Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Mer-Hagography: The Erasure, Return and Resonance of Splash’s Older Mermaid","authors":"P. Hayward","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.10","url":null,"abstract":"The 1984 feature film Splash initially included a scene featuring an embittered, older mermaid (referred to as the “Merhag” or “Sea-Hag” by the production team) that was deleted before the final version premiered. Since that excision, the older mermaid and the scene she appeared in have been recreated by fans and the mer/sea-hag has come to comprise a minor element in contemporary online culture. The term “Merhag,” in particular, has also spread beyond the film, being taken up in fantasy fiction and being used—allusively and often pejoratively—to describe notional and actual female characters. Drawing on Mary Daly’s 1978 exploration of supressed female experiences and perspectives, this essay first examines Splash and associated texts with regard to the general figure of the hag in western culture (and with regard to negative, ageist perceptions of the ageing female), before discussing the use of “Merhag” and “Sea-Hag” as allusive pejoratives and the manner in which their negative connotations have been countered.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80313821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Review of Agnieszka Łowczanin, A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic: Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe (Peter Lang, 2018)","authors":"D. Punter","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.26","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89811797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Victim-Warriors and Restorers—Heroines in the Post-Apocalyptic World of Mad Max: Fury Road","authors":"Anna Reglińska-Jemioł","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.08","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses the evolving image of female characters in the Mad Max saga directed by George Miller, focusing on Furiosa’s rebellion in the last film—Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, studying Miller’s post-apocalyptic action films, we can observe the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the saga: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We observe female heroes: the vengeful Furiosa, the protector of oppressed girls and sex slaves, the women of the separatist clan, and the wives of the warlord, who bring down the tyranny and create a new “green place.” It is worth emphasizing that the plot casts female solidarity in the central heroic role. In fact, the Mad Max saga emerges as a piece of socially engaged cinema preoccupied with the cultural context of gender discourse. Noticeably, media commentators, scholars and activists have suggested that Fury Road is a feminist film.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88745359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Northern Ireland’s Interregnum. Anna Burns’s Depiction of a (Post)-Troubles State of (In)security","authors":"R. Bartnik","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.05","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to present the main contours of Burns’s literary output which, interestingly enough, grows into a personal understanding of the collective mindset of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland. It is legitimate, I argue, to construe her fiction (No Bones, 2001; Little Constructions, 2007; Milkman, 2018) as a body of work shedding light on certain underlying mechanisms of (post-)sectarian violence. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between 1998 and 2020, the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region. My reading of the novelist’s selected works intends to show how the local public have been fed by (or have fed themselves upon) an unjustified—maybe even false—sense of security. Burns, in that regard, has positioned herself amongst the aggregate of writers who feel anxious rather than placated, hence their persistence in returning to the roots of Northern Irish societal divisions. Burns’s writing, in the above context, though immersed in the world of the Troubles, paradoxically communicates “an idiosyncratic spatiotemporality” (Maureen Ruprecht Fadem’s phrase), namely an experience beyond the self-imposing, historical time limits. As such, it gains the ability to provide insightful commentaries on conflict-prone relations, the patterns of which can be repeatedly observed in Northern Ireland’s socio-political milieu. Overall, the main idea here is to discuss and present the narrative realm proposed by Burns as (in)determinate, liminal in terms of time and space, positioning readers between “then” and “now” of the region.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88792691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conceptualizing In-Text “Kshetra”: Postcolonial Allahabad’s Cultural Geography in Neelum Saran Gour’s Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink","authors":"Chhandita Das, P. Tripathi","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.24","url":null,"abstract":"Literary renditions of cities have always gravitated towards the spatial imagination and its ethical counterpart outside the textual space. This paper explores the multicultural geography of the North Indian city Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) observed through Neelum Saran Gour’s postcolonial narratives Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink, projecting the narrative alignment of spatial aesthetics and cultural ethics. Interrogating the spatial dimensions of a “narrative world” within narrative theory (Ryan) and its interdisciplinary crossover with cultural geography (Sauer; Mitchell; Anderson et al.), the article seeks to examine Gour’s literary city not simply as an objective homogeneous representation, but as a “kshetra” of spatio-cultural cosmos of lived traditions, memories, experiences and collective attitudes of its people, in the context of E. V. Ramakrishnan’s theoretical reflections. The article proposes new possibilities of adapting the Indian concept “kshetra” to spatial literary studies; its aim is also to suggest a new source of knowledge about the city of Allahabad through a community introspection of “doing culture” in the texts, bringing into view people’s shared experiences, beliefs, religious practices and traditions as offshoots of the postcolonial ethos. The article aims to re-contextualize the city’s longstanding multicultural ethics in the contemporary times of crisis, which may affect a shift in the city’s relevance: from regional concern to large-scale significance within ethnically diverse South Asian countries and beyond.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78383245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Griselda’s Afterlife, or the Relationship between Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale and the Tale of Magic","authors":"A. Wicher","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.21","url":null,"abstract":"Some influence of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, also known as the story of the patient Griselda, on Shakespeare, and particularly on The Winter’s Tale, has long been recognized. It seems, however, that the matter deserves further attention because the echoes of The Clerk’s Tale seem scattered among a number of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the later ones. The experimental nature of this phenomenon consists in the fact that Griselda-like characters do not strike the reader, especially perhaps the Renaissance reader, as good protagonists of a tragedy, or even a problem comedy. The Aristotelian conception of the tragic hero does not seem to fit Griselda because there is no “tragic fault” in her: she is completely innocent. It was thus a bold decision on the part of Shakespeare to use this archetype as a corner stone of at least some of his plays.