Journal articles on the topic 'Intradiegetic'

The Form of Text Communication in Eka Kurniawan’s Corat-coret di Toilet Short Story Collection. The purpose of this study is to find the method of text communication in the Corat-coret di Tolet short stories collection. The form of this study is a literary study with structural analysis methods as offered in the narrative theory of Gerard Gennette. The results of the study are the classification of the text communication method of short stories namely: zero and fixed internal focalization; subsequent and simultaneous narrating times; intradiegetic-heterodiegetic, extradiegetic-heterodiegetic, and intradiegetic-homodiegetic types of narrating level and person; the character and writer as a narrator. The findings of the classification of text communication methods indicate the existence of a gender bias that alienates women's position in the story.

The purpose of this paper is to examine selected issues concerning the differences in the reception of specific narratorial features as regards the original literary text and its translation. The analysis focuses on a unique narrator created by Joseph Conrad – a story teller and yarn spinner Charles Marlow. Marlow as a first-person narrator, who recounts his experiences to his intradiegetic addressees, employs characteristic techniques to communicate with his listeners, to make them involved in his stories, and to re-live his experiences. If ignored or overlooked by a translator, narrative techniques and linguistic features typical of him disappear, thus changing the reception of him as a narrator. This shift in reception and the very image of Marlow is exemplified by ignoring such features as Marlow’s phatic communication with his intradiegetic addressees (the use of such expressions as “you see”, “you understand”), interpretive markers that indicate Marlow’s imperfect knowledge or hesitation (expressions such as “I think”, “I believe”), linguistic patterning (repetitions) and cases of delayed decoding.

In Maupassant's short stories, as psychologically distressing events proliferate and his protagonists descend into madness, polychromatic modernity fades away to reveal a stark world of black and white. Such monochromism also engenders an anxiety-ridden reading experience. Black and white draw our attention beyond intradiegetic events to the diegesis itself, where Maupassant's play on textual shape and punctuation gestures towards the non-signifying white page beneath the comfortingly signifying black-ink words. This article explores Maupassant's dissolution of the spectrum, as he moves beyond the nineteenth-century's fascination with colour towards the bleak, monochromatic realm at the very edges of the symbolic.

The story of Robinson Crusoe comes to us in the guise of a first-person narrative based in part on a diary. Successor texts have traditionally adopted the same narrative situation, exploiting it in order to foreground ideas of authorship, textual authority and linguistic dominance. This essay pays particularly close attention to those Robinsonades that have not followed this pattern and have instead opted to omit meta-narration and intradiegetic narrator figures. It considers to what ends this is done in three modern Robinsonades: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), and Michael Dudok de Wit’s animated film The Red Turtle (2016).

The project The Forking Paths aims to create a set of interactive cinematographic narratives, within an applied research that seeks to transfer the spectator from an extradiegetic level to an intradiegetic level, creating a metalepsis. The intention is, above all, to analyze the possibilities of the spectator's identification as the main character, by the manipulation of the idea of time in Cinema. We aim to reach this proposal through the use of specific narrative resources, as well as through the possibility of choice between alternative image flows. The project The forking paths is intended to be available in different media and supports such as the Internet, touch sensitive screen devices and conventional cinemas.

This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palimpsestic memory’, contending that the novel articulates an interconnectedness between memory and migration. Firstly, I will investigate how the tension between aeonic temporality and some paratextual elements that attempt to install order and direct the reader’s orientation mimic and resonate with the intricate motif of the palimpsest. Then, I will illustrate how the alternation between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narration and the format of the multigenerational novel contribute to create a palimpsestic tale where several generations and different stories are inextricably intertwined, generating a spiral pattern where the multiple and invisible trajectories of temporality are refracted and eventually converge.

In<em> Fangirl</em> (2013) and <em>Carry On</em> (2015), the American writer Rainbow Rowell blurs the lines between reality and fiction, as well as extradiegetic and intradiegetic narratives. This article aims<br />to shed light on the transgressive and unstable aspects of Rowell’s fictional worlds where her characters are able to move from one diegetic level to another. By placing the embedded story in <em>Fangirl</em> at another level, the Young Adult author presents a work where borders do not exist. Through the expansion of the intertwined worlds, she jostles the standard and normative codes of<br />time and space in literature.

