Journal articles on the topic 'Tamil Women poets'

In the Eight Anthologies texts Purananooru is most important. It contains 400 songs which depicts the outreach of the Sangam Tamil people. In it the war and the heroism of the warrior are revealed. It features songs by more than a hundred poets. The number of Attestors sung in the same way is over a hundred. It features 16 unnamed songs of the poet. Avvaiyar, Kabilar, Paranar, Koovoorkizar and Mudamozier have sung more than ten songs. in that respect, in relation to women through Purananooru songs, the heroism of women, excellence in Academic, discipline has been seen. Also, it is mentioned that women have faced many restrictions.

Cancer has gradually occupied a bigger space in mortality count. It’s reported that every four minutes a person is affected by cancer. Women had taken over men; mainly 1 in 30 women are affected by breast cancer. Breast cancer has cancer. Breast cancer has a great impact on emotional & social perspectives. More than an organ it’s a symbol of beauty and motherhood. In Ancient Tamil literatures, mainly sanga literatures at many instances poets have glorified the beauty of women, donating breast, hair, waist line & motherhood. Though difficult we still can survive with one kidney, one eye, leg and hand but in breast cancer it is tragedy. The pain of hair due to chemotherapy, losing a breast and beauty seems to be higher than pain caused by the disease. They undergo a lot of mood swings and emotional imbalances, to build in resilience and to enhance their livelihood meditation. Yoga helps than to beat over fatigue. It also helps manage the side effects of cancer treatment and helps manage the emotional add-ons such us mental fatigue, depression. Yoga is mainly recommended for the psycho-social wellbeing along with family counselling. The yogic package mainly had pranayama practice, meditation and few asanas. Regular practice if continued by breast cancer survivor even after the cancer cure will have lifelong benefits. The purpose of writing this article is to create awareness among women of my own motherland-Tamil Nadu to stay conscious and undergo regular screening as women are the true lights of our nation.

Cancer has gradually occupied a bigger space in mortality count. It’s reported that every four minutes a person is affected by cancer. Women had taken over men; mainly 1 in 30 women are affected by breast cancer. Breast cancer has cancer. Breast cancer has a great impact on emotional & social perspectives. More than an organ it’s a symbol of beauty and motherhood. In Ancient Tamil literatures, mainly sanga literatures at many instances poets have glorified the beauty of women, donating breast, hair, waist line & motherhood. Though difficult we still can survive with one kidney, one eye, leg and hand but in breast cancer it is tragedy. The pain of hair due to chemotherapy, losing a breast and beauty seems to be higher than pain caused by the disease. They undergo a lot of mood swings and emotional imbalances, to build in resilience and to enhance their livelihood meditation. Yoga helps than to beat over fatigue. It also helps manage the side effects of cancer treatment and helps manage the emotional add-ons such us mental fatigue, depression. Yoga is mainly recommended for the psycho-social wellbeing along with family counselling. The yogic package mainly had pranayama practice, meditation and few asanas. Regular practice if continued by breast cancer survivor even after the cancer cure will have lifelong benefits. The purpose of writing this article is to create awareness among women of my own motherland-Tamil Nadu to stay conscious and undergo regular screening as women are the true lights of our nation.

As English has its influence throughout the world, most of Shakespeare’s works became famous. Even then, one can challenge that so far no one has written anything which can beat down the classical epics and Idhikāsams. There is no much difference between men and women in nature. Both are similar in aesthetics, knowledge, character etc. The respect given to women during Sangam period has got changed. They were refused of their rights in the later literature and in the minds of the poets. The chaste women in the Tamil epics were obedient to their husbands, and on one would have ever questioned their husbands. Akalyai, who accidently lost her chastity is also included in the list of chaste women. Panchali, who is referred as Draupathi, Krishnai, Indhirasenai, Thrihayani is the heroine of Vyasar’s Maha Bharatham, won by Arjuna in Swayamvaram, she became wife of five Pandavas on the words of Kunthi. She appealed to Kannan to safeguard her during the abuse happened to her by Dushyasana, in Dhruyodhana’s court when the game of dice was challenged to her husband. Sita, the heroine of Ramayana is adored as the ‘fire of chastity’, ‘ornament of chastity’ etc. Though Mandodhri condemns her husband’s activities, she is also added to be one among the chaste women as she died immediately following her husband’s death. Periyar appreciates only certain heroine who parallels his ideologies of reasoning, discipline and self-respect and criticizes others.

