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Journal articles on the topic 'Fantasy tropes'
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1
Varughese, E. Dawson. "Post-millennial “Indian Fantasy” fiction in English and the question of mythology: Writing beyond the “usual suspects”." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 3 (December 7, 2017): 460–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989417738282.
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Focusing on two novels published in 2016, one by HarperCollins India and the other by Hachette India, this paper argues that Savage Blue by Balagopal and Dark Things by Venkatraghavan carve out a new space in post-millennial Indian speculative fiction in English, namely one that does not privilege ‘Hindu Indian mythology’ tropes. Such tropes have been espoused by a growing number of authors whose novels are anchored in Hindu Indian mythology and narratives of itihasa since the early 2000s. Banker, Tripathi, and Sanghi are generally recognized as the authors who first published in this post-millennial genre of Indian fiction in English. This discussion of the novels by Balagopal and Venkatraghavan, alongside ideas of how ‘fantasy’ as a genre has been, and continues to be defined, raises questions about how we might think about ‘Indian fantasy’ as a genre term within the domestic Indian book market and how it intersects with post-millennial Indian living, Indianness, and the popular imaginary.
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Jiménez, Maximiliano. "Partly Familiar, Partly Novel Too: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West." Nuevas Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura Comparada, no. 1 (February 11, 2020): 123–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/ffyl.nuevaspoligrafias.2020.1.1111.
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This article proposes a reading of Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) that pays attention to the tropes and formulas of fantasy and science fiction used to frame an account of the so-called refugee crisis. Although the novel portrays situations rooted in the global concern regarding migrants, Hamid structures his story through associations with non-mimetic genres employing the trope of magical doors that provide escape to those desperate to flee their surroundings. I argue that replacing the hardships of travel with such a magical means of transport helps to relativize our perception of the situation in terms of science-fictional and fantasy scenarios. At the same time, the “unrealistic” depiction of the real sociopolitical problem leads to thematic reflections that are not grounded in the pity raised by the excessive attention paid to the dangers of migration, but that rather invite to a critical, positive engagement with the concept of hybridity, dramatized by Hamid in both the form and the content of his novel. Since what provides SF its generic cohesion is its use of ideology rather than specific structures or themes (Moreno, 2014), and since fantasy can be read underlying the political potential of its affective dimension (Clúa, 2017), the critical consideration of these two genres gives Exit West easy passage into a committed discussion about its context.
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Czyżak, Krzysztof. "Kolonizacja stawów hydr – narracje w serii Heroes of Might and Magic." Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication 29, no. 38 (June 15, 2021): 205–2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/i.2021.38.13.
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This article is an analysis of narratives in a series of video games called Heroes of Might and Magic. Author discusses issue of colonial/imperial thinking connected with strategy genre, evolution of fantasy tropes and developement of plot structure. On this basis he tries to outline the limitations of storytelling which result from series formula.
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Vossen, Emma. "There and Back Again." Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 37–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.37.
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The cultural ubiquity of The Lord of the Rings has shaped our contemporary assumptions about what the fantasy genre looks like, and these assumptions have in turn determined to a great extent what video games look like both historically and today. The Lord of the Rings and video games are, sadly, both well known for their lack of diversity, and this article argues that that is no coincidence. Focusing on the impact of the life and work of J. R. R. Tolkien, it traces fantasy media from the birth of the genre to the present day to discuss how exclusion is remediated, normalized, and justified. It challenges the racism of the “historical accuracy” fallacy and details how very old sexist literary tropes are continually remediated into contemporary fantasy video games. It asks: What can past discourses surrounding diversity in fantasy media tell us about the resistance to diversity in video games in the present?
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Seago, Karen, and Lavinia Springett. "Dzikie bohaterki? Problematyka płci kulturowej i gatunku literackiego w przekładach Northern Lights Philipa Pullmana." Przekładaniec, no. 40 (2020): 22–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/16891864pc.20.002.13165.
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Savage Heroines? The Treatment of Gender and Genre in Translations of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is the first instalment of his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials. In this alternate-worlds fantasy and children’s literature classic, Lyra and her daemon Pan are catapulted from the relative stability of Oxford to negotiate an increasingly threatening world in a quest to protect free will from cataclysmic adult zealotry. According to prophecy, Lyra is the chosen one; she conforms to the tropes of the fantasy quest performing the paradigmatic steps of the saviour hero. Pullman’s protagonist transgresses and subverts the stereotypical expectations of the fantasy heroine whose generic destiny is coded in enclosure, passivity and endurance. Lyra is also a coming of age story and here again Pullman’s conceptualisation does not conform to the female pattern in both fantasy and children’s literature where marriage functions as the marker for maturity. Character is one of the two defining traits of fantasy (Attebery 1992) and it performs a didactic function in children’s literature. Characterisation is created through the reader’s interpretation of textual cues: narratorial description; direct and free-indirect speech. Lyra’s character subverts fantasy stereotypes and depicts a transgressive child who does not conform to gender role expectations. Genre translation tends to adapt the text to target culture norms and the didactic and socialising impetus of children’s literature has been shown to prompt translation strategies which comply with the receiving culture’s linguistic and behavioural norms. In this paper, we analyse the rendering of character cues in the French, German and Italian translations of Northern Lights: 1. Is the transgressive trope of a) the heroine following the male hero paradigm and b) the coming of age pattern maintained or normalised to conform to genre expectations? 2. Is Lyra’s transgressive character rendered in translation or is it adapted to comply with didactic expectations of behaviour? 3. Are there different notions of the role and function of children’s literature in the target environments and do these impact on translation strategies?
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Heywood, Russell G. "Autoethnography for Extraterrestrials." Journal of Autoethnography 1, no. 2 (2020): 175–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/joae.2020.1.2.175.
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The article explores a creative-artistic approach rooted in autoethnography, using satire and literary tropes from science fiction and fantasy. Edited excerpts from a completed PhD autoethno-satiric novel called The Doom of Clowns are used to illustrate the theoretical and ethical development of this narrative style. The advantages of employing science fiction and satire are demonstrated through the otherworldly narrative distance and ambiguity these genres allow.
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Sarha, Jennifer. "‘The Sultan’s self shan’t carry me’: Negotiations of harem fantasies in Byron’s Don Juan." Articles, no. 56 (March 8, 2011): 0. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1001094ar.
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Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise a libertine fantasy, an Orientalist premise, and a picaresque adventure, but also some traces of epic, the gothic and literature of sensibility. Yet, these tropes are consistently complicated in the poem and used to undermine the gendered foundations of their traditions. This essay considers the formulation of such subversions through explicitly literary paradigms: what signs of gender are referred to, and how are they made intelligible as fictional constructs? By interrogating the use of gendered tropes, their formation as intelligible concepts within literary history, and their negotiations with sexualised conventions of narrative, I intend to highlight the discrepancies in the heteronormative construction of these literary paradigms and Byron’s use of them to suggest sexual fluidity.
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Cole, Megan. "Fantasy and Education in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 3 (March 1, 2022): 287–306. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ecf.34.3.287.
