Theorizing orality and performance in literary anecdote and history : Boswell's diaries

The diaries of the eighteenth-century literary figure James Boswell supply a rich source of materials useful not only for delving into period songs and their role in daily life, but also for interrogating our theoretical framework for reading such materials. Boswell's renderings of popular singing and song culture in the course of his activities--literary, political, amorous, familial, domestic, traveling, business, leisure--demonstrate in example after example the mixing of oral and written, of belles lettres and popular culture, in the life and discursive self-fashioning of one lively eighteenth-century gentleman. Recent theoretical framings propose that we rethink those assumptions and inclinations in the study of songs and oral performance that have often inclined to separate the oral and orality from literature and the literary. Such a conceptual division skirts the truly interpolated character of expressive modes, especially those that are customary and quotidian. In addition, the study of cultural expression came into being with a history of conceptualizing "folk" music in terms of misleading notions of a "purer" oral culture, in contrast to a less "authentic" realm of literacy, print, and media-infused popular culture. A further tendency in some studies of orality has at times been a focus on the present with a lack of historical depth in analysis, which gives less access to understanding the oral dimension of the arts and experience of the past. The anecdotes that Boswell recorded prompt us to take up newer models and tools for analysis as we explore his detailed panorama of oral contexts, informal musical performance, and collective cultural reference and experience in eighteenth-century Britain.Issue title: Sound Effects. Note: In memory of Morris Brownell (1933-2007)

Conquering the Zoombies. Why we need drama in online settings

In this piece we offer a reflexive account of our recent experiences of teaching with drama in two different online settings. Eva will recount her practice teaching trainee teachers in Switzerland and Nicky will recall her practice working with postgraduate applied theatre students in a drama school in the UK. Over and over again, we have encountered the mind-set that teaching drama online is “not possible”, or at the very least, that it is but a pale reflection of face-to-face teaching. Although we were out of our comfort zone at first, we now feel that teaching with drama online has its place in our fast-paced and increasingly technological world. Teaching and learning in digital contexts will likely remain a reality from now on, thus it is the purpose of this article to make the case for the creative potential of and indeed urgent need for online teaching that includes drama

Figures of Style in Strangers on a Train

PARALLELISM AND PROGNOSTICATION: FIGURE OF STYLE IN STRANGERS ON A TRAIN     "I certainly admire people who do things!"               Bruno Anthony to Guy HainesSTRANGERS on a Train is a parable about a wish fulfilment fantasy overtaking reality by means of metaphysical freedom, opposing energies, and deadly consequences. The film suggests that dangerous moral, ethical, and material forces are unleashed when conscious behaviour and subconscious wishes are in conflict. The narrative and stylistic organization of the film (based on the notion of inner-directed elements controlling the objective world) bears a general similarity to some of the precepts of Expressionism. The essential expressionist credo is that stylistic exaggerations and manipulations are commensurate with a protagonist's extraordinary anxiety and inner conflicts. For example, shortly after Miriam's (Laura Elliot) murder, there is a medium long-shot of Guy's (Farley Granger) cab pulling up to his apartment building with the bright..

The Cultural Politics of Jennifer Lawrence as Star, Actor, Celebrity

Jennifer Lawrence emerged as a major star of American cinema following the collapse of the economy in 2008. This article will argue that her image in the initial phase of her fame (2010–16) is reflective of mainstream culture’s response to the crisis of neoliberalism and the endemic economic insecurity it has precipitated. Rising to prominence in the Great Recession through indie hit Winter’s Bone (2010), in which Lawrence played Ree Dolly, an impoverished young girl trying to save her family from destitution, on to her zeitgeist-capturing turns as reluctant revolutionary Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (2012–15) series, and through her role as successful entrepreneur and single mom Joy Mangano in Joy (2015), she played to a particular ‘type’: ‘white trash with too much responsibility’. Indeed, the initial phase of Lawrence’s film career (2010–16) performed essential cultural work in the aftermath of the recession, attempting to critique the consequences of neoliberalism’s crisis, but ultimately coming to reinforce some of its fundamental ideological tenets. This article argues that Lawrence’s image, performances, and acting style have addressed the effects of the crisis of neoliberalism and, more often than not, offered a fantastical vision of how one might escape it