The universal unification of the Lord siva and sakthi was the result of creation of woman. The woman was glorified by the poets like valluvan, kamban, and Ilango and they were felicitated by Bharathi. "Panjali Sabatham" was a revengeful epic of Bharathi and he created Panjali as an eminent equivalent to the prisoned persona Seetha, and virally virtuous Kannagi. The speaking skill of these three characters was exhibited marvellously by the creativity of the poets. The object of this research is to exhibit the exuberant speaking skill of these characters. The argumentative speech of Kannagi to prove the innocence of her husband towards the Pandiya King and Seetha against the pleading Ravana, and Panjali who was ashamed by her relatives were taken for research. The research also brings out the heroic nature of these characters through their speech was the reason for the stability of these three epics.

‘Porul Thodarnilai Ceyyul’ was the name given to epic before the word kāppiyam came into existence. Tamil lexicon refers ‘kāppiyam’ as Sanskrit term. Kāvyam is the word used by Sanskrit scholars for ‘kāviyam’. Ravana Kāviyam written by Pulavar Kulanthai consists of 56 padalams (Chapters) of 2828 Viruttangal i.e., poems. He adopts the story of Ramayana as it is. He is a person who follows Periyar’s ideology of self-respect, feminism etc. His passion for Tamil makes him write many of his creative writings. Periyar advised women to learn all arts, particularly the art of self-defence. Kambar had depicted Sita as Rama’s wife in his epic. The relationship of Rama and Sita varies in various Ramayanas available in India. Ravana kāviyam doesn’t deviate from the parameters of epic. It stands within its grammar. Pulavar Kulanthai portraits women characters with dignity modesty of women.

The sweetness of domestic life begins with the labor of mankind. The connection and happiness of the human relationship is due to the combination of the two hearts. The Ancient Tamil community has observed that although sexual desire is a fundamental characteristic of living organisms, morality, honesty and high character should be practiced in them. This article focuses on the sociological interpretation of the immoral attacks of the leader in tamil poems created by promoting morality, the physiological lying characteristics of the leader and the psychological implications they create.

Morgan found that the adi from of the clans formed on the basis of maternal rights, from which the clans based on paternal rights later developed. In this way we understand that the castes we see among the people who are tired of the ancient Social civilization are based on paternal rights and before that there were Social clans with maternal rights. As important as Darwin’s theory of evolution way in biology and how important Marx’s Philosophy of surplus value was in the field of Political, Economy, so important is the discovery that there was a Primitive maternal right that preceded patriarchy in civilized populations. The Social system that forgot this historical background enslaved the woman. set her aside from production. She was stripped of her rights and made to kneel before the man the began to paint her limbs. Myths about women and literary evidence in written form spilled out of masculine thought. Thus, the women become the most physically vulnerable in the attack on the country. In his poems, he shows the way in which the Tamil community considers activities that are considered sacred and pure. Malati Maitri writes about Social liberation, questioning the sacred practices of sacrifice, family morality, domesticity, motherhood and affection.