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The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) stands out, both within Eliza Haywood’s career and among mid-eighteenth-century novels, for its highly constructed, fantastical narrative. Despite the proliferation of fantasy tropes within the text, many readings of Eovaai focus on its political allegory. This article centres on the fantastical elements, particularly the incorporation of illusory magic, to explore the novel’s contributions to feminist philosophical discourse. In Eovaai, Haywood enters a conversation about gender, truth, and perception begun by Mary Astell. Haywood uses the oft-decried genre of fantasy to probe more accurately the physical and political stakes of Astell’s abstract theories. Reading Eovaai alongside Astell’s philosophical work makes patent Haywood’s investment in theorizing feminist models of perception and authority, an effort continued in her later work. This expansive understanding of Eovaai uncovers Haywood’s often unrecognized connections to rational feminist discourse in the period while demonstrating that her generic invention— widely acknowledged in terms of the amatory—extends to other genres.
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Felczak, Mateusz. "Audiosfery lochów, poetyki krajobrazu. Ślady estetyk romantyzmu w grach cRPG." Panoptikum, no. 24 (October 20, 2020): 28–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.26881/pan.2020.24.03.
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The aim of this text is to discern and analyze aesthetic tropes in selected fantasy cRPG games in the areas of visual arts and music. The analysis is conducted in the context of American romanticism, especially Hudson River School of painting, and musical works belonging to the dungeon synth genre. Through the enumeration and close reading of the elements pertaining both gameplay and digital landscapes, it is argued that the specific type of romantic imagery and its philosophical underpinnings may have influenced the recurring themes in cRPG games, including character development, avatar’s agency and player’s projected disposition towards the game world.
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Moura, Hudson. "Hollywood’s Viral Outbreaks and Pandemics: Horror, Fantasy, and the Political Entertainment of Film Genres." Revista Légua & Meia 13, no. 1 (January 26, 2022): 97–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.13102/lm.v13i1.7710.
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Films revolving around big natural catastrophes, the end of the world, and global pandemics are viral in Hollywood. Some authors claim that 9/11 enticed the proliferation of disasters, zombies, and apocalyptical narratives. Will the coronavirus further increase these narrative tropes? A cinematic apocalypse takes many shapes, including zombie infestation, nuclear war devastation, and aliens’ attack. Watching films such as Twelve Monkeys (1995), Children of Men (2006), or Contagion (2011) during a real-life global pandemic creates a much different viewing experience than when these films were released. Certain films kill humans with a deadly virus and turn them into zombies emphasizing and pushing forward to a cinema of genre its entertainment features, such as I Am Legend (2007), Train to Busan (2016), or Blood Quantum (2020). However, they also use horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres to portray a realistic compelling family drama or discuss structural racism and systemic colonialism against America’s indigenous peoples. In all these films, scientific ambition, political greed, and economic power intermingle, becoming the unknown forces and real detractors behind these catastrophes. Whether or not the end of the world is an appropriate story for entertainment attracts most viewers to Hollywood cinema. Conventional postapocalyptic tropes create a film riddled with relevant political concerns. Every year, hundreds of films transpose to the screen compelling narratives related to pandemics and their effects. In Coronavirus’s times, I analyze and contextualize several of Hollywood’s viral outbreaks to situate their narratives to current political subjects and understand how disaster and pandemic films have become entertaining.
Keywords
Hollywood cinema, Film Genres, Pandemics, Coronavirus, Racism, Indigenous, Covid19, Politics, Film Aesthetic, Disaster Films.
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Sharp, Sabine Ruth. "Salt Fish Girl and “Hopeful Monsters”: Using Monstrous Reproduction to Disrupt Science Fiction’s Colonial Fantasies." Contemporary Women's Writing 13, no. 2 (July 2019): 222–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpz022.
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Abstract The revival of the Frankenstein origin myth has left science fiction’s relationship to colonialism undertheorized. More recent creative interventions have, however, challenged the genre’s colonialist legacy: two works that achieve this are Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Hiromi Goto’s short story “Hopeful Monsters” (2004). Using different forms of unruly reproduction—strange births, recurring histories, and eclectic intertextuality—these texts unravel the tangled histories of science fiction and colonialism. Using tropes of repetition and mutation, Lai and Goto trace not a myth of origins but the texture of interwoven histories of gendered and racialized oppression. Monstrous patchworks of texts, these works interrogate the boundaries between science fiction, myth, folklore, and fantasy, showing these generic distinctions to have been buttressed by colonialist discourses.
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Burge, Denise. "There is the Beach, There is the Ocean." Cubic Journal 5, no. 5 (December 17, 2022): 30–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.31182/cubic.2022.5.46.
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My work investigates our complex cultural relationship with Nature with a capital "N", in particular the fantasy of tropical space: a collage of impressions and desires which ossify into a psychological 'elsewhere' that is in fact no place at all. By making images that simultaneously trigger and violate romantic tropes, I attempt to reverse the gaze of the tourist back onto itself. This essay describes the process by which I became a tropical tourist at the age of six, the year that I found my father’s heart-attacked body on our kitchen floor. This early experience of mortality, coupled with yearly family trips to the beach, created the representational code by which I now work out poetic relationships with desire and loss.
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Thomas, Roie. "If We Are Too Small to See or You Have Forgotten: A postcolonial response to modern representations of the San in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series." Public Journal of Semiotics 4, no. 1 (October 1, 2012): 108–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.37693/pjos.2012.4.8840.
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Alexander McCall Smith’s enormously popular fiction series set in Botswana (2000-11) appears on superficial analysis to represent the San people benignly, even affectionately. Neil Graves (2010) submits that The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency achieves an image of “untainted and uncorrupted” Botswana through a “three-stage process of engagement, disarmament and dismissal, leaving behind a saccharine utopian Western fantasy of primitive primordial Africa” (15). However, deconstruction via a postcolonial lens shows the depictions in this text to be insidiously harmful in the light of the San’s social and political disenfranchisement in Botswana since independence. Six tropes from David Spurr’s seminal work The Rhetoric of Empire (1993) are deployed to position the various representations of the San children in this series firmly within a postcolonial critique, since such classifications clearly define the particular nuances and levels of the characters’ literary depictions.
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FRASER, GORDON. "Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati." Journal of American Studies 54, no. 2 (November 12, 2018): 273–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875818001408.
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This essay examines reactionary, countersubversive fictions produced in the context of two conspiracy theories in the United States: the Illuminati crisis (1798–1800) and Pizzagate (2016–17). The author suggests that both cases emblematize a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomasochism that recurs across United States culture. Building on the work of Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others, this essay argues that observers should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic, countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world.
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Moynihan, Conor. "Timelessness and Precarity in Orientalist Temporality: Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s Aesthetics of Disorientation." Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 8 (October 30, 2019): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2019.272.