Abstract This article takes Gamaliel’s speech in Acts 5:34-39 as a test case for Luke’s use of dramatic irony, which is defined as a difference in either knowledge or comprehension between an intradiegetic narrator and the extradiegetic recipients. It is argued that the author applies this narrative tool in a very complex way to elaborate his theology of providence: Even though Gamaliel proposes the distinction between divine and human plans and activities, he does not fully grasp the meaning of his words. This encourages the readers to evaluate Gamaliel’s statement on the basis of Luke’s narrative. Hence, they are able to conclude that from a divine point of view a human action opposing God’s plan cannot actually exist because God has already foreseen this action.

This essay tracks relations between Laurence Sterne's sonorous prose and his discussions of time in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), identifying a novelistic technique of rhythmic narration geared to represent experiential temporality. I call this technique sonorous duration, and I demonstrate how it conveys a pulsating embodied experience shared by intradiegetic communities as well as by readers. After giving a brief account of early musicology and eighteenth-century elocutionary treatises to indicate the cultural context in which Sterne develops his notions of rhythm and duration, I offer close readings of key scenes in Tristram Shandy that exemplify a novelistic interest in sonority as a means for representing shared and embodied temporal experience. In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as Gérard Genette and Garrett Stewart.

This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of Bildung (life formation) in relation to video games. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement. We argue that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development in games, which restrains rather than stimulates the kind of complexities, diversity, and fluidity of character psychology needed in contemporary video game ecology. The main part of this study is dedicated to a comparative analysis of three indie games that address the life formation theme through allegories of space-in-time. The main focal areas will be character and story patterns; chronotopic mappings onto developmental trajectories; the treatment of mastery, mentorship, and choice; and the spiritual and metacognitive alignment of extra and intradiegetic education.

According to some grammarians the use of the historical present tense is a technique for enhancing the dramatic effect of a story by making addressees feel as if they were present at the time of the experience, witnessing events as they occurred. Others have suggested that the historical present represents events as if they were occurring before the speaker’s eyes. My own position on the matter, though, is that the necessity to postulate a “metaphorical shift”, an “as if”, is due to the interpretation of the basic meaning of the present as being contemporality with the speaker’s present and the identification of a speaker (narrator) with an “intradiegetic” participant in the story (character). In support of this position the paper argues that the temporal referential of the present tense is the speech referential, organised by and around the speaker/character. The speech process is an incomplete process with a validation interval closed to the left and open to the right. This property motivates use of the present as a gram-matical vehicle for re-presentation.

This paper analyzes the narrative structure and the literary elements that give Saramago’s novel its postmodern features, focusing in the plot and its uchronic perspective in order to appreciate the sci-fi dimension that the historical events take through the narrative. Our discussion examines the action of the principal character, Raymundo Silva, who proofreads a historical work titled The History of the Siege of Lisbon and decides to deny an important fact: "the crusaders did (not) help the Portuguese forces against the Moorish army". Added to the historical work, this não ("not", in portuguese) produces a disruption over the ‘real’ temporary line. In consequence, the city of Lisbon, at the centre of a meteorological phenomenon, slides in between the medieval siege and contemporary life. Thus, the historical subject resorts to a science fiction procedure: uchrony. Two intradiegetic symbols -the circle and the deleatur- represent the two overlapped universes; the circle refers to the historical world and the deleatur symbolizes the uchronic universe. Therefore, História do cerco de Lisboa is not a sci-fi work, but a postmodern historiographical metafiction.

This article examines the apocalyptic in Gomorra ( Saviano, 2006 ). Wu Ming 1 (2008) declared Saviano’s novel to be part of a new body of literature called the “New Italian Epic” based upon the narrative’s seven characteristics. Alessandro Dal Lago (2010) , on the other hand, does not think that Saviano’s work represents a new genre. For him, Ming’s sixth characteristic, the unidentified narrative object, has been the narrative technique of various historical authors such as Giovanni Verga (1978) and almost any work by Jorge Borges, just to name two. This technique is that of a composite narrator, which employs mimesis in combination with a diegetic narrative that alternates between being intradiegetic and extradiegetic according to the author’s whim. In assessing Gomorra, Dal Lago argues that there has always been literature that appears to tell an objective truth but that, in fact, represents the author’s subjective portrayal. He calls this writing style the “heroic rhetoric.” Dal Lago is correct in assessing this rhetorical style, but does not fully explain Saviano’s popular success. This article will review the apocalyptic literature to show how it applies to the narrative of Saviano’s prophetic voice in an eschatological context.

Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.

In the work of the French writer Michel Tournier, the novel The Golden Drop (1985) stands out for the massive presence within its plot of various visual images – photographs, drawings, mannequins, etc.; the hero, a young Algerian immigrant in France, develops in relation to those images. Their interaction can be described ideologically in the sense of postcolonial theory or through the opposition of the “symbolic” Islamic culture and the “figurative” European one; however, the author of the novel outlines his own, original concept of a visual image associated with the personality of the subject, but escaping his control due to its serial multiplicity. In this specific aspect, Tournier practically works out the problem of the intradiegetic image – a visual image included in a narrative plot. Encountering visual objects, some of which depict himself, the hero of Tournier’s novel remains unchanged, does not undergo any “education”, does not acquire, as a result of his adventures, either an ideal image or an ideal sign-symbol. Arriving from afar, he still does not recognize himself as a participant in European history, indicated in the novel by allusions to the student revolution of 1968

Abstract Printed anonymously in 1587, the henceforth immensely successful Historia von D. Johann Fausten is both a textual and a narratologic provocation. This is brought about by the polyphony of sources and genres compiled by its author which do not produce a homogeneous whole. But it is also the result of a specific, hybrid conception of text and narration, which intendedly creates ambiguity and scatters irritation everywhere. A valid interpretation is thereby sheerly impossible, which presumably is the most significant reason for the long and controversial discussions among readers and re-tellers, running from Christopher Marlowe (1592) and the Wagnerbuch (1593) up to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). This article explores some essential textual aspects of this inexhaustible narrative, such as the discursive and hermeneutic predominance of intradiegetic instances (first of all Mephostophiles) and the decommissioning of the narrator by inserted documents, transtextual references, and primarily by paratexts which almost lead a life of their own on the margins of the story in a proper sense. In this way, the text gets fluid, and its reception becomes an endless search for a coherent meaning which isn’t right there.

This article focuses on stylistic choices in the novel Im atë donte Adolfin (My father loved Adolph) by the Albanian author in Kosovo Mehmet Kraja (2005) as a strategy to generate a post-communist perspective of interpreting history. By blending first-person narration as confidentiality and third-person narration as conventionality (Barthes, 1978), the possessive construction ‘my father’ in this literary text serves both as referential label and deictic, generating dual focalization (Phelan, 2005). The heterodiegetic narrator is positioned simultaneously as a neutral eye witnessing narrator and as a signal of subjectivity. Even in cases of intradiegetic role the narrator remains detached interweaving his voice with the voice of the character. The synchronized overt and distant narratorial stances in this novel correspond with the demonstration of historical discourse as both subjective and factual narration. The relationship between fiction and truth has been widely treated in the post-modern intellectual thought, and as Borg (2010) points out in his study on Beckett and Joyce, the radical narrative innovations are “examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth” (p. 179), suggesting that in modern literary texts “every event exists factually and fictionally at the same time” (p. 187). As a resonance to Borg’s analysis of modernist literature, in Kraja’s novel the knowledge about history consists of both factual and imaginative elements, bringing “the moment of truth in all its potential” (p. 191).

The paper is located in the field of cognitive poetics and its general aim is to explore cognitive processes underlying the idiosyncrasy of a reader’s narrative engagement on the level of texture. By introducing the notion of texture, Peter Stockwell (2009) added the third level of a reading experience, situated above a text (level 1) and textuality (level 2). While textuality present in text‘s stylistic patterns is the “outcome of the workings of shared cognitive mechanics, evident in texts and readings,” texture is defined as the “experienced quality of textuality” (Stockwell, Texture – A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading 1). In other words, texture must involve a reader’s aestheticpositioning, but it also “requires aesthetics to be socially situated” (Stockwell 191; emphasis added). The paper focuses on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (2015) which has been selected due to its added complexity stemming from the fact that the chapters have alternating narrators. In the book a computational analysis is applied to the narratives of the three focalizers to trace and compare the positive and negative emotional valence of the texts with the use of R-environment software. It is argued that where intradiegetic perspectivizing entities (focalizers/narrators) are multiple, indicating and creating a mental representation of the main protagonist involves a particularly complex process. The protagonist’s ontological existence inside the narrative situation blends with the reader’s mental capacity for synthesis along the edges of the multiple narrative perspectivization.