In his 1993 Dalit Panpaadu, Raj Gauthaman declares that Dalit writing should “outrage and even repel the guardians of caste and class” (qtd. in Holmström, 2008: xii). Writing by Dalit women has been exceptionally successful in achieving this goal, particularly in its representation of the sexuality and sexually-charged language of Dalit women. For instance, in Sangati, Tamil author Bama describes the difficult and deeply moving lives of Dalit women in south India. Although multiply subversive, Sangati is the most outrageous in its exposure of the sexual violence that often underpins the language of her female characters. Similarly, in her oral autobiography Viramma: Life of an Untouchable, Viramma repeatedly speaks in ways that suggest her embrace of that which, from an upper-caste and middle-class perspective, might seem vulgar, especially since it issues from the mouth of a woman. The present article theorizes this use of sexual language, arguing that it can be read as a powerful disruption of the feminine in that it refuses to play to patriarchal expectations about feminine decorum, and, as such, it models a defiance that mainstream feminism, rooted as it has been in predominantly middle-class values, might very well copy. To understand the contours of this defiance, I compare Dalit women’s bodily language, including that found in Sukirtharani’s poetry, to other expressions of Indian feminine sexuality: in Kamala Das’s biography and poems, and in the lyrics to devadasi songs.

Tulisan ini mendeskripsikan tentang adanya sebuah diskursus baru pada media sosial, yakni kemunculan niqabstyle. Diskursus ini mewakili sebuah tren dimana perempuan-perempuan bercadar menampilkan dirinya di media sosial dengan gaya mereka masing-masing. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengungkap makna-makna di balik fenomena tersebut. Pengambilan data diawali dengan pengumpulan postingan-postingan terkumpul dalam #niqabstyle. Data telah terkumpul kemudian dikategorikan berdasarkan kriteria tertentu dan dianalisis dengan Semiotika Peirce. Analisis ini memperhatikan ground, representament, dan interpretant dari objek-objek yang dikaji. Sehinga ditemukan makna-makna yang ada di balik objek tersebut. Penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa kemunculan #niqabstyle merupakan hasil dialektika antara komitmen untuk mempertahankan kesalehan dengan keinginan untuk tampil stylish dari para perempuan bercadar. Dialektika ini mendorong mereka untuk tampil stylish dengan tetap menggunakan cadar. Penampilan mereka yang seperti ini memiliki makna bahwa mereka tetap bias tampil modish dengan tetap mempertahankan komitmen mereka untuk menjadi wanita-wanita salehah.[This paper describes a new discourse on social media, namely the emergence of the niqab style. This discourse represents a trend where veiled women present themselves on social media in their own style. This study aims to reveal the meanings behind this phenomenon. Data collection begins with the collection of posts collected in #niqabstyle. The data has been collected and then categorized based on certain criteria and analyzed by Peirce's Semiotics. This analysis pays attention to the ground, representant, and interpretant of the objects being studied. The meanings behind the object are found. This research concludes that the appearance of #niqabstyle is the dialectical result of the commitment to maintain piety and the desire to look stylish by veiled women. This dialectic encourages them to look stylish while still wearing the veil. Their appearance like this means that they can still appear modish while maintaining their commitment to becoming pious women.]