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The Hourglasses (2015), by French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, features five large hourglasses displayed artifact-like upon a table. As one would expect of an hourglass, these glass sculptures can be inverted to measure out time. This, though, is where convention ends, as these are filled with couscous, not sand. Unlike sand, couscous cannot measure time consistently and the inversion of any one of these five hourglasses results in a different measurement of time. In effect, they disorient any linear notion of temporality, raising the specter of Orientalism and its fantasy of a timeless East. Mehdi-Georges works in a diverse range of media including performance, sculpture, installation, and self-portraiture. Dealing with race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, identity, and representations of Islam and Catholicism, his work performs the instability in all these categories by critically complicating fantasies of “East” and “West” without relying on a mere binary reversal of meaning. Contextualizing his work within a larger history of Orientalism, my argument begins first with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” composed in 1817, followed by an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist paintings before leading to a concise discussion of contemporary Orientalism in art and art discourse. My analysis then circles back to the artist’s work to insist that Orientalism’s fantastical invocation of the East remains a disabling presence in the contemporary imaginary. Orientalism’s temporality, as glimpsed obliquely from Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s hyphenated identity, is likewise rendered unstable in his work. As seen in The Hourglasses, his work produces what I call “an aesthetic of disorientation,” predicated on the artist’s embodied cultural hyphenation, which renders the Orientalist fantasy of the East absurd through its own tropes of representation. By bringing queer theory and disability studies to bear on his work, I show how his practice engages with Orientalism’s temporality to open up new possibilities of perceiving the world.
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Campbell, Norah, and Cormac Deane. "Bacteria and the market." Marketing Theory 19, no. 3 (September 6, 2018): 237–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470593118796678.
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We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial products and in public service announcements since 1848. We identify four dominant and recurring tropes that bring bacteria into the symbolic realm: cuteness, overpopulation, the lower classes and deviant sex. As a first stage of our analysis, we propose that bacteria are symptoms of a capitalist socio-economic order. Bacteria are repressed fears and fantasies about purity, gender, race, community, pollution, class and sexual promiscuity which are tacitly leveraged by antibacterial brands. We then ask why these fears and fantasies take the form of the bacterial. We trace a movement from the psychoanalytical concept of the symptom to the sinthome. If symptoms can be read as a repressed, extrinsic ideology that can/must be revealed, the sinthome is a fantasy that, when brought to light, does not dissolve, because it structures reality intrinsically. We indicate an emerging body of psychoanalytically informed critical marketing that points to the perverse effects of emancipatory, revelatory critical analysis, where the consumer is made to face their symptom. The sinthome is a useful way to summarize this problem. However, while the sinthome is testimony to the impossibility of redemption through the revelation of our ideological prisons, it has a productive, positive contribution to critical marketing theory. It presents a theory of and a tool for analysing fantasies that focus on the form of their expression, rather than their content. In our case, the fact that fantasy takes the form of the bacterial reveals a surprising confluence between the politics of community and the physiology of (auto)immunity, with important and specific strategies on how ideology can be interrupted. This power of the sinthome to straddle the symbolic, imaginary and real creates ways to conceive marketing phenomena as simultaneously psychoanalytic, political, physical and metaphorical.
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HAMBERLIN, LARRY. "Visions of Salome: The Femme Fatale in American Popular Songs before 1920." Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 3 (2006): 631–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2006.59.3.631.
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Abstract This article documents representations of Salome, an archetypal exotic femme fatale, in American popular songs of the early twentieth century. The production of Salome songs began shortly after the sensational 1907 U.S. premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Vaudeville performers, beginning with the Met's own prima ballerina, capitalized on the ensuing fad for Salome dances, which the New York Times called “Salomania.” Relevant songs and dances figured in musical comedies and revues until some time after the return of Strauss's opera to the New York stage, in the 1909 Manhattan Opera Company production with Mary Garden in the title role. Through the next decade, musical, lyrical, and illustrative tropes that originated in the Salome songs became disassociated from the figure of Salome, gradually merging into “oriental fox-trots” and exotic romance songs. The topical humor of the Salome songs suggests that American audiences were skeptical of the allure of orientalist fantasy, then at its height in Europe, and that an unwillingness to grant artistic legitimacy to Salome's religious-themed eroticism is an important marker of the American reception of works such as Strauss's.
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Smith, James L., and Steve Mentz. "Learning an Inclusive Blue Humanities: Oceania and Academia through the Lens of Cinema." Humanities 9, no. 3 (July 22, 2020): 67. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9030067.
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Hollywood films such as Pixar’s Moana (2016) and Warner Brothers’ Aquaman (2018) have drawn on the aesthetics and stories of the island cultures of Oceania to inform their narratives. In doing so, these works have both succeeded and failed to respect and engage with oceanic cultural knowledge, providing a cultural vehicle to expand communication, while also exploiting Oceanic culture for financial gain. Cultural tropes and stereotypes pose a heavy intellectual burden that neither film fully shoulders, nor are the complexities of their content acknowledged. Moana sought to enlarge the franchise of the “Disney Princess” genre, but could not avoid issues of cultural appropriation and tokenism becoming entangled with an ongoing process of engagement. Moana’s desire to represent the cultural memory of Oceania raises questions, but while Pixar presents digital fantasy, Aquaman hides its global ambitions beneath star Jason Momoa’s broad shoulders. If the blue humanities is to follow the seminal postcolonial scholarship of Tongan and Fijian cultural theorist Epeli Hau’ofa by exploring a counter-hegemonic narrative in scholarly treatment of the global oceans, then how can it respond with respect? This risk applies equally to academic literary inquiry, with a more inclusive mode of receptive and plural blue humanities as an emerging response.
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Despotopoulou, Anna, and Efterpi Mitsi. "Real and imagined Greek women in Victorian perceptions of ‘1821’." Journal of Greek Media & Culture 7, no. 2 (October 1, 2021): 171–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00035_1.
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The article explores the reception of ‘1821’ in Victorian popular culture, focusing on the representation of Greek women in stories published in contemporary periodicals. The two dominant tropes of Greek womanhood that emerge in popular fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s ‐ the captive harem slave and the intrepid warrior ‐ arouse sympathy for the enslaved women but also evoke liberal ideas on women’s national and social roles. These texts foreground the position of Greek women within a nineteenth-century social context and imbue in them virtues and conflicts such as radicalism, the enfranchisement of women and middle-class domesticity that concerned Britain as much as Greece. Greek women, as represented in these stories, construct a Victorian narrative of ‘1821’ and of the Greek nation that oscillates between familiarity and strangeness, freedom and enslavement, real and imaginary. These largely neglected texts challenge traditional definitions of philhellenism, which depended on the legacy of ancient Greece as justification for the cause of the country’s liberation, and instead construct new myths about Greece, participating in the discursive production of its national fantasy. They also provide the opportunity of reconsidering the cultural position of Modern Greece in the Victorian period beyond the division between Hellenism and Orientalism.
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Nwakanma, Obi. "Okigbo Agonistes: Postcolonial Subjectivity in "Limits" and "Distances"." Matatu 33, no. 1 (June 1, 2006): 327–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-033001037.
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Among Africa's leading twentieth-century poets, Christopher Okigbo occupies a most interesting space. Born to Igbo Roman Catholic parents in Eastern Nigeria, Okigbo studied the Classics and began to write poetry as a means of re-identification with his primal world. Yet both his life and his poetry staked a claim to a universalist impulse, and, as a colonial subject interpreting the postcolonial moment, Okigbo rejected a narrow, essentialist categorization of either himself or his poetry. He rejected the Africa Prize in 1966, claiming that "there is no such thing as African poetry, there is only good poetry or bad poetry." Okigbo appropriated signs and tropes from a vast range of sources, emphasizing the cosmopolitan, hybrid, transborder nature of signs and language in the postcolonial text. Yet Okigbo's poetry exhibits the recursive fantasy, displacement, and disorientation of a problematic imaginative cosmos. I argue in this essay that Okigbo, especially in the poems "Limits" and "Distances," was expressing his attempt to engage in an agonistic search, a quest for some stable identity. In interpreting the chaotic space of postcolonial experience, the poet Okigbo reflects what Homi Bhabha describes as a "mixed and split text of hybridity" – the double-toned voice of postcolonial anxiety.
