and the romance’s status dynamic (peer-peer/hierarchical) were also examined. Results indicate Millennial workplace romance partners focused on personal benefits and difficulties, whereas coworkers tended to identify organizational impacts. Women were more likely than men to identify drawbacks of workplace romance, and employees reporting on hierarchical versus peer-peer romances were more likely to identify the partners gaining workplace advantages. Implications for work–life blending and workplace romance policies geared toward Millennial organizational members are discussed.

Romeo and Juliet are sexting: consent, countertime and literary voice

ABSTRACT Romeo and Juliet is ‘a tragedy of the name’, that is, a story about how the ‘civil brawls’ between two feuding families determine the life stories of the protagonists, since Romeo and Juliet are born ‘from forth the fatal loins of these two foes’. The title of the play, Romeo’s and Juliet’s names, determines the tragic plot, which ends with their deaths, but also offers these lovers a certain timelessness. Reading the all-time canonical tale of pubescent love as a tragedy that stages young love as rash and risky, this essay juxtaposes the image-abundant and flirty communication between Shakespeare’s tragic lovers with the contemporary phenomenon of digital sexting. It argues that their exchange shares with this contemporary form of love letters a risk of its ‘fatal’ publicity, and that this possibility – the risk that their messages do not arrive at the right place at the right time – is integral to the communication. It foregrounds the question of voice and its complex undertakings of both mediating our social being and constituting the grain of our subjectivity and suggests that Romeo’s and Juliet’s excessive speech can challenge our distributions of privacy and agency in the context of our cultural discussions about teenage sexuality.

Traversing the Class Boundary: Gone Girl (2014) as Failed Remake

Traversing the Class BoundaryGone Girl (2014) as Failed Remake Anthony Ballas David Fincher's 2014 film adaptation of Gillian Flynn's wildly popular 2012 novel Gone Girl is clearly (though not always explicitly) an inverted adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). Rather than following the movement from the Middle West to the sophistication and prestige of the New York City scene of the Jazz Age, however, Gone Girl begins in New York under the aura of commercial prosperity, only to settle in the isolated middle-class landscape of suburban Missouri. The film follows the lives of Amy (Rosamund Pike), a young, affluent New Yorker, and her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), a midwestern 'everyman' who teaches writing at a community college. On the morning of the couple's five-year anniversary, Amy disappears and Nick is implicated in her murder, which causes a media frenzy reminiscent of the 2002 Laci Peterson case. The plot develops under the gaze of a hawkish media—including a clever caricature of Nancy Grace named Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle)—though it becomes clear that Nick has been framed by Amy. Hence, the bulk of the film focuses on Nick attempting to exonerate himself in front of news cameras, the police, Amy's family, as well as his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). Although the twist that Nick has not participated in his wife's disappearance is revealed early on, he is far from inculpable; in her diary (later found by police), Amy accuses Nick of domestic abuse, and he has cheated on her with one of his young students Andie (Emily Ratajkowski). Amy, it turns out, has faked her disappearance and taken to the road disguised as a working-class woman. She ritualistically strips herself of the signifiers of her affluence and replaces them with working-class ones (a bandana, sweat-pants, Coca-Cola, and Little Debbie), all while carefully and painstakingly carrying out her meticulously planned revenge plot against Nick. When Nick gains the upper hand in the media, Amy seeks assistance from her former lover Desi (Neil Patrick Harris) whom she will later falsely frame as her [End Page 215] kidnapper. Amy eventually makes a 'heroic' return to Nick's arms in front of news cameras after staging her escape and murdering Desi. Nick is nonplussed, but must keep up appearances in front of the vulture tabloid media perched outside of their home. The film occasionally offers visual and dialogic hints at the ideological differences between New York and Missouri—Nick describing himself as a "Corvette, salt-of-the-earth, Missouri guy" and Amy identifying herself as a New Yorker for whom "the world ends at the Hudson"—however, the film fails to capture the potential impact of this truly radical geographical juxtaposition. Cultural differences such as the ideological, economic, and social antagonisms between these loci are shown in several superficial and short-lived montages early on in the film, depicting both the desolate midwestern scenery and the glitz, glamour, and magical aura of New York. The viewer is introduced to the latter via a rather banal scene in which Amy and Nick fall in love under wafts of powdered sugar that rise into the air from workers in the background unloading parcels from a truck in an alleyway; the sugar is momentarily suspended in the night sky as the couple share an embrace—one example of the numerous clichés that mar the film. This simulated romantic atmosphere indicates, at best, Fincher's willingness to broach issues of class difference in the most cursory way imaginable. The specific context for the couple's New York romance may very well have been a byproduct of the laborers' efforts, but any intrigue born of this encounter between two well-to-do young lovers and the workers stops short when the narrative shifts to a mundane conjugal fantasy in which the two leads are depicted taking one another on treasure hunts and keeping their love life interesting, often via adventurous sexual liaisons in odd places (a bookstore, for instance). The sexual fantasy elides the social context in which the fantasy itself is upheld. Fitzgerald employs a strikingly similar visual metaphor of...