<p><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>La escritora mejicana Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) ansiaba otro modo de ser mujer y libre en la sociedad en la que le tocó vivir, convirtiéndose este deseo en el <em>leitmotiv</em> de su obra. En cuanto al amor, se dice que Castellanos estaba convencida de que no podría vivir sin que su marido la amara tanto como ella a él, tal y como ella misma parece indicar en <em>Cartas a Ricardo</em> (1994). La autora concluye uno de sus poemas más conocidos, “Meditación en el umbral”, con versos que incitan a la búsqueda de otros modos de ser, siendo mi propósito el de redireccionar ese registro a otros modos de amar. Para ello recurriré a la teoría postestructural de Luce Irigaray, quien hace que nos cuestionemos, al igual que hiciera Castellanos, nuestra identidad, pero que, a diferencia de la escritora mejicana, huye de buscar una respuesta definitoria y, en lo referente al amor, profundiza en la búsqueda de una cultura que modifique la condición de las relaciones amorosas. Y es que otros modos de ser y de amar son posibles.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos knew that other ways of being a woman and a free subject were possible, and it was this very desire that became the <em>leitmotiv</em> of her work. Regarding love, it has been said that Castellanos was convinced that it was impossible for her to live without the love of her husband, as she seems to underline in <em>Cartas a Ricardo</em> (1994). She concludes one of her well-known poems, “Meditación en el umbral”, with lines that encourage us to claim new ways of being. It is my purpose to redirect this aim towards new ways of loving within a romantic relationship. To do so I will use Luce Irigaray’s poststructuralist theoretical framework on love. This critic makes us question, as Castellanos did, our identity, but differs from the Mexican writer in trying to find an answer and, regarding love, deeply encourages us to deconstruct a culture which should modify romantic relationship stereotypes, since other ways of being and loving are possible.</p><br /><div id="SLG_balloon_obj" style="display: block;"><div id="SLG_button" class="SLG_ImTranslatorLogo" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/imtranslator-s.png'); display: none; opacity: 1;"> </div><div id="SLG_shadow_translation_result2" style="display: none;"> </div><div id="SLG_shadow_translator" style="display: none;"><div id="SLG_planshet" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/bg2.png') #f4f5f5;"><div id="SLG_arrow_up" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/up.png');"> </div><div id="SLG_providers" style="visibility: hidden;"><div id="SLG_P0" class="SLG_BL_LABLE_ON" title="Google">G</div><div id="SLG_P1" class="SLG_BL_LABLE_ON" title="Microsoft">M</div><div id="SLG_P2" class="SLG_BL_LABLE_ON" title="Translator">T</div></div><div id="SLG_alert_bbl"> </div><div id="SLG_TB"><div id="SLG_bubblelogo" class="SLG_ImTranslatorLogo" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/imtranslator-s.png');"> </div><table id="SLG_tables" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SLG_td" align="right" width="10%"><input id="SLG_locer" title="Fijar idioma" type="checkbox" /></td><td class="SLG_td" align="left" width="20%"><select id="SLG_lng_from"><option value="auto">Detectar idioma</option><option value="af">Afrikáans</option><option value="sq">Albanés</option><option value="de">Alemán</option><option value="ar">Árabe</option><option value="hy">Armenio</option><option value="az">Azerí</option><option value="bn">Bengalí</option><option value="be">Bielorruso</option><option value="my">Birmano</option><option value="bs">Bosnio</option><option value="bg">Búlgaro</option><option value="kn">Canarés</option><option value="ca">Catalán</option><option value="ceb">Cebuano</option><option value="cs">Checo</option><option value="ny">Chichewa</option><option value="zh-CN">Chino (Simp)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chino (Trad)</option><option value="si">Cincalés</option><option value="ko">Coreano</option><option value="ht">Criollo haitiano</option><option value="hr">Croata</option><option value="da">Danés</option><option value="sk">Eslovaco</option><option value="sl">Esloveno</option><option value="es">Español</option><option value="eo">Esperanto</option><option value="et">Estonio</option><option value="eu">Euskera</option><option value="fi">Finlandés</option><option value="fr">Francés</option><option value="cy">Galés</option><option value="gl">Gallego</option><option value="ka">Georgiano</option><option value="el">Griego</option><option value="gu">Gujarati</option><option value="ha">Hausa</option><option value="iw">Hebreo</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hmn">Hmong</option><option value="nl">Holandés</option><option value="hu">Húngaro</option><option value="ig">Igbo</option><option value="id">Indonesio</option><option value="en">Inglés</option><option value="ga">Irlandés</option><option value="is">Islandés</option><option value="it">Italiano</option><option value="ja">Japonés</option><option value="jw">Javanés</option><option value="km">Jemer</option><option value="kk">Kazajo</option><option value="lo">Lao</option><option value="la">Latín</option><option value="lv">Letón</option><option value="lt">Lituano</option><option value="mk">Macedonio</option><option value="ml">Malayalam</option><option value="ms">Malayo</option><option value="mg">Malgache</option><option value="mt">Maltés</option><option value="mi">Maorí</option><option value="mr">Maratí</option><option value="mn">Mongol</option><option value="ne">Nepalí</option><option value="no">Noruego</option><option value="fa">Persa</option><option value="pl">Polaco</option><option value="pt">Portugués</option><option value="pa">Punjabí</option><option value="ro">Rumano</option><option