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Karavodin, Katerina. "Transforming and queering identity: The influence of magical girl anime on queer-inclusive western animation." Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 7, no. 1-2 (June 1, 2022): 95–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/qsmpc_00071_1.
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Following the success of Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe there has been an explosion of openly queer representation in US children’s animated television through programmes such as She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and The Owl House (2020–present), among others. The majority of these programmes follow trends seen in Steven Universe. These queer-inclusive children’s programmes tend to exist within the sci-fi/fantasy genre, visually reference Japanese anime, focus on female queer identity and attract adult fan bases in addition to young audiences. These factors can be accounted for, at least in part, by the direct influence of the mahō shōjo or magical girl genre of Japanese anime and manga or its indirect influence through Steven Universe. Scholarship has already commented upon the queer tropes common in magical girl programmes, both open and subtextual, and the direct influence of this genre on Steven Universe is well established. However, while the influence of the magical girl genre is obvious in programmes like Steven Universe and She-Ra that are closely patterned on the magical girl, it can also account for the aforementioned similarities in a majority of seemingly different recent queer-inclusive programmes such as The Owl House, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts and others. The anime influenced visuals of these programmes are partially a result of borrowing from aspects of the magical girl genre, such as the iconic transformation or henshin sequence. It is the sci-fi/fantasy nature of magic and transformation, just as in magical girl programmes, that allows young women to access magical power and agency through explorations of identity. These similarities make for an accessible language of transformation and exploration through which queer narratives can be expressed. By tracing the influence of the magical girl genre and its focus on the power of self and interpersonal exploration, we can begin to see why modern, queer-inclusive children’s animation exists in the form it currently does and begin to question what this means for queer representation and messages in contemporary US children’s animation.
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Dibyajyoti Das. "“Numbing of the Heart”: Negotiating with Humanity in the Wake of the Pandemic in Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague." Creative Launcher 5, no. 3 (August 30, 2020): 61–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2020.5.3.09.
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As the world progresses in its fight against COVID-19, the human civilization finds itself fighting against more than just a mere pathogen. Besides being an unprecedented health emergency, the pandemic has caused breakdowns in many other fronts as well. One of the very alarming issues is the incidents of inhumanity, callousness and deliberate cruelty by people towards their fellow-sufferers, which may incite far-reaching complications in the human society. In the worst case scenario, civilization could go either way- to become more united than ever or to fall to pieces with the extinction of human values- depending on our response in the wake of the pandemic. Plague and pestilence have ever been a popular topic in literature. Here, I take the case of Jack London's The Scarlet Plague for a study of the reversion to cruelty of all humans in the face of the plague and also what are the exceptions that have been admitted by the author to suggest how the retention of the ideals of human bonding and empathy can help us stand a chance in the hour of doom. This short novel has particular relevance to the present scenario for its temporal resemblances to the present outbreak, for London's preoccupation with naturalism in his fantasy and for his reliance on the latest scientific discoveries in virology and other modern technologies. The novel is also full of tropes that suggest that the germs of destruction are borne by the sociological framework and the ideologies that go into the foundation of the society.
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Lhamo, Dechen, and S. Chitra. "The Trope of Fantasy in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories." Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews 10, no. 1 (February 26, 2022): 81–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.18510/hssr.2022.10111.
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Purpose of the study: This study aims to explore how fantasy probes the embedded meanings of creativity and communication. It also seeks to reiterate the role of fantasy and imagination in confronting contemporary issues in real life.
Methodology: This study uses an interpretative approach using J.R.R Tolkien's theory of fantasy to analyze the text as an allegory. Through close reading and textual analysis, the text is analysed, relating the events to a personal and political context, which it allegorizes. Online scholarly materials on fantasy and storytelling, collected from various digital sources and libraries were explored to assist in analyzing the role of fantasy in dealing with the contemporary issues in the real world.
Main Findings: The study has found that the power of imagination has brought fantasy into existence and fantasy is analyzed as a tool to resist the contemporary issues regarding the freedom of thought and speech in the real life. The study has also found that storytelling brings a union in the community to build an egalitarian society.
Applications of the study: This study can be helpful in children’s literature, to prepare the children for their adulthood by equipping them with problem-solving skills and creative skills by empowering their power of imagination. It can also facilitate the children to empower be aware of their the sense of right to information and expression in their life.
Novelty/Originality of the study: The study proves the text as fantasy fiction, not just for fun with the supernatural features, but has embedded messages in the symbols and metaphors, revealed through the storytelling technique. Fantasy and creativity draw a link between the imaginary world and the real world as it is an outlet for repressed desires and also a tool to resist the contemporary issues of real-life through creativity.
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Mobili, Giorgio. "Fun until the end: The nightclub fantasy in the Italian cinema of the economic miracle." Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 53, no. 1 (January 3, 2019): 139–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0014585818821047.
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This article examines the use of the nightclub trope in three films from the early years of the Italian “economic miracle”: Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (1957), Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). Availing myself of psychoanalytic theory, I discuss how, in these three films, the nightclub is deployed as a hermeneutic space that sheds light on the functioning of the then nascent ideology of consumption, specifically on the way it captures the subject through fantasy. Capitalism earns our allegiance by creating the illusion that the ontological lack that marks us as subjects is in fact only contingent, and thus remediable through the acquisition of an empirical object (a commodity) that might yield the total enjoyment we crave. In mainstream Hollywood cinema—the chief disseminator of the capitalist ideology—this illusion is mostly fostered through the fantasy of the successful sexual relationship (or romantic fantasy). Through the nightclub trope, Fellini, Visconti, and Antonioni deconstruct this fantasy by letting it unfold well past the point at which Hollywood endings would stop, until it inevitably unravels into an encounter with the Real: nothing but loss awaits us at the end of fantasy. Yet this traumatic moment is politically crucial: once we realize that the enjoyment we failed to attain was always already lost, we will be free from the capitalist injunction to consume and accumulate—from the crippling illusion that our happiness lies but one more purchase away.
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Zarate, Andrea. "Portals, Agency and the Negotiation of Liminality in A Tale of Time City and Johnny and the Bomb." International Research in Children's Literature 4, no. 1 (July 2011): 87–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2011.0009.
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This paper focuses upon the portal trope in Diana Wynne Jones's A Tale of Time City and Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Bomb, suggesting that the portal trope is not just a practical narrative conveyance but a liminal space in which negotiation of discourse comes to the fore. In light of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, the portal is rendered a nexus point of time and space in which multiple discourses meet and blend. Characters, in entering a portal space, must negotiate these discourses, absorbing and appropriating them – a phenomenon that both alters the characters and the discourses themselves. From this theoretical lens, the portal trope articulates the fluidity of discourse as well as the processes of subject negotiation that characterise much of fantasy literature for children.