Coming Home to Roost in London

Coming Home to Roost in London Jay Rogoff (bio) In 1961, Frederick Ashton, founder choreographer of Britain's Royal Ballet, created a charming two-act narrative work called Les Deux Pigeons, a title Anglicized the following year to The Two Pigeons. I watched it for the first time during the Royal's winter 2019 London season, and at first glance the ballet can look trivial, drawing on timeworn devices such as gypsy characters and their dances to tell its story of love spurned and redeemed. But it also weaves into this narrative some virtuosic dancing, and in expressing the ups and downs of young love, it exudes an enormous charm. It strikes me as an important work for Ashton, coming at a pivotal point in his career. In the postwar years and through the 1950s, Ashton chiefly created star vehicles for the Royal's prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. Narrative dominated these works, which included Cinderella, Daphnis et Chloé, Tiresias, Sylvia, Romeo and Juliet, La Péri, and Ondine. Casting Fonteyn in these romantic myths and fairy tales reflected her magical sway over the company and its repertory, and in the later 1950s, Ashton made steps that helped disguise her fading technique. Some of the lead roles in Ashton's occasional non-story works, like Symphonic Variations and Birthday Offering, went to her as well. As Fonteyn's career appeared to wind down in the early 1960s—she turned 42 in 1961—Ashton began to make roles on some of the company's younger dancers, such as Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, who danced Titania and Oberon in The Dream, his 1964 Mendelssohn ballet. He also devoted time once again to non-narrative dance and experimented with more modernist movement, as in the sublime Monotones, his 1965 ballet to Satie. These new directions revitalized Ashton's choreography, and although Fonteyn's career unexpectedly revived when Russian defector Rudolf Nureyev joined the Royal as guest artist in 1962 and partnered her for another decade and beyond, Ashton made only one [End Page 446] ballet for the two of them, a version of the Dame aux Camélias/Traviata story, Marguerite and Armand, in 1963. The Two Pigeons derives from an 1886 Paris Opéra Ballet work by Louis Mérante, to serviceable music by André Messager, inspired by La Fontaine's fable of a male pigeon who goes off to explore the world but returns happily to his mate. Mérante made the characters human, sent the male off to explore the gypsy life, and had his love pursue him in gypsy disguise. Ashton simplified the story, turning the Young Man (as he is called) into a painter living in a huge Parisian garret, and the Young Girl into his rather restless model. The gypsies visit the garret, and, taken with a beautiful Gypsy Girl, he follows them to their camp, where, after a dance contest with the gypsy's Lover, he receives a beating and returns home to the Young Girl, who accepts him with love. At his departure, just before intermission, one of two live doves has flown offstage, abandoning the other; when he returns, so does the bird, first alighting on his shoulder, then joining its mate perched on the oval back of a white, cast-iron chair. Throughout The Two Pigeons you can feel Ashton's delight in seizing the chance to work with dancers just starting out, their youth lending poignancy to the lovers' problems and affection. The premiere, on Valentine's Day, 1961, featured two 21-year old dancers, Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable. In this performance, the lead roles went to principal Akane Takada and first soloist James Hay. While both are somewhat older, they convincingly embody the moodiness and foolishness of young lovers from the very start. Hay dances while brandishing his palette, with graceful high kicks, while Takada, posing for him on the white chair, fidgets, scratches an itch, and stamps out a cockroach, things a ballerina simply shouldn't do. The juxtaposition of the Young Man's absorption in his art with the Young Girl's resistance admits a dose of realism into the ballet, hinting that all its foolish 19th...