Abstract The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky (Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky, 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders them without preferring one of them. He is even unable to account for, let alone to recognize the fact that these versions are contradicting each other. So, it seems impossible to determine which one of these versions is true in the fiction. The version the narrator believes to be true may be true or not. On the one hand, the narrator can be considered to be plainly unreliable; on the other hand, his unreliability is not the point of the story. It is its point that what the narrator tells us is inevitably vague; it is not its point that he lies or is not able to find out what is true in his world. – The last example stems from the novel The Poor Squanderer (Der arme Verschwender, 1936) by Ernst Weiß. In this case, the narrator’s discourse is full of single contradictions and omissions. Some of the gaps can be closed, some of them not. However, there is no explanation which accounts for the narrator’s misreporting and underreporting tout court. The overall setting of the narrator’s putative unreliability is left open due to the lack of self-awareness the narrator reveals in his discourse. – The paper closes with a short outlook on the literary/poetical difference between the closed and the open function of unreliable narration. Texts that close the gaps caused by the unreliability of their narrators display other literary properties than texts that leave the gaps, caused by the unreliability of their narrators, open. Additionally, the difference between texts whose open gaps are caused by unreliable narration and texts with similar gaps, which are not unreliably narrated, is hard to explain.

This article reads Jacques Derrida's notion of the "supplement" alongside Georgina Kleege's influential work on blind access to the visual arts, in order to argue that audio description (AD) should be repositioned as a key cinematic feature rather than an access-driven afterthought. Analysis of instances of extradiegetic and intradiegetic audio description in films featuring blind protagonists reveals that AD can function to comment on, replicate or foreground the experience of the blind protagonist and/or the blind beholder. The most successful descriptions are those which are incorporated into the film from its inception, and which thus allow an enhanced viewing experience for both blind and non-blind filmgoers.

AbstractIn a programmatic way, Jean Paul’s novel “Titan” illustrates in how far novels are inclined to become ‘encyclopaedias’. First, it is based on abundant knowledge resources that are linked together in a complex way and may be regarded as ‘encyclopaedic’. On the intradiegetic level, the different kinds of knowledge are partially represented by single characters. Secondly, Jean Paul’s “Titan” reflects upon different strategies of creating orders of knowledge as well as of representing and mediating knowledge. Thirdly, it can be regarded as an encyclopaedic arrangement that reflects different novelistic genres. In order to cope with the complexity of encyclopaedic dimensions characteristic of this literary text, it appears to be helpful to present the multiple aspects concerned in alphabetical order.

AbstractIn today's literary theory there is a consensus regarding the concept of authorial intention, namely, that it is obsolete and useless for the interpretation of literary texts and has relevance only in such discourses as legal discourse or literary history. The aim of my paper is to reinterpret the concept of authorial intent from the aspect of Darwinian and cognitive theory. I will argue that the authorial intention is not a fallacy that necessarily results in misinterpretations of the text, but a way of reading narrative according to its fictional status. I will demonstrate on some examples that the strongest stimuli for making assumptions about the authorial intention are passages that do not allow the reader to follow any intradiegetic perspective but force a global view on the fictional work.

Abstract This article explores Triphiodorus’ use of Cassandra in his brief epic Sack of Troy. An examination of the placing of the prophetess within the poem's plot and a comparison with previous literary attestations demonstrate that Triphiodorus makes extended use of the previously supplementary character. The reader is particularly invited to read Cassandra against the Cassandras of Euripides’ Trojan Women and Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, thus identifying ties with both epic and tragedy. Cassandra's speech alludes to the proem of the epic. At the same time, Cassandra's prophecy constitutes the key for understanding the connection between imagery deployed prior and subsequent to her presence, thus ensuring the thematic congruity of the poem. Triphiodorus’ Cassandra constitutes a doublet of the poet, depicted as imitating his poetic voice and effectively summarizing the entire epic in her speech; entwined in Triphiodorus’ poetic agenda, she also becomes its intradiegetic mouthpiece.