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84876822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aligning with Sociopaths: Character Engagement Strategies in Highsmith’s and Minghella’s Talented Mr. Ripleys","authors":"L. Zdunkiewicz","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.09","url":null,"abstract":"Patricia Highsmith’s stated reason for writing The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) was to see if she could elicit empathetic engagement for her immoral protagonist Tom Ripley. Amongst other factors, she achieves her goal by allowing readers to align affectively with the protagonist’s road to self-discovery. Her experiment culminates with Tom’s fruition into an aggressive consumer, thus resolving his and the readers’ apprehensions. On the other hand, Anthony Minghella’s Ripley leaves more room for interpretation. In his interviews, the filmmaker states that he does not aim for his protagonist to remain the sociopath from Highsmith’s novel. Instead, his story explores the absence of a father figure and how it affects his main characters. Consequently, he frames Tom as an underprivileged youth whose emotional instability brings about his demise. To this end, he employs victimization scenes, as well as moral disengagement cues. I argue that, amongst other factors, such an application of an industry-tested design of emphatic concern elicitation obscures the filmmaker’s initial intent. As a result, Minghella’s Tom can be seen as a manipulative sociopath, as well as a victimized tragic hero.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75665085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial: Literature and Security","authors":"L. Gearon","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.02","url":null,"abstract":"Literature is a lie which seeks to tell a truth. Espionage is a trade dependent on deceit. Where the two professions meet, the dissembling knows no limit (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”). John le Carré, the nom-de-plume of the late David Cornwell (1931–2020), reflected more than any novelist of our time on the interface of literature and security. In his case, that was a life lived in service, to the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the Security Services, MI5, and a life lived, too, in the service of literature. The author stated: “I’m a liar, born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist” (Sisman 1). In The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré aptly characterizes his autobiography as “stories from my life,” the subtitle of his work. It is a narrative in which the dual worlds of security and secret intelligence are inseparable from his love of and dedication to writing; there is little or no separation from his life and his art. Born in 1931 and educated in the English public-school system he was a patriotic schoolboy during the Second World War. Skilled at languages and loving literature, he left England, as he himself admits, to escape a difficult relationship with his father, and to study modern languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. It was there, as his autobiography details, that a dedicated patriot developed an intense love of all literatures, especially German. David Cornwell’s national service as part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps was put to good use in the interrogation of those who crossed from the other side of what was now called the Iron Curtain to where he was stationed in Allied-occupied Austria. Vienna, in the early period of the Cold War, was the crossroads of intelligence. Look simply to the novels of the time by Graham Greene above all to see the spies on those streets. Completing his National Service, David Cornwell returned to England, and Oxford, in 1952, at an age when today he would be called a mature student, at Lincoln College. His unofficial and covert duties Text Matters, Number 11, 2021 https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.02","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85264796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Review of Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570–1630 (Routledge, 2019)","authors":"P. Morawski","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.29","url":null,"abstract":"Much has been written about commedia dell’arte over the years, and Natalie Crohn Schmitt’s 2019 publication provides evidence of that. What one could call an impressive bibliography occupies a large part of an otherwise not very comprehensive book. It would seem, then, that the primary purpose of Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570–1630, a book which received the 2020 Ennio Flaiano Award in Italian Culture, is to present the existing state of knowledge rather than to put forward new theses on one of the most widespread theatrical genres in Italian (and not only Italian) culture and, above all, in theatre studies worldwide. This is not the first time that the author—an experienced researcher working at the University of Illinois, Chicago—has tackled commedia dell’arte. Published in 2014, Schmitt’s Befriending the Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala: The Comic Scenarios was devoted to a collection of old prints documenting the title scenarios. She went on to present source material that is fundamental to understanding the genre, which she brilliantly analyzed. The book raised the interest of researchers and was discussed in the most important specialist journals.1 It was undoubtedly a great contribution to the field of theatre studies. It is difficult to discuss Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570–1630 without referring to the author’s previous book. It is a kind of an appendix to, or perhaps a more popular version of, her history of dell’arte, intended for less specialized readers. Although Schmitt also frequently refers to Flaminio Scala’s scripts, she places her story of dell’arte in the broad context of cultural and literary studies. In fact, she has written a book about the contemporary establishment of dell’arte rather than the traditional historical narrative.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77097248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hercule Poirot and the Tricky Performers of Stereotypes in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express","authors":"Ken Eckert","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.13","url":null,"abstract":"Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) remains well-read, and its hero Hercule Poirot continues to enjoy popular currency. Yet the text has not aged well due to some of its now clichéd plot developments and dialogue, as well as Christie’s depiction of class, ethnic and national prejudices in it and her other novels. This study hopes to re-energize discussion on Murder by finding defensible reasons for its apparent flaws. Not only do the stereotypical behaviors of the passengers narratively distract Poirot and the reader from a solution, but their flaws serve as foils against which Poirot’s heroic gravitas and cultural values are positively contrasted. Further, criticism often misses the point that the passengers are performing their behaviors, and if so, the deployment of stereotypes as only acted performances destabilizes them as permanent aspects of national or ethnic identity. Can Murder then be read as an anti-racist text?","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79870555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}