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Daniel, Carolyn. "Hairy on the Inside: From Cannibals to Paedophiles." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 13, no. 3 (December 1, 2003): 5–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/pecl2003vol13no3art1282.
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Cannibalism and its uses as a trope in colonial literature, contemporary fantasy, colonial writing, horror fiction, and fairy tales are considered. Episodes of cannibalism and metaphorical allusions to perverse forms of ingestion assume different forms and perform functions inflected by historical and cultural contexts, but they are apt to construct distinctions between self and others.
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Samanta, Anik. "Between the Village and the Void: Spatiality of (Non)Being in Jibanananda Das’s Tale of City and Village." Galore International Journal of Applied Sciences and Humanities 6, no. 3 (September 23, 2022): 153–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.52403/gijash.20220717.
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This article examines the topological psychodynamics of spatiality vis-à-vis the myriad and complex configurations of subjectivity underpinned by the unconscious dynamics of psychosexuality operative and observable amongst the protagonists in the great modern Bengali poet and author Jibanananda Das’s short story ‘Tale of City and Village’ who find themselves in an impossibly triangulated situation attendant upon the trope of the a visit(ation) of/from the past. It concisely and closely examines the unconscious dynamics of fantasy, desire and drive mapped onto the daseinal displacement from the country to the city which answer to the existential void or originary lack in being deploying the theoretico-critical framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, narratology, Russian Formalism, Bakhtinian dialogism, and continental philosophy. Keywords: Being, subjectivity, fantasy, desire, drive, jouissance, displacement, anxiety, pastoral, sublime.
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Yeung, Jessica Siu-yin. "Cultural Memory, the Trope of "Humble Wage Earners," and Everyman Heroism in the Hui Brothers’ Comedies and Their Remake." Archiv orientální 90, no. 3 (December 22, 2022): 417–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.47979/aror.j.90.3.417-446.
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I attend to the trope of Humble Wage Earners (daa gung zai 打工仔) in the Hui brothers’ comedies and their remake Fantasia (Gwai maa kong soeng kuk 鬼馬狂想曲, 2004) and argue that they preserve a cultural memory of Hong Kong during transitional periods. The trope and its everyman heroism are keys to decoding the social critique in the remake, which can be seen as an archive constructed through pastiche of canonical elements from the originals. The article first contextualizes the Hui brothers’ comedies in the postwar East Asian comedy film and media tradition (1950s–1970s) and considers them as Hong Kong salaryman comedies, which epitomize the trait of everyman heroism as a core element of Hongkonger’s identity. I demonstrate this point through a reading of Fantasia by focusing on how memory is represented and how the trope is remade. The close reading examines the film’s pastiche of the classic elements, influences, and anecdotes of the Hui brothers’ comedies, hence illustrating a remake’s capacity to archive cultural memory, rewrite cultural history, and reexamine identity in a new light.
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Bednorz, Magdalena. "Heroine’s journey to love: Spatial rhetoric in romantic subplots in BioWare’s fantasy RPGs." Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication 29, no. 38 (June 15, 2021): 191–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/i.2021.38.12.
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This article explores the potential of digital games to encode references encompassing specific cultural ideas of romantic love within their spatial structures, thus helping guide the player’s interpretation of romance as they interact with and move through those spaces. It undertakes an analysis of romantic subplots in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing games, specifically those which reappropriate the courtly love trope, and discusses elements of that remediation which rely heavily on spatial metaphors and structures, including the shared experience of heroic journey, the role of questing for the development of romance, and spatial positioning of lovers on the game map. Through its analysis, the article explores how digital games can employ spatial rhetoric while approaching topics of love, and how they are equipped to represent the materiality and spatiality of love and love narratives.
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Sintobin, Tom, and Marguérite Corporaal. "‘Turf is nu eenmaal een vruchtbaar terrein voor de fantasie’." De Moderne Tijd 5, no. 3/4 (December 1, 2021): 268–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/dmt2021.3/4.003.sint.
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Abstract ‘After all peat is a fertile soil for the imagination’. The literary representation of bog and peat cutting in Dutch literature, 1909-1940 Novels about peat lands and turf-cutting were immensely popular in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. This article traces recurring narratives and tropes in four such novels written by H.H.J.Maas, Antoon Coolen, Anne de Vries, and Theun de Vries, illustrating the ambivalent role that peat lands play in these texts. They function as sites of communality, future opportunity, and disorder on the one hand, and as places of exploitation and alienation on the other. These four novels do not downright reject the introduction of industrial innovations, but some among them are critical of the class divisions that may result. Others seem to acknowledge the hard labour that turf production involves, but do not criticize the social status of the peat-cutters.
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Keating, Michaela. "Victims and Survivors in the Rape-Revenge Narrative: A Comparison of Black Christmas (2019) and I May Destroy You (2020)." CINEJ Cinema Journal 10, no. 1 (December 19, 2022): 59–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2022.436.
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The rape-revenge narrative is fertile ground to explore and contextualize the experience of sexual violence and its aftermath. While typically a trope in genre films seen through the male gaze, female filmmakers are reclaiming this narrative. Two recent entries from female filmmakers into the canon of the rape-revenge fantasy are the 2019 horror remake Black Christmas, and the 2020 HBO drama-comedy series I May Destroy You. This article will compare the ways that these two examples construct characters who experience rape, and how their personality traits and behaviors are infused with the cultural perceptions of "rape victims" or "rape survivors." This analysis will be grounded in ongoing feminist discourse around the use of the term applied to those who experience rape, and how this impacts our understanding of these characters.
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Jordan, Katya. "“It’s All One Big Fantasy”: The Critique of Modernity in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot." Dostoevsky and world culture. Philological journal, no. 2 (2021): 65–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-2-65-88.
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The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.
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Jordan, Katya. "“It’s All One Big Fantasy”: The Critique of Modernity in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot." Dostoevsky and world culture. Philological journal, no. 2 (2021): 65–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2021-2-65-88.
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The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.
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Pelletier, Laurence. "« Language was being » : à rebours du fantasme de l’être chez Kathy Acker." Cygne noir, no. 8 (April 5, 2021): 102–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1076274ar.
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Dans cet article, je propose une analyse du fantasme ontologique comme objet du désir féminin dans My Mother : Demonology de Kathy Acker. En prenant comme prémisse le statut suspect de l’« être féminin », j’entends montrer comment Acker reprend et réinvestit les tropes des traditions philosophique et psychanalytique pour produire le possible ontologique du sujet féminin. Le phallus est considéré traditionnellement comme le signifiant privilégié de la différence sexuelle. Il détient un privilège épistémique masculin quant à l’« idéalisation originaire » de l’être. La nécessité de produire d’autres modes de subjectivation amène Acker à faire du sexe féminin le lieu de ce fantasme conceptuel. De fait, l’écrivaine parodie la prémisse psychanalytique qui lie la sexualité féminine au déni de son manque, reléguant l’être et l’énonciation du sujet féminin du côté de l’absence. Mettant en oeuvre dans l’écriture un désir qui ne suit pas la logique métonymique et métaphorique phallogocentrique, mais convoquant plutôt un régime de sens qui obéit à la fonction littérale et matérielle du langage, Acker opère une transition de l’ordre symbolique à l’ordre sémiotique. L’être du sujet féminin devient ainsi l’objet d’un désir d’énonciation.