This article investigates how China fantasised about itself and the Beijing 2008 Olympics through the award-winning TV public service announcements (PSAs) of the Beijing Opera Series, with a focus on visibility. By drawing on theories of the spectacle, I perform a semiotic analysis of the most recurrent signs, organising them according to the main themes that emerge. The theatre stage – which represents the Olympic stage – is closely linked to China’s dream of owning the Games and its desire for global visibility. The performance includes the theatrical performance of the Beijing Opera and the performance of civilisation, which semiotically over-determines the Games. The protagonists include famous actors and roles of Beijing Opera (i.e. Dan, who is an anthropomorphic metaphor for China), as well as ordinary people, who are extraordinary for their high degree of civilisation. The spectators, especially through the intradiegetic presence of a Western male Other, validate the country’s performative success and confirm its achieved global visibility.

It’s been a quarter of a century since the rereading of Zsigmond Kemény’s oeuvre began. By now, the reception of Kemény is open to modern trends and has become a decisive tradition in the history of reception. Following this tradition, I prepared my talk for the bicentennial conference discussing Kemény’s novel The Widow and Her Daughter. My approach uses a reading open to romantic form principle; however, it is also a deviation from it with special regards to the schemes of intertextuality, composition, language and self-reflection while paying special attention to the act of reception and meaning attribution. In my essay I scrutinize letters shaping the texture of the novel. The special focus on the letters obviously emphasizes certain tendencies of interpretation. In my analysis I follow an approach of interpreting insertions into the main body text as structural inserts, while attributing decisive role to letter inserts in the narrative structure of Kemény’s novels. I attempt to analyze letters inserted into The Widow and Her Daughter from a textological and typological point of view, paying special attention to the dynamic aspect in the organization of the novel’s plot. The genre itself offers great opportunity to focus on the matter of fact concreteness of letter; which, as a consequence, can function – as we shall see – a rather mere intradiegetic narrative structure; furthermore, as an organizing principle of the plot through repetition, copying, violation of the sanctity of mail, the attachment etc.

RiassuntoRispetto a Virgilio, senza dubbio la figura di poeta intradiegetica più prominente e al contempo la fonte antica più importante della Commedia, si tende a sottovalutare l’importanza di Ovidio. Le sue Metamorfosi, infatti, sono un testo di riferimento molto presente per tutte e tre le Cantiche, sia nell’emulazione delle metamorfosi animali di Inferno XXIV-XXV che nelle figurazioni tipologiche e nelle imitazioni contrastive in Purgatorio e in Paradiso. Con la sua interpretazione innovativa di Ovidio, Dante si trova all’inizio di una nuova, intensa fase della ricezione delle Metamorfosi nel Tardo Medioevo. Attraverso il testo e l’immagine, il latino e le lingue volgari, la poesia e la predica, il testo ovidiano raggiunge ora diversi ambienti comunicativi della società.