A poetic playground: collaborative practices in the Peak District

© 2017 Landscape Research Group Ltd. The literary map of the Peak District is surprisingly thin. This article explores how this lacuna has been addressed by a range of contemporary writers who have made the Peak District a site of poetic hyperactivity: a landscape of creative processes and practices; projects and poems of place. Paying particular attention to texts by Helen Mort, Mark Goodwin and Alec Finlay, the article contends that much contemporary Peak District poetry is underpinned by imaginative and formal experimentation: a shared commitment to the exploration of new ways of perceiving, practising and representing landscape which is characterised by a collective playfulness. Moreover, the article argues that much contemporary Peak District poetry is shaped by collaboration as the poets placed under critical scrutiny share a preoccupation with finding new creative methodologies to articulate the communal experience of being-in-landscape

Sleep against Capitalism

UIDB/05021/2020 UIDP/05021/2020Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity. Sleep is one of the last resistance gestures against capitalised lives, opening a gap for social change through the aesthetic dimension as an extension of arts in politics. Parasomnia raises awareness for empathy and unproductiveness by inviting spectators to take a massage and eating delicacies. Bodily senses are therefore a way to activate potentials and becomings. Often understood as weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the actions elicited—contemplating, caring, and resting—bring up a strength and a capacity to arouse the imagination and fabulation as political acts. It is also argued that dimensions such as fantasmatic, cyclicity, and subjectivity are key social outputs of Parasomnia. Allowing for a pause in a continuous stream of goals, of connectivity and consumption, and without commodification purposes, sleep may return us to a sense of our own interiority made of several layers: like a fall into the sleep that enables alterity to emerge inside the self.publishersversionpublishe

Body Parts and Their Epic Struggle in Ovid’s Amores

This thesis examines how body parts in Ovid’s Amores provide the location for an epic battle between the conflicting genres of Tragedy and Elegy. The first chapter summarizes past Ovidian scholarship. The second chapter examines how Ovid separates body parts of the amator and the puella in Amores 1.4 and 1.5 in order to deny the lovers complete unification. The third chapter expands the conclusion of the second by analyzing poems in Books 2 and 3, which contain a significant number of body parts, to determine how the amator’s interaction with the puella’s body parts reflects his lack of union with her in public and private spheres. The fourth chapter rereads the puella’s body parts, and the amator’s relationship with them, with a view to establish the puella as either Tragedy or Elegy and to theorize how the amator’s relationship with the puella symbolizes the poeta’s relationship with his poetry

“Reader, I Did Not Marry Him:” Marriage Proposals, Choice, and Female Desire in the Victorian Era

This thesis examines marriage proposals scenes in Victorian literature from 1847 to 1874. In four major Victorian novels: Jane Eyre, North and South, Can You Forgive Her?, and Far from the Madding Crowd, scenes in which a suitor proposes present the heroine with a choice that will determine the rest of her life. These proposal scenes play out as negotiations of these heroines\u27 desires and provide them with insight about the daily reality of marriage. In an era where women were often sheltered from knowledge of what marriage actually entailed, the proposals in these novels allow the heroines to vocalize what they actually want and expect from the defining relationships in their lives

Battle of the Bains: Tactical Bathing in Two Expository Texts, One Film and a Novella

In numerous articles and texts published within the arenas of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, much has been written on the trope of the shared bath-and even more specifically the hammam-as a space of orientalism. Although researchers such as Magreban sociologist Fatima Mernissi, Algerian writer Malek Alloula, and film scholars Serena Anderlini-DOnofrio and Elisabetta Girelli have offered images of le bain turc in expository texts, art and media, and films as those which offer \u27Turkish Dreams\u27 of orientalist fantasy, this paper focuses on the space as a loci of performative strategies and tactical moves, which abet social resistance. I argue that one can posit the hammam, and acts of shared bathing in two expository texts, a film and a novella as riposte: Le bain turc is as a pool of resistive, not passive, odalisques. In this work I draw on Victor Turner\u27s theories of Social Drama, and Michel de Certeau\u27s concepts of strategies and tactics. My intervention is that, despite often seeming orientalist, these baths also act as social spaces of politically reactive liminoid acts: \u27playful\u27 insurgency. Female participants use \u27tactical bathing\u27 to rebut patriarchal pressure and oppression, creatively