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Saito, Kumiko. "Magic,Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society." Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 143–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021911813001708.
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The magical girl, a popular genre of Japanese television animation, has provided female ideals for young girls since the 1960s. Three waves in the genre history are outlined, with a focus on how female hero figures reflect the shifting ideas of gender roles in society. It is argued that the genre developed in close connection to the culture ofshōjo(female adolescence) as an antithesis to adulthood, in which women are expected to undertake domestic duties. The paper then incorporates contexts for male-oriented fan culture ofshōjoand anime aesthetics that emerged in the 1980s. The recent tendencies for gender bending and genre crossing raise critical questions about the spread of the magical girl trope as cute power. It is concluded that the magical girl genre encompasses contesting values of gender, and thus the genre's empowerment fantasy has developed symbiotically with traditional gender norms in society.
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Paparoussi, Marita. "Otherness, Discrimination, and Cats in Eugene Trivizas's The Last Black Cat." International Research in Children's Literature 4, no. 2 (December 2011): 180–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2011.0025.
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This paper examines Greek writer Eugene Trivizas's 2001 crossover animal fantasy The Last Black Cat, considering the implications of using the trope of the animal both to interrogate the construction of black cats as Other and to challenge examples of prejudice, or rather the grounds of prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating. Extended consideration is devoted to the ways in which the narrative produces black cats as the marginalised and demonised Other of both humans and other cats, while at the same time it questions the culturally established hierarchy between humans and animals, and the paradigm of animal victim. It is argued that the focus on how the human/animal relations are articulated in Trivizas's novel makes it possible to perceive both the irrationality of the ideology behind the discrimination and the beast in humankind; in others words, by using misfortunes of animals as a tool for social criticism it subverts dominant discriminatory discourses and redefines prevailing ideas of humanity.
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Santamarina Campos, Beatriz, and Eva Mompó. "La calle por bandera. Gramáticas, tropos y marcadores en los movimientos urbanos del Cabanyal (Valencia, España)." Revista de Antropología Social 29, no. 2 (October 4, 2020): 229–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/raso.71670.
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En este artículo, analizamos cómo los movimientos urbanos se apropian de espacios de la ciudad mediante su resignificación, inscriben en el territorio sus demandas y dotan de contenido los lugares a través de potentes marcadores. A partir del caso del barrio del Cabanyal (Valencia, España) mostraremos cómo, a lo largo de veinte años de resistencia, las calles se han convertido en teatros de diversas representaciones y reivindicaciones. Los cambios escénicos y las luchas por conquistar el paisaje han transformado los movimientos en auténticos tramoyistas del barrio. Eso sin olvidar que la disputa por el Cabanyal llevó a las autoridades políticas locales a convertir algunas zonas en decorados fantasma o a marcar sus conquistas de forma explícita. Recorreremos las calles para leer las memorias ancladas en ellas y las pugnas de los movimientos urbanos por crear sus propios significados y símbolos barriales.
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Kerr, David. "'Maisha yetu ya kila siku kama vile movie': Fantasy, desire and urban space in Tanzanian music videos." Journal of African Cinemas 11, no. 3 (December 1, 2019): 225–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jac_00018_1.
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Abstract An explosion of creative practices in music, film and video production followed the liberalization of the Tanzanian media in the early 1990s. Concerned about cultural imperialism, Tanzania's first president Julius Nyerere had resisted allowing television in mainland Tanzania and consequently the first licence was only granted in 1994. Following the establishment of the first TV station there has been a proliferation of TV station and online platforms circulating the new genre of popular music videos. During the last decade, new media spaces, including continent-wide TV channels such as Channel O and MTV Africa (both based in South Africa), have created new circuits for the circulation of Tanzanian music videos. New media spaces enabled by liberalization have become sites for negotiating gendered, moral and sociopolitical value. They also serve as imaginative sites of desire and fantasy. Music videos set in the cinematic space of Dar es Salaam's new high-rise buildings and 'exclusive' clubs have become something of a trope in Tanzania. These videos display fantasies of enjoyment and consumption. In so doing, they reflect neo-liberal and individual modes of wealth accumulation which challenge accepted social norms about consumption and wealth. Examining these new contemporary cinematic representations of the city as spaces of fantasy and desire, this article will explore the modes of spectatorship audiences bring to these videos. It will examine how audiences, largely excluded from these exclusive city spaces of consumption and excess, read cityscapes in music videos. This article ultimately sets out the multiplicity, ambiguity and indeterminacy of the desires (both creative and destructive) evoked in audiences by contemporary music video.
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Hoeckner, Berthold. "Schumann and Romantic Distance." Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, no. 1 (1997): 55–132. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/832063.
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The poetic trope and aesthetic category of "distance" is central to Novalis's and Jean Paul Richter's definition of the Romantic, as embodied in dying sound and distant music. In the "young poetic future" proposed by the composer and critic Robert Schumann in the 1830s, romantic distance figures prominently, exemplified by the relationship between the endings of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre and Schumann's Papillons, Op. 2. Distance also provides the key for a new understanding of the relationship between analysis and poetic criticism in Schumann's review of Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony; between texted and untexted music in his Piano Sonata, Op. 11; between music and landscape in Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6; and between the composer and his distant beloved in the Fantasie, Op. 17 and the Novelletten, Op. 21. The article presents new evidence of Schumann's reference to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte and Clara Wieck's Romance variée, Op. 3 in the Fantasie, and to Clara's Valses romantiques, Op. 4 in Davidsbündlertänze.
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Budziak, Anna. "A Game of Equivocations: Richard Shusterman’s “The Man in Gold: Paths between Art and Life. A Philosophical Tale”." Anglica Wratislaviensia 60 (December 30, 2022): 285–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/0301-7966.60.18.
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In Richard Shusterman’s The Adventures of the Man in Gold, the limitations of the conte philosophique are transgressed. The published volume incorporates a photo essay, reviving the old tradition of paragone; the written narrative, in turn, invokes the traditions of the doppelgänger story, the fairy tale, the quest-romance and—through its introspective passages—a literary confession. But even if, by Shusterman’s admission, this tale refers to its author’s personal experience, it also breaks the “autobiographical pact” by continuously playing with the pronominal references and thus destabilizing the relationships between the author, the narrator, and the characters. The current review proposes that Shusterman’s refusal to draw the line separating “I” from “he”—and reality from fantasy—is informed by his conclusions about T. S. Eliot’s (self-protective) and Oscar Wilde’s (self-incriminating) creations of their public personae. It also suggests that his storytelling technique relies on the trope of irony in self-redescription as understood by Richard Rorty, although Shusterman’s l’Homme en Or remains the very opposite of Rorty’s ironist.
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Sánchez Osores, Ignacio. "El sexilio de una loca que calla sus amores proscritos: figuraciones extranjeras y fantasmagóricas en la poesía de Gabriela Mistral." 452ºF. Revista de Teoría de la literatura y Literatura Comparada, no. 26 (February 1, 2022): 63–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1344/452f.2022.26.5.