value="ru">Ruso</option><option value="sr">Serbio</option><option value="st">Sesoto</option><option value="so">Somalí</option><option value="sw">Suajili</option><option value="sv">Sueco</option><option value="su">Sundanés</option><option value="tl">Tagalo</option><option value="th">Tailandés</option><option value="ta">Tamil</option><option value="tg">Tayiko</option><option value="te">Telugu</option><option value="tr">Turco</option><option value="uk">Ucraniano</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="uz">Uzbeco</option><option value="vi">Vietnamita</option><option value="yi">Yidis</option><option value="yo">Yoruba</option><option value="zu">Zulú</option></select></td><td class="SLG_td" align="center" width="3"> </td><td class="SLG_td" align="left" width="20%"><select id="SLG_lng_to"><option value="af">Afrikáans</option><option value="sq">Albanés</option><option value="de">Alemán</option><option value="ar">Árabe</option><option value="hy">Armenio</option><option value="az">Azerí</option><option value="bn">Bengalí</option><option value="be">Bielorruso</option><option value="my">Birmano</option><option value="bs">Bosnio</option><option value="bg">Búlgaro</option><option value="kn">Canarés</option><option value="ca">Catalán</option><option value="ceb">Cebuano</option><option value="cs">Checo</option><option value="ny">Chichewa</option><option value="zh-CN">Chino (Simp)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chino (Trad)</option><option value="si">Cincalés</option><option value="ko">Coreano</option><option value="ht">Criollo haitiano</option><option value="hr">Croata</option><option value="da">Danés</option><option value="sk">Eslovaco</option><option value="sl">Esloveno</option><option selected="selected" value="es">Español</option><option value="eo">Esperanto</option><option value="et">Estonio</option><option value="eu">Euskera</option><option value="fi">Finlandés</option><option value="fr">Francés</option><option value="cy">Galés</option><option value="gl">Gallego</option><option value="ka">Georgiano</option><option value="el">Griego</option><option value="gu">Gujarati</option><option value="ha">Hausa</option><option value="iw">Hebreo</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hmn">Hmong</option><option value="nl">Holandés</option><option value="hu">Húngaro</option><option value="ig">Igbo</option><option value="id">Indonesio</option><option value="en">Inglés</option><option value="ga">Irlandés</option><option value="is">Islandés</option><option value="it">Italiano</option><option value="ja">Japonés</option><option value="jw">Javanés</option><option value="km">Jemer</option><option value="kk">Kazajo</option><option value="lo">Lao</option><option value="la">Latín</option><option value="lv">Letón</option><option value="lt">Lituano</option><option value="mk">Macedonio</option><option value="ml">Malayalam</option><option value="ms">Malayo</option><option value="mg">Malgache</option><option value="mt">Maltés</option><option value="mi">Maorí</option><option value="mr">Maratí</option><option value="mn">Mongol</option><option value="ne">Nepalí</option><option value="no">Noruego</option><option value="fa">Persa</option><option value="pl">Polaco</option><option value="pt">Portugués</option><option value="pa">Punjabí</option><option value="ro">Rumano</option><option value="ru">Ruso</option><option value="sr">Serbio</option><option value="st">Sesoto</option><option value="so">Somalí</option><option value="sw">Suajili</option><option value="sv">Sueco</option><option value="su">Sundanés</option><option value="tl">Tagalo</option><option value="th">Tailandés</option><option value="ta">Tamil</option><option value="tg">Tayiko</option><option value="te">Telugu</option><option value="tr">Turco</option><option value="uk">Ucraniano</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="uz">Uzbeco</option><option value="vi">Vietnamita</option><option value="yi">Yidis</option><option value="yo">Yoruba</option><option value="zu">Zulú</option></select></td><td class="SLG_td" align="center" width="21%"> </td><td class="SLG_td" align="center" width="6%"> </td><td class="SLG_td" align="center" width="6%"> </td><td class="SLG_td" align="center" width="6%"> </td><td class="SLG_td" align="center" width="6%"> </td><td class="SLG_td" width="10%"> </td><td class="SLG_td" align="right" width="8%"> </td></tr></table></div></div><div id="SLG_shadow_translation_result" style="visibility: visible;"> </div><div id="SLG_loading" class="SLG_loading" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/loading.gif');"> </div><div id="SLG_player2"> </div><div id="SLG_alert100">La función de sonido está limitada a 200 caracteres</div><div id="SLG_Balloon_options" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/bg3.png') #ffffff;"><div id="SLG_arrow_down" style="background: url('chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/img/util/down.png');"> </div><table width="100%"><tr><td align="left" width="18%" height="16"> </td><td align="center" width="68%"><a class="SLG_options" title="Mostrar opciones" href="chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/html/options/options.html?bbl" target="_blank">Opciones</a> : <a class="SLG_options" title="Historial de traducciones" href="chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/html/options/options.html?hist" target="_blank">Historia</a> : <a class="SLG_options" title="ImTranslator Ayuda" href="http://about.imtranslator.net/tutorials/presentations/google-translate-for-opera/opera-popup-bubble/" target="_blank">Ayuda</a> : <a class="SLG_options" title="ImTranslator Feedback" href="chrome-extension://mchdgimobfnilobnllpdnompfjkkfdmi/content/html/options/options.html?feed" target="_blank">Feedback</a></td><td align="right" width="15%"><span id="SLG_Balloon_Close" title="Cerrar">Cerrar</span></td></tr></table></div></div></div>