“In the performing arts the very absence of a complete score, i.e., of a complete duplicate, enables music, dances and plays to survive. The tension created by the adaptation of a work of yesterday to the style of today is an essential part of the history of the art in progress” (Rudolf Arnheim, “On Duplication”). In his essay “On Duplication”, Rudolf Arnheim proposes the idea that a close look at the life of adaptations indicates that change is not only necessary and inevitable, but also increases our understanding of the adapted work. To Arnheim, the most fruitful approach to adaptations is therefore to investigate the ways in which the various re-interpretations partake of the (initial) work and concretise latent aspects in a new historical and cultural context. This article analyzes how, and to what ends, the re-contextualising of Georges Bizet’s Carmen in other media—flamenco dance and film – changes, distorts and subverts our perception of the opera’s music. The text under analysis is Carlos Saura’s 1983 movie about a flamenco transposition of Bizet’s Carmen. I discuss this film in terms of how flamenco music and dance, on the one hand, and the film camera, on the other hand, gradually demystify the fascinating power of Bizet’s music, as well as its clichéd associations. Although these forms displace and defamiliarise music in many ways, the main argument of the analysis centers on how flamenco dance and the film image foreground the artificiality of the exotic sections from Bizet’s opera, as well as their inadequacy in the Spanish context, and also on how the film translates and self-reflexively comments on the absence of an embodied voice for Carmen. “C’est la Carmen! Non, ce n’est pas celle-là!” As the credits from Carlos Saura’s Carmen are displayed against the backdrop of Gustave Doré’s drawings, we can hear the chorus of the cigarières from Bizet’s opera singing “C’est la Carmen! Non, ce n’est pas celle-là!”. Why did the director choose this particular section of Bizet’s Carmen with which to begin his film? Moreover, what is the significance of combining Doré’s drawings with these words? In a way, we can say that the reality/illusion polarity signified by the sung words informs and gives a preview of one of the movie’s main themes—the futility of an adapter’s attempt at finding a “true” Carmen. The music’s juxtaposition with Doré’s drawings of nineteenth-century espagnolades adds to the idea of artifice and inauthenticity: Saura seems to be dismissing Bizet’s music by pairing it with the work of another one of the creators of a stereotyped (and false) image of Spain. Demystifying the untrue image that foreigners have created of Spain is one of the film director’s main concerns in his adaptation of both Bizet and Mérimée’s Carmen. The movie’s production history reinforces this idea. In his book on the films of Carlos Saura, Marvin D’Lugo notes that in 1981 the French company Gaumont had approached Saura with the project of making a filmed version of Bizet’s Carmen, “with a maximum of fidelity to the original text” (202), an idea which the director clearly rejected. Another important aspect related to the production history is the fact that Antonio Gadés, the film’s choreographer and actor for Don José’s part, had previously created a ballet version of Bizet’s Carmen, based solely on the second act of the opera. The 1983 film production is then the result of Carlos Saura—the film director attempting to reframe the French opera in the Spanish context—and Antonio Gadés—the flamenco troupe director—collaborating to create a Spanish dance version of Carmen. The film’s constant superimposition of its two diegetic levels—the fictional level, consisting in the rehearsal scenes, and the actual level, which coincides with the characters’ lives outside of and in-between rehearsals—and the constant blurring of the lines separating these two worlds, have been the cause of a plethora of varying interpretations. Susan McClary sees the movie as “a brilliant commentary on ‘exoticism’: on the distance between actual ethnic music and the mock-ups Bizet and others produced for their own ideological purposes” (137); to D’Lugo, the film is an illustration and critique of how “the Spaniards, having come under the spell of the foreign, imposter impression of Spain, find themselves seduced by the falsification of their own cultural past” (203). Other notable interpretations come from Marshall H. Leicester, who sees the film as a comment on the fact that Carmen has become a discourse and a cultural artifact, and from Linda M. Willem, who interprets the movie as a metafictional mise en abyme. I will discuss the movie from a somewhat different perspective, bearing in mind, however, McClary and D’Lugo’s readings. Saura’s Carmen is also a story about adaptation, constantly commenting on the failed attempts at perfect fidelity to the source text(s), by the intradiegetic adapter (Antonio) and, at the same time, self-reflexively embedding hints to the presence of the extradiegetic adapter: the filmmaker Saura. On the one hand, as juxtaposed with flamenco music and dance, the opera’s music is made to appear artificial and inadequate; we are presented with an adaptation in the making, in which many of the oddities and difficulties of transposing opera music to flamenco dance are problematised. On the other hand, the film camera, by constantly foregrounding the movie’s materiality—the possibility to cut and edit the images and the soundtrack, its refusal to