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En este artículo se realiza una lectura queer de un corpus poético de la escritora chilena Gabriela Mistral. Frente al pánico lésbico de la crítica mistraliana tradicional, sostengo que las figuraciones extranjeras y fantasmagóricas presentes en la obra de la poeta constituyen tropos con los que se representa el cuerpo y subjetividad lesbiana. En particular, propongo que, por medio de la extranjera y la fantasma, Mistral poetiza su propia experiencia de sexilio a causa de su disidencia sexual. En el sexilio el yo extranjero no solo polemiza con la nación que lo excluyó, cobra un cuerpo otro y forja comunidades queer, sino que también imagina una contra-nación en el que el cuerpo lesbiano no es expulsado de sus límites.
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Thaliath, Maria Rajan. "Grotesque Realism in O.V Vijayan’s The Saga of Dharmapuri." Tattva - Journal of Philosophy 9, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 31–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.12726/tjp.17.3.
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The Saga of Dharmapuri by O.V. Vijayan is a dystopian fantasy set in the imaginary country of Dharmapuri, which could be a depiction of India or any other newly independent country in the post-colonial era. Mikhail Bakhtin in his treatise Rabelais and his World (1965) justifies the use of Grotesque Realism, a literary trope that allows the author to move away from the conventions of propriety and decency to convey messages that are real and powerful nevertheless. Usually exaggeration and hyperbole are key elements of this style. Through the centuries, literature has often been a medium through which contemporary concerns have been transmitted. This paper argues that O.V. Vijayan uses Grotesque Realism in his novel to depict the political, social and economic condition of India of the 1970s- specifically a country that was under emergency. Like all dystopian fables, The Saga of Dharmapuri has been prophetic in anticipating some of the social issues that we face even today. The paper aims at examining how Vijayan uses explicit language and scatological and sexual imagery so as to achieve this sense of realism within his novel.
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Parille, Ken, Kenneth Kidd, Jay Mechling, Victoria Cann, and Edward W. Morris. "Editorial Board Reflections on Formative Books and Other Media." Boyhood Studies 15, no. 1-2 (December 1, 2022): 183–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/bhs.2022.15010212.
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Reading Characters, People, and PropertiesIn this piece, I reflect on superhero comic books I read in my childhood and adolescence, noting that as I collected and read stories featuring the character known as the Silver Surfer, I slowly began to realize that the character’s traits, as established in the first comic in which he appeared, seemed to change in comics published later. In searching for explanations for these changes, I began to pay attention to a comic’s credits, recognizing that different writers and artists understood the character in different ways and often felt no obligation to maintain a consistent approach. I eventually realized that a comic’s credits sometimes misrepresented the labor invested by each of the story’s creators. This long process led to an ongoing interest—in both my writing and teaching—in the ways that our interpretation of a story and its characters can be enriched by understanding the conditions under which it was produced.Books of the HeartWhat might reflecting on favorite books from our childhood tell us about our past and current selves? This short meditation on that question first considers reading memoirs and experiments in rereading, and then reviews some favorite books from the author’s own childhood, speculating on their appeal and potential significance for identity consolidation.The Fantasy of the Boy Scout HandbookBorn and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, I opened my new Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys in the summer of 1956, at age 11, in anticipation of moving from the Cub Scouts to the Boy Scouts that fall. I found in those pages a fantasy that moved me deeply, a romantic fantasy of hiking and camping in the wilderness with a band of boy buddies. That fantasy has deep roots in fiction for boys and in books like the Handbook, appealing to the boy’s desire to escape the surveillance and control of adults and to fashion a community of “lost boys” in a wilderness setting ideal for strong male bonding in friendship.“I Never Had Any Friends Later on Like the Ones I Had When I Was Twelve. Jesus, Does Anyone?”: Reflections on Learning about Boyhood through Stand by MeThis piece offers reflections on the 1986 movie Stand by Me, drawing on some of the main themes and contextualizing them in relation to my own childhood as a girl growing up in the 1990s. I reflect on how in my rewatch of the movie, I was struck by the ways that the class positions of the boys echoed my own experiences of transition and liberation through education. I also reflect on the significance of seeing boys cry and be scared—feelings that the boys at my school were policed out of performing in public.Boy Genius: Reflections on Reading The Great BrainBased on reflection and analysis of a formative childhood text, this essay disentangles the relationship between reading, intelligence, and masculinity. The author argues that although reading fiction appears to encourage empathy, books written specifically for boys may contain detrimental messages about masculinity. The analysis reveals that the popular Great Brain series reinforces notions of whiteness, ableism, and masculine superiority. These messages are reinforced by the books’ emphasis on pragmatic “genius” and the savior trope in boyhood.
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Hatfull, Ronan. "‘That’s One of Mine’." Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 7, no. 3 (June 26, 2020): 45–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v7i3.481.
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In televisual representations of William Shakespeare’s life which blend biographical fact with fictionalised fantasy, contemporary writers often utilise the trope of the playwright colliding with characters and scenes recognisable from plays which he has yet to create and, consequently, finding inspiration. Others construct a reciprocal loop of influence, whereby Shakespeare is shown to have written or been informed by works that did not exist during his lifetime and which his plays themselves instigated. It has become fashionable in the metamodern era to depict these forms of metaphorical cannibalism in a parodic manner which oscillates between sarcastic rejection of Bardolatry and sincere appreciation for Shakespeare’s ‘genius’. Gareth Roberts satirised the notion of Shakespeare’s originality in Doctor Who episode The Shakespeare Code (2007), through the depiction of the playwright being fed and consuming his own works and specific references. In 2016, the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death, a number of commemorative BBC programmes also exhibited cannibalistic features, including the reverent (The Hollow Crown), the irreverent (Cunk on Shakespeare), and those which combined both registers (Upstart Crow). I will explore how these writers construct their portrayals of Shakespeare and, by interlacing fact and fiction, what portrait of the playwright these cannibalistic representations produce.
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Sherman, Jacob Holsinger. "Reading the Book of Nature after Nature." Religions 11, no. 4 (April 20, 2020): 205. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel11040205.
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Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. What might it mean to read the book of nature in a time of ecological precarity, what many have called the Anthropocene? I will argue that premodern theological traditions of the book of nature, such as one finds in the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor, have something extremely important to add to a postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature, precisely because the premodern book of nature already performs the construal of nature as culture (and of culture as nature) so often recommended today by critics such as Latour, Haraway, and others. On such an account, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable text to be tamed, rationalized, and epistemically leveraged, but rather the changing concept and experience of nature is a symbol illuminated in a book we half receive, and half create, a symbol open to both critique and contemplation, which gives rise to thought, action, and the sort of novel moral intuitions we need now more than ever.
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Medic, Milena. "From pain to pleasure: The troping of elegy in the renaissance Italian madrigal." Muzikologija, no. 22 (2017): 151–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz1722151m.
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In the Renaissance period, melancholia emerged as a dramatic cultural phenomenon among the intellectual and artistic elites, with a locus in elegy it gave form to the Renaissance poetics of loss, pain and shedding of tears, expressing essentially the fantasy about death as a prerequisite for revival. The possibilities of confronting the threats of death were being found in its very nature whose inherent ambiguity was determined by the principles of Thanatos and Eros. The creative act of the troping of elegy proved to be an effective literary and musical strategy for the transcendence of death including the procedures of homeopathization, pastoralization, heroization and erotization of elegy. The elegiac tropic transcendence of death found its most complex expression in the madrigal which in turn added to its basic polyphonic procedure the opposing stylistic elements of the pastoral genres (canzonettas and villanellas) or heroic solo or choral recitations and it consequently acquired a hybrid form in the last decades of the 16th century, and thereby proved to be a cultural trope itself. The aim of this article is to examine the musical implications of the tropic strategies of facing death within Francesco Petrarch?s, Torquato Tasso?s, and Battista Gurini?s poetic models of the art of loving death, using the remarkable examples of the Italian madrigal practice of the late Renaissance.