This article uses feminist perspectives on decoloniality as a lens for analysing selected poems from Francine Simon’s début collection, Thungachi (2017). Simon is a South African Indian woman poet from Durban, raised by Catholic parents of Tamil linguistic heritage. Her poetry collection, while feminist and experimental, deeply captures the experiences of dispossession and loss that define the large majority of South African Indians, with particular focus on the women whose voices remain marginalised in the South African literary canon. Framed by decolonial theory, this study serves the interests of decolonising research praxis, and thereby the nature of the knowledge produced. I conducted in-depth interviews with Simon and use them as a supplementary device in executing a literary analysis of two poems: “Betel Nut”, and “Tamil Familiars”. These poems emphasise the use of South African Indian English and the role that South African Indian women occupy as custodians of the cultural archive in maintaining fragments of precolonial ontologies. This article finds that it is necessary to critique Simon’s poetry within a decolonial, feminist framework in order to uncover its cultural complexities and contributions to counter-discourse against the Western, objectivist knowledge paradigm.

Abstract Introduction Polyneuropathy is a key feature of polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal band, and skin changes syndrome, which is a paraneoplastic manifestation of an underlying lymphoproliferative neoplasm. We report the first case of polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal band, and skin changes syndrome presenting with a pseudosensory level. Case presentation A 59-year-old Tamil woman with long-standing diabetes mellitus and hypertension developed painless, progressive inguinal lymphadenopathy. A contrast-enhanced computed tomography scan showed mild hepatomegaly and intra-abdominal lymphadenopathy. A histological examination of an enlarged inguinal lymph node showed features of a plasma cell-type Castleman disease. She was treated with rituximab. Six months later, she developed gradually ascending numbness and weakness of both lower limbs. On examination, she had flaccid paraparesis (power 3/5) with a sensory level to pinprick at thoracic level 9. Joint position sense was preserved. Her cranial nerves and upper limbs were neurologically normal. Nerve conduction studies confirmed peripheral neuropathy with conduction slowing and a magnetic resonance imaging of her spine did not show cord or root compression. Serum protein electrophoresis showed a monoclonal band. A bone marrow biopsy showed a hypercellular marrow with 30% plasma cells. A repeat contrast-enhanced computed tomography scan showed sclerotic bony lesions involving multiple vertebrae in addition to mild hepatomegaly and intra-abdominal lymphadenopathy. Polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal band, and skin changes syndrome was diagnosed and she was treated with intravenously administered pulse therapy of dexamethasone and cyclophosphamide. After three cycles of treatment, she regained normal muscle power and sensation. Conclusions Polyneuropathy in polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal band, and skin changes syndrome can present as a pseudosensory level.

