6,108 research outputs found

    BEYOND THE MYTH: Screenwriting Approaches to Biographical Films

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    This PhD submission comprises an original screenplay on the relationship between African American activist Paul Robeson and the mining community of south Wales titled Robeson: They Can’t Stop Us Singing, and the accompanying exegesis. The aim is to explore, by academic study (gnosis) and creative practice (praxis), the previously overlooked field of writing biographical films, or biopics, and to acknowledge the role of the screenwriter in telling a person’s life story on film. The script is the experiment; the exegesis is the analysis and methodology. The role of the screenwriter is underrepresented across cinema studies, but no more so than in the discussion of biopics. My exegesis begins by exploring what academic and popular writing already exists on English-language biopics, highlighting that amidst auteurist approaches prevalent in cinema studies, little credit has been afforded to screenwriters. I seek to address this by examining how screenwriters have responded to historiographical and socio-political contexts while balancing the needs of the audience with factual integrity (or sometimes not), before using the case studies of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Lindbergh to explore how American hero figures have been represented on screen. How does a script written on Lincoln in 1939, for example, differ in terms of tone and political philosophy to one delivered in the 21st century? Using historical approaches, the exegesis then examines the life of Paul Robeson and the Welsh miners he knew, to observe the meticulous choices required by the screenwriter researching and writing a biopic script. Using primary sources (interviews with living dramatic writers, including the BAFTA-nominated screenwriter of the biopic, Good Vibrations) and secondary sources (screenplays, films, audio, interviews, other academic writing), I question where and when to begin and end a biographical story, which parts of a person’s life to include or jettison, how to make a historical figure’s events pertinent to a contemporary audience, and how to utilise fictionalised elements in a drama while adhering to a central truth. My own screenplay on Robeson and Wales is the embodiment of this research. The script demonstrates the myriad artistic decisions that need to be made to present the qualities and flaws of the historical figure. It shows why fictionalised moments and composite characters contribute to an understanding of a real person’s motives and feelings in a way documentary and historical writing cannot. And it stands as a record of the screenwriter’s previously overlooked contribution to creating biographical films

    Elite perceptions of the Victorian and Edwardian past in inter-war England

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    It is often argued by historians that members of the cultivated Elite after 1918 rejected the pre-war past. or at least subjected it to severe denigration. This thesis sets out to challenge such a view. Above all, it argues that inter-war critics of the Victorian and Edwardian past were unable to reject it even if that was what they felt inclined to do. This was because they were tied to those periods by the affective links of memory, family, and the continually unfolding consequences of the past in the present. Even the severest critics of the pre-war world, such as Lytton Strachey, were less frequently dismissive of history than ambivalent towards it. This ambivalence, it is argued, helped to keep the past alive and often to humanise it. The thesis also explores more positive estimation of Victorian and Edwardian history between the wars. It examines nostalgia for the past, as well as instances of continuity of practice and attitude. It explores the way in which inter-war society drew upon aspects of Victorian and Edwardian history both as illuminating parallels to contemporary affairs and to understand directly why the present was shaped as it was. Again, this testifies to the enduring power of the past after 1918. There are three parts to this thesis. Part One outlines the cultural context in which writers contemplated the Victorian and Edwardian past. Part Two explores some of the ways in which history was written about and used by inter-war society. Part Three examines the ways in which biographical depictions of eminent Victorians after 1918 encouraged emotional negotiation with the pas

    Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920s–1940s

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    This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectuals’ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life. Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the characters’ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. “Crossing” relates to characters’ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction. There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives. Type 1 is the crossing into “haunted” houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned ‘haunting’, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiers’ silenced, suffocated state. Type 2 is men crossing into female ghosts’ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals. Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the characters’ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the characters’ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality. Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authors’ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society. The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanity’s vices and destructive potential. The primary sources demonstrate their writers’ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and people’s lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity. The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality. This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time