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Harrer, Sabine. "From Losing to Loss: Exploring the Expressive Capacities of Videogames Beyond Death as Failure." Culture Unbound 5, no. 4 (December 12, 2013): 607–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.135607.
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In games, loss is as ubiquitous as it is trivial. One reason for this has been found in the established convention of on-screen character death as a signifier for failure (Klastrup 2006; Grant 2011; Johnson 2011). If that’s all that games have to offer in terms of addressing an existential trope of human experience, the worried protectionist concludes, shouldn’t we dismiss this intrinsically flat medium as inferior to more established media forms such as film or literature? (Ebert 2010). Contrary to this view, this paper discusses gameplay examples that shed light on how this medium might leverage its expressive resources to arrive at rich representations of loss.
First, the notion of loss implied in Sigmund Freud’s work “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) will be discussed in relation to losing in games. Looking at procedurality, fictional alignment and experiential metaphor as three expressive gameplay devices identified by Doris Rusch (2009) will help explain the expressive shortcoming of losing and lay out what is at stake with profound gameplay expression. Moreover, it will serve as the keywords structuring the following analysis of three videogames, Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ico (2001) and Passage (2007), and their design decisions fostering deep representations of loss. Keeping the Freudian notion of loss in mind, we can trace its repercussions on the three expressive dimensions respectively. Following a separate analysis of each gameplay example, the last section will discuss some commonalities and differences and arrive at the identification of desired object, permanent disruption and linearity as design aspects modeling loss in more compelling ways than losing.
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Pamula, Natalia. "Violent Inclusion: Disability and the Nation in Polish 1950s and 1960s Young Adult Literature." East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 34, no. 4 (June 7, 2020): 858–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325419897787.
Full textAbstract:
This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer. My article “Violent Inclusion: Disability and the Nation in Polish 1950s and 1960s Young Adult Literature” analyzes representations of physical and sensory disability in some of the most popular young adult novels published in 1950s and 1960s Poland written by Krystyna Siesicka, Jadwiga Korczakowska, Irena Krzywicka, Jadwiga Ruth-Charlewska, and Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa. It argues that the recurring trope that connects the novels—the overcoming of disability—serves as a synecdoche for the Polish nation overcoming the catastrophe of World War II. Moreover, it shows that compulsory rehabilitation functions as a way of including disabled subjects into a Polish post-war society. At the same time, participation in the “rehabilitative regime” constitutes a patriotic duty for a disabled Polish child or teenager and paves a way to a socialist citizenship. Rehabilitation is always successful and culminates with a child or teenager transforming into an able-bodied socialist citizen reminding of a successful, yet sacrificial, reconstruction process of Poland. My article focuses on the sites of the overcoming of disability showing that Polish nature, whether it is a sea or woods, is crucial to the healing of a disabled subject. This way, the writers accentuate the connection between Polish nature and land and a “healthy” body, thus reconsolidating their fantasy of “Polishness.” What the novels ultimately testify to is the emergence of an embodied socialist subjectivity constructed through the corporeal rehabilitative practices and internalization of socialist values.
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Abellán Muñoz, Rocío. "El archivo fantasma. Apuntes acerca de la maternidad como (im)posibilidad en la práctica artística de Tracey Emin." Arte y Políticas de Identidad 23 (December 30, 2020): 98–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.6018/reapi.461181.
Full textAbstract:
La irrupción del movimiento conceptual y del discurso autobiográfico en el terreno artístico desde finales de la década de los sesenta del siglo pasado, supuso un punto de escisión que redefinió la obra de arte en base a premisas como la información, la significación, el lenguaje y el archivo. Bajo dicho contexto esta intervención pretende analizar la maternidad como un tropo que históricamente ha articulado la realidad femenina a través de cierta facción del corpus artístico de Tracey Emin relacionada con la creación de un archivo fantasma en torno a sus embarazos, sus abortos y sus hijos no natos.Así, desde una perspectiva analítica, sociológica y de género se analizará la perversión del archivo, la memoria y la autobiografía a través de la revelación de una narrativa espectral, anclada entre la vida y la muerte que, paradójicamente, constituirá para la artista la única vía a través de la que poder tolerar su traumática realidad. The emergence of both the conceptual movement and the autobiographical discourse in the artistic sphere towards theend of the sixties of the last century, entailed a split point that redefined the art work as information, significance, language and archive. In this context, the aim of this paper is to analyse the maternity as a trope that, historically, has articulated feminine reality through one brach of Tracey Emin´s artwork related to the construction of a ghostly archive about her pregnancies, her abortions and her unborned children.Thus, from an analytical, sociological and gender critical approach, this paper ig going to analyze the perversión of the archive, memory and autobiography carried out by a ghostly narration, anchored between life and death that, paradoxically, for the artist will constitute the only way through which she can tolerate her traumatic reality.
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Chayanika Roy. "Reversing the Gaze: Subversion and Re-interpretation of Mythical Stereotypes in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions." Creative Launcher 6, no. 2 (June 30, 2021): 113–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2021.6.2.16.
Full textAbstract:
Epics are indeed an indelible part of our existence carrying us into the timeless history where reality and fantasy blends into a harmonious whole. A diasporic women writer re-creating myth and folklore in a contemporary context and re-telling a popular epic Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective is monumental and extraordinary. There have been sudden inclinations on part of the contemporary writers to re-interpret the epics in a new light highlighting the women characters who have been otherwise neglected in the original story as tangible subjects. Usually, epic narratives portray women on an ideological viewpoint; women being embodiments of perseverance and forbearance, mute spectators of misery and injustice perpetrated on them. But Divakaruni re-created the women characters by assigning them a voice of their own so that they become strong enough to express their choices and by living their own bodies vis-à-vis lives. The mystifying feminine psyche of the mythical women characters is unfolded before the readers and many unknown crevices of the inner mind are laid bare. These impressions and explorations of the epic characters were actually a hidden trope for self-discovery and articulation. The Palace of Illusions is a re-creation of the illusionary, magical world of Draupadi and her dream destination and how this world gets shattered in front of her eyes is not only literal but metaphorical in course of the novel. In an attempt to re-work the epic, the contemporary women writers deviate from the usual phallocentric thrust of the epic and make Draupadi the hero of the novel; subverting the stereo-typed gendered version of an epic. Divakaruni’s fiction strives to subvert the gendered binaries looking at the epic and its magnificent characters and events through Panchaali’s gaze. Thus, the Western model of the male gaze is repudiated and the female gaze is celebrated in an altogether new form. Is the story of Mahabharata a familial clash between fraternity or a woman’s personal desire and Panchaali’s revenge which drenched the country and its inhabitants in the blood is the question that is left open-ended for the readers who revisits Mahabharata through the eyes of Draupadi vis-a-vis Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.