A discourse, according to Alan Sekula, is "an arena of information exchange, that is a system of relations between parties engaged in communicative activity."1 Sekula immediately qualifies his definition by pointing out that "the notion of discourse is a notion of limits," and arguing that "it is this limiting function that determines the very possibility of meaning." In the capacity of testing the acceptable limits of any possible subject, jokes often reveal contradictions or ambivalent feelings about the meaning of power relations. This seems especially true about jokes involving sexual or erotic situations. In this paper, I will examine several jokes about sex that I have heard at one point or another, and consider how these jokes reveal the ideological dialogue interwoven in phallogocentric power. For many years I made my living in Los Angeles as a blueprint machine operator in an architectural office and as a typesetter for weekly newspapers. All machines eventually break down, and repair workers are often welcome simply because they provide a different face within the routine. Since repair workers are moving from site to site, they are also in a position to pass on the latest economic rumor about another company, or to repeat a joke that someone has just told them. These jokes can range from a variant of the three-guys-on-an-island routine to a story about the Pope being driven to Yankees Stadium in a limousine. I am not especially good at remembering jokes, but the following one stands out, in part because I was surprised that the repairman felt comfortable enough about the work environment he was in to tell me the joke. In retrospect, I guess he looked at the five-to-one ratio of men to women in the production department and figured that there were equivalent odds in anyone being bothered by telling me the following joke: A man's at a party and he starts talking with a very beautiful woman. After about a half-hour of bantering and chit-chat, the man says, "Would you sleep with me if I gave you ten million dollars?" The woman looks at the man, pauses, and says, "Ten million for one night? Well, yes," she says. "How about a million dollars?" says the man? "Maybe," says the woman. "How about a hundred dollars?" says the man. "No way," says the woman. "What do you think I am? A whore?" "Oh, we've already established that," says the man. "We're just quibbling about the price." The man who told me this joke as he fixed the typesetting equipment I worked on thought this was fairly funny, and I remember trying not to make it look as if I were smiling instead of scowling at what seemed to me a fairly nasty joke. As hostile humor goes, it could perhaps be conceded that it is fairly successful. The effectiveness of the joke aside, what impressed me was the sincerity with which he told the joke. It seemed as though the put-down told some kind of truth that he was not able to find expressed in any other way. The stereotype that the joke is built in is the assumption that all women are mercenary in regards to their sexual behavior: underneath the veneer of sexual attraction is a process of coy bargaining. The joke suggests that men and women might as well drop all pretension that any other motives are at work. In "quibbling about the price," the repair person's joke is attempting to reestablish the exchange of commodities in a capitalist society in terms of gendered domination. At its core, the above joke is meant to attack women who believe that they have any power in their lives other than sexual availability. One crucial aspect of these jokes as thumbnail sketches of domination is that they serve as information that revolves through a culture with the casual insouciance of rumors. At the time, it Did not occur to me to ask the repairman where he had first heard the joke, though he probably would have said from somebody working at the place where he had been. If I had contacted that person, I no doubt would have been referred to yet another person. Even if I had managed to find a print version of the joke, it probably would not have an individual's name attached to it. In circulating without specific attribution in regards to authorship, the anonymity of jokes allows them to function as the gossip of ideology. If, as Alan Sinfield suggests, the point of ideology is to make an explanation of social reality plausible,2 sexual jokes in particular repeat categorical ideas, e.g., all women are basically prostitutes in terms of their sexual agency, and make the implausible believable. If the purpose of ideology is to make the logic of a social system cohere, jokes point up imperfections in the arrangements, and allow us to estimate how much change would have to occur for the flaws in that logic to become acceptable, if not at least