    Theorising Christian Anarchism A Political Commentary on the Gospel

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    This thesis argues that there is a tradition in political theology and in political theory that deserves to be called "Christian anarchism." The various thinkers that contribute to this tradition have never before been considered to be part of a theoretical movement or tradition, and the originality of this thesis is to weave these thinkers together and present a generic theory of Christian anarchism. . Taken together, thinkers like Tolstoy, Ellul, Elliott and Andrews put forward a comprehensive exegesis of Jesus' teaching and example as implying a critique of the state and a vision of a stateless society. Based on this understanding of the Gospel, they accuse both the state and the church of contradicting, betraying and corrupting the essence of Christianity. Some Christian anarchists - Eller in particular - even see Romans 13 and the "render unto Caesar" passage as not discrediting but indeed confirming their interpretation, and although more activist Christian anarchists sometimes disagree on the potential role of civil disobedience, they do all stress that what matters above all is obedience to God Moreover, they all call for the "true" church to lead the Christian anarchist revolution by example, despite the very demanding sacrifices which this involves. They point to numerous examples of similar witness ever since the early church, and themselves strive to emulate such examples in their own lives - the Catholic Worker movement being perhaps the most notable example in this regard Thus, Christian anarchist thinkers' critique of the current order and appeal to follow God's radical commandments echoes the voices of the prophets of old, calling society to return to God's covenant. By weaving their scattered voices together - by theorising Christian anarchism - this thesis provides a political commentary on the Gospel which contributes as much to political theory as it does to political theology

    Full Issue: Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence, 2022 Special Issue (Vol. 5, Iss. 3)

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    The full-length 2022 Special Issue (Volume 5, Issue 3) of the Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence Access the online Pressbooks version (with downloadable EPUB format) here

    Irresistible Revolution: Black, Trans, and Disabled World-Making through Activist Portraiture

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    This practice-based dissertation project engages large-scale portraiture to confront and resist the fungibility of Blackness. The project comprises a selection of twenty drawings and an exegesis in which I analyze my aesthetic process in order to shed light on theoretical problems and gaps in Trans, Disability, Black studies and activisms. This collection of writing also discusses and presents activist struggle, white supremacy in the arts, abolitionist organizing and speculative futures. These theoretical explorations are supported by reflections on the collaborative creation process and the ways in which the portraits have been received. To this end, I have included interviews I conducted with the portrait subjects and through textual analysis of ways in which the portraits have been taken up in art and activist contexts. I argue that studying and supporting Black disabled activist practice can inform ways forward for disability arts in the Canadian milieu

    The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event

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    This dissertation examines late modernist, intermedial representations of events, considering art as an event and how art depicts and circulates events. Through cross-media close readings and interdisciplinary theories and methods derived from media studies, music and sound studies, intermedial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and literary theory, I study multimedia opera, civilian bombardments during the Spanish Civil War, the 1943 Harlem riot, and the atomic bombing of Japan in order to evaluate media practices from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Employing eventalization, my research illuminates intersections of media, gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Some of the artists I engage with include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Petry, Mina Loy, John Hersey, Shda Shinoe, and Nagai Takashi. The four chapters comprising this project take up fluctuating interactions among sonic, verbal, and visual mediations that were produced between 1927 and 1949, juxtaposing various newer media (photojournalism, radio, and others) with works of art (poetry, fiction, and painting). Stein and Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, transposed first into a staged opera and then as a radio broadcast, highlights how its many remediations offer formal innovation while reinforcing historical inequities. Picasso and Woolf's collage-like responses to war in Spain demonstrate hypermediacy and immediacy—remediation's twinned impulses—with each artist treating public and private divisions (as materials and as politics) differently. In their depictions of state violence against Black Americans, Hughes, Lawrence, and Petry draw differently on sonic, visual, and verbal modes. Hughes and Petry's fictional rioters publicly express dissatisfaction and challenge the containment strategies used during the actual riot. My concluding chapter also considers how intermediality resists containment, tracing the disparate availability of media in North America and Japan. Simultaneously empty and excessive, these atomic media reveal the ways knowledge and power produce nuclear subjects. My findings reveal that late modernism offers a particularly resonant set of texts and contexts from which to evaluate literature as a medium. Moreover, literature's porous borders enable multiple movements and engagements. The eventalization of these circulations reveal the political stakes and uses of intermediality

    Earth dance and fire song: A journey towards transformative reconciliation in nursing education