maintain a realist illusion—displaces and re-codifies music in other contexts, thus bringing to light dormant interpretations of particular sections of Bizet’s opera, or completely altering their significance. One of the film’s most significant departures from Bizet’s opera is the problematised absence of a suitable Carmen character. Bizet’s opera, however revolves around Carmen: it is very hard, if not impossible, to dissociate the opera from the fascinating Carmen personage. Her transgressive nature, her “otherness” and exoticism, are translated in her singing, dancing and bodily presence on the stage, all these leading to the creation of a character that cannot be neglected. The songs that Bizet adapted from the cabaret numéros in order to add exotic flavor to the music, as well as the provocative dances accompanying the Habaňera and the Seguidilla help create this dimension of Carmen’s fascinating power. It is through her singing and dancing that she becomes a true enchantress, inflicting madness or unreason on the ones she chooses to charm. Saura’s Carmen has very few of the charming attributes of her operatic predecessor. Antonio, however, becomes obsessed with her because she is close to his idea of Carmen. The film foregrounds the immense gap between the operatic Carmen and the character interpreted by Laura del Sol. This double instantiation of Carmen has usually been interpreted as a sign of the demystification of the stereotyped and inauthentic image of Bizet’s character. Another way to interpret it could be as a comment on one of the inevitable losses in the transposition of opera to dance: the separation of the body from the voice. Significantly, the recorded music of Bizet’s opera accompanies more the scenes between rehearsals than the flamenco dance sections, which are mostly performed on traditional Spanish music. The re-codification of the music reinforces the gap between Saura and Gadés’ Carmen and Bizet’s character. The character interpreted by Laura del Sol is not a particularly gifted dancer; therefore, her dance translation of the operatic voice fails to convey the charm and self-assuredness that Carmen’s voice and the sung words fully express. Moreover, the musical and dance re-insertion in a Spanish context completely removes the character’s exoticism and alterity. We could say, rather, that in Saura’s movie it is the operatic Carmen who is becoming exotic and distant. In one of the movie’s first scenes, we are shown an image of Paco de Lucia and a group of flamenco singers as they play and sing a traditional Spanish song. This scene is abruptly interrupted by Bizet’s Seguidilla; immediately after, the camera zooms in on Antonio, completely absorbed by the opera, which he is playing on the tape-recorder. The contrast between the live performance of the Spanish song and the recorded Carmen opera reflects the artificiality of the latter. The Seguidilla is also one of the opera’s sections that Bizet adapted so that it would sound authentically exotic, but which was as far from authentic traditional Spanish music as any of the songs that were being played in the cabarets of Paris in the nineteenth century. The contrast between the authentic sound of traditional Spanish music, as played on the guitar by Paco de Lucia, and Bizet’s own version makes us aware, more than ever, of the act of fabrication underlying the opera’s composition. Most of the rehearsal scenes in the movie are interpreted on original flamenco music, Bizet’s opera appearing mostly in the scenes associated with Antonio, to punctuate the evolution of his love for Carmen and to reinforce the impossibility of transposing Bizet’s music to flamenco dance without making significant modifications. This also signifies the mesmerising power the operatic music has on Antonio’s imagination, gradually transposing him in a universe of understanding completely different from that of his troupe, a world in which he becomes unable to distinguish reality from illusion. With Antonio’s delusion, we are reminded of the luring powers of the operatic fabrication. One of the scenes which foregrounds the opera’s charm is when Antonio watches the dancers led by Cristina rehearse some flamenco movements. While watching their bodies reflected in the mirror, Antonio is dissatisfied with their appearance—he doesn’t see any of them as Carmen. The scene ends with an explosion of Bizet’s music heard from off-screen—probably as Antonio keeps hearing it in his head—dramatically symbolising the great distance between flamenco dance and opera music. One of the rehearsal scenes in which Bizet’s music is heard as an accompaniment to the dance is the scene in which the operatic Carmen performs the castaňet dance for Don José. In the Antonio-Carmen interpretation the music that we hear is the Habaňera and not the seductive song that Bizet’s Carmen is singing at this point in the opera. According to Mary Blackwood Collier, the Habaňera song in the opera has the function to define Carmen’s personality as strong, independent, free and enthralling at the same time (119). The purely instrumental Habaňera, combined with the lyrical and tender dance duo of Antonio/José and Carmen in Saura’s film, transforms the former into a sweet love theme. In the opera, this is one of the arias that centralise the image of Carmen in our perception. The dance transposition as a love pas de deux diminishes the impression of freedom and independence connoted by the song’s words and displaces the centrality of