somewhat more tolerable. Jokes permit us to express our doubts about the distribution of power or to suppress incipient doubts, and in quelling them, mold the energy of doubt into more acceptable projections of normativity. Given that ideology is fundamentally patriarchal, most sex jokes are about the disproportionate relations of power, control and authority. Male fears about the interminable unreliability of their value as reproductive agents are a large part of the trumpery of social life that provides the foundation for jokes about sex. For men, part of the baggage they lug around as that trumpery is a concern about the size of their penis. Phallic jokes almost always involve an objectification of women. A co-worker at the same newspaper where I heard the first joke told me the following one at the tail end of a fourteen hour shift. I have to confess that I laughed more at this one, and I will not use exhaustion as an excuse. A man is taking a walk with his new wife, and up ahead he sees her first husband walking towards them. As they start to pass each other, the ex-husband says, "Hey, how does it feel to be with used goods?" "Very lovely," replies the new husband, "once I get past the used part." The male gaze in this joke is focused completely on the genitals of all three of the characters. The woman is portrayed as common property, and her worth is only gauged in relationship to the transience of phallic power. The woman in this joke doesn't even get to protest her status, but even when the woman is given the punch line, as in the following joke, the sexual agency at the core of the joke is portrayed as gratifying the ideological assumptions of power and possession. A woman gets into bed with her new husband on their wedding night, and says, "I've got something to tell you, dear." "What's that, sweetheart?" "I want you to be very gentle. I'm still a virgin." "That's can't be possible," the husband says. "You've been married three times before me." "Well," says the wife, "The first husband was a gynecologist, he just like to look at it. The second was a psychiatrist. He just liked to talk about it. The third was a veterinarian. He just coughed up hairballs." I would rate this as a far better joke than the first two, in part because it has a stronger coil of a starting point. Jokes, like poems, have their own peculiar logic, and jokes often work best when they begin with an absurd situation. A woman still being a virgin as she starts her fourth marriage is a blatantly absurd proposition, and yet and yet that which appears to be contradictory is quickly explained by involving the absurd amount of power we cede to those at the top of the masculine pyramid. The first three husbands would all seem to be at the summit of discourse in that they are trained as doctors, and theoretically are potent agents of domination. The absurdity of the joke's initial proposition is a necessary component for pointing up how the contingency of the desire for erotic pleasure meets its limits in the imbalance of power created by male control of professional life. The joke plays out the full ramifications of the power of the male gaze in objectifying women. In contrast, the woman's power in this joke is only in the passivity of her virginity. If the men are not able to have erections, the woman does not assert herself either in that she gives no indication that she enjoyed in the slightest degree the cunnilingus of the poem's final punch line. Perhaps the most insidious part of sexual jokes is that it's very hard to resist their allure. We might regard ourselves as seeing through all the machinations of an interpellative society, and yet in spite of intellectual insights, can find ourselves enjoying humor that is effective only because it is playing off stereotypes of gender and power to which we are very susceptible. A huge number of jokes are about the costs and rewards of sexual power, and to that extent are the jagged nodes of domination. As with gossip, the distortions are repeated one person at a time. The cumulative effect of this circulation is to close off or limit the possibilities of other ways of organizing social life. Jokes, in that sense, contain and control the discourse generated by the doubts that ideology inherently raises. If laughter mutes these doubts, it also springs the traps that power sets for itself and us in maintaining its grip on the comedy of life. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mohr, Bill. "The Gossip of Ideology" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/2-mohr-gossip-of-ideology.html>. APA Style Mohr, B. (2003, Nov 10). The Gossip of Ideology. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/2-mohr-gossip-of-ideology.html>

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.