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    G̱ilakas\u27la, Nugwa’a̱m Joanna Elizabeth Fraser. I was born in East Africa to parents of European ancestry. I have been an inhabitant of the West Coast of Canada since I was two years old. This inquiry offers a vision for co-creating healing learning spaces for transformative reconciliation in nursing education. Oriented by Indigenous research methodologies, I draw from mĂ©tissage and, portraiture to share the story of finding ya\u27xa̱n yiyaḵ̓wima (my gifts from the Creator). Starting with finding ya\u27xa̱n dƂig̱a̱m (my name), I ask who I am in relation to the places and people who I have learned from. In finding ya\u27xa̱n ḵ̓a̱ngex̱tola (my blanket), I ask where I am from as I weave, unweave and reweave understandings of what I have learned as a nurse and as an educator. In finding ya\u27xa̱n ya̱xw\u27a̱nye\u27 (my dance), I ask where I am going and share my experiences from over 13 years of co-facilitating immersion learning field schools in remote First Nations communities. Finally, I share the learnings of my inquiry for educators more generally as I find ya\u27xa̱n ប̓a̱mda̱m (my song) and ask myself why I am here. My learnings from the field schools are about following the lead of Indigenous people, orienting myself to relationships and always seeking out wellness. These learnings are applied to nursing education more generally as my inquiry leads me through three landscapes: bearing witness, being an inhabitant and becoming Indigenist. Transformative reconciliation happens when we naáž”i\u27stamas (make things right) and tlaxwalapa (lift each other up with love). We can do this through living in relationally accountable and ecologically reciprocal ways. My lessons are of the Sisiutl, seeing everything in complexity, and of the he’istalis (world around us) experiencing everything as relationship. Ultimately, my vision is to reimagine nursing and nursing education so that we can heal ourselves, each other, and the land to become synala (whole)

    A Cornish palimpsest : Peter Lanyon and the construction of a new landscape, 1938-1964

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    The thesis examines the emergence of Peter Lanyon as one of the few truly innovative British landscape painters this century. In the Introduction I discuss the problematic nature of landscape art and consider the significance of Lanyon's discovery that direct description and linear perspective can be replaced with allusive representational elements by fusing the emotional and imaginative life of the artist with the physical activity of painting. Chapter One concentrates on the period 1936-8 when Lanyon was taught by Borlase Smart, a key figure in the St Ives art colony between the wars. Chapter Two examines the influence of Adrian Stokes and the links between Lanyon's painting and the theories developed in books such as Colour and Form and The Quattro Cento. Chapter Three analyses the period 1940-45 when Lanyon was directly influenced by the constructivism of Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. I look closely at their approaches to abstraction and assess Lanyon's relative position to them. The importance of Neo-Romanticism and the status of St Ives as a perceived avant-garde community is also addressed. In Chapter Four I discuss how Lanyon resolved to achieve a new orientation in his art on his return from wartime service with the RAF by synthesising constructivism, and traditional landscape. The Generation and Surfacing Series demonstrate his preoccupation with a sense of place, a fascination with the relationships between the human body and landscape and his struggle to find a technique and style that was entirely his own. His sense of existential insideness is discussed in Chapter Five through an examination of the work derived from Portreath, St. Just and Porthleven - key places in Lanyon's psychological attachment to the landscape of West Penwith. In Chapter Six I examine Lanyon's attachment to myths and archetypal forms, tracing the influence of Bergson's vitalist philosophy as well as his use of Celtic and classical motifs. Chapter Seven is a discussion of the malaise evident in Lanyon's work by 1955 and the impact of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery a year later. In the summer of 1959 Lanyon joined the Cornish Gliding Club and Chapter Eight looks at how this necessitated a dynamic, expanded conception of the landscape and a re-thinking of relations within the picture field. The ability to dissolve boundaries encouraged him to break down distinctions between painting and construction so that abstract sculptural elements were now assembled into independent works of art. Finally, Chapter Nine assesses Lanyon's overall position in relation to his early influences and to St Ives art as a whole, his response to new directions in art coming out of London and NewYork in the early 1960s and the importance of travel as a stimulus for further realignment in his artistic and topographical horizons. His pictorial inventiveness and vitality remained unabated at the time of his death and would undoubtedly have continued to be enriched by travel abroad and contact with new movements in modem art on both sides of the Atlanti
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