Carmen. Our perception of the opera’s music is significantly reshaped by the film camera too. In her book The Hollywood Musical Jane Feuer contends that the use of multiple diegesis in the backstage musical has the function to “mirror within the film the relationship of the spectator to the film. Multiple diegesis in this sense parallels the use of an internal audience” (68). Carlos Saura’s movie preserves and foregrounds this function. The mirrors in which the dancers often reflect themselves hint to an external plane of observation (the audience). The artificial collapse of the boundaries between off-stage and on-stage scenes acts as a reminder of the film’s capacity to compress and distort temporality and chronology. Saura’s film makes full use of its capacity to cut and edit the image and the soundtracks. This allows for the mise-en-scène of meaningful displacements of Bizet’s music, which can be given new significations by the association with unexpected images. One of the sections of Bizet’s opera in the movie is the entr’acte music at the beginning of Act III. Whereas in the opera this part acts as a filler, in Saura’s Carmen it becomes a love motif and is heard several times in the movie. The choice of this particular part as a musical leitmotif in the movie is interesting if we consider the minimal use of Bizet’s music in Saura’s Carmen. Quite significantly however, this tune appears both in association with the rehearsal scenes and the off-stage scenes. It appears at the end of the Tabacalera rehearsal, when Antonio/Don José comes to arrest Carmen; we can hear it again when Carmen arrives at Antonio’s house the night when they make love for the first time and also after the second off-stage love scene, when Antonio gives money to Carmen. In general, this song is used to connote Antonio’s love for Carmen, both on and off stage. This musical bit, which had no particular significance in the opera, is now highlighted and made significant in its association with specific film images. Another one of the operatic themes that recur in the movie is the fate motif which is heard in the opening scene and also at the moment of Carmen’s death. We can also hear it when Carmen visits her husband in prison, immediately after she accepts the money Antonio offers her and when Antonio finds her making love to Tauro. This re-contextualisation alters the significance of the theme. As Mary Blackwood Collier remarks, this motif highlights Carmen’s infidelity rather than her fatality in the movie (120). The repetition of this motif also foregrounds the music’s artificiality in the context of the adaptation; the filmmaker, we are reminded, can cut and edit the soundtrack as he pleases, putting music in the service of his own artistic designs. In Saura’s Carmen, Bizet’s opera appears in the context of flamenco music and dance. This leads to the deconstruction and demystification of the opera’s pretense of exoticism and authenticity. The adaptation of opera to flamenco music and dance also implies a number of necessary alterations in the musical structure that the adapter has to perform so that the music will harmonise with flamenco dance. Saura’s Carmen, if read as an adaptation in the making, foregrounds many of the technical difficulties of translating opera to dance. The second dimension of music re-interpretation is added by the film camera. The embedded camera and the film’s self-reflexivity displace music from its original contexts, thus adding or creating new meanings to the ways in which we perceive it. This way of reframing the music from Bizet’s Carmen adds new dimensions to our perception of the opera. In many of the off-stage scenes, the music seems to appear from nowhere and, then, to inform other sequences than the ones with which it is usually associated in the opera. This produces a momentary disruption in the way we hear Bizet’s music. We could say that it is a very rapid process of de-signification and re-signification—that is, of adaptation—that we undergo almost automatically. Carlos Saura’s adaptation of Carmen self-reflexively puts into play the changes that Bizet’s music has to go through in order to become a flamenco dance and movie. In this process, dance and the film image make us aware of new meanings that we come to associate with Bizet’s score. References Arnheim, Rudolf. “On Duplication”. New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986: 274-85. Blackwood Collier, Mary. La Carmen Essentielle et sa Réalisation au Spectacle. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994. D’Lugo, Marvin. The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Feuer, Jane. “Dream Worlds and Dream Stages”. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1993: 67-87. Leicester, Marshall H. Jr. “Discourse and the Film Text: Four Readings of ‘Carmen’”. Cambridge Opera Journal 4.3 (1994): 245-82. McClary, Susan. “Carlos Saura: A Flamenco Carmen”. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992: 135-7. Willem, Linda M. “Metafictional Mise en Abyme in Saura’s Carmen”. Literature/Film Quarterly 24.3 (1996): 267-73. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Furnica, Ioana. "Subverting the “Good, Old Tune”: Carlos Saura’s Carmen." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/10-furnica.php>. APA Style Furnica, I. (May 2007) "Subverting the “Good, Old Tune”: Carlos Saura’s Carmen," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/10-furnica.php>.

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.