Anna Kérchy | University of Szeged (original) (raw)
Papers by Anna Kérchy
The Acoustics of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Alice Tales
International Research in Children's Literature
This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures i... more This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass (1865, 1871), published under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, renewed the genre of children's literature by turning the vocal play of literary nonsense into the organising principle of child-centric, non-didactic, ludic narratives. 1 It shows how his language games strategically undermine tyrannical ideological structures, whether in the form of discursive ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 80), the institution of monarchy, the adult–child hierarchy maintained by a pedagogy of fear, or speciesist supremacy of human over animal.
Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens
The Woman 69 Times: Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills
Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale
Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale
European Journal of English Studies, 2010
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: comparative critical and theoretical essays. Ed. Lovalerie King and Lynn Orilla Scott. New York: Palgrave Macmillan., 2006
paper published in Americana e-journal. “Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies... more paper published in Americana e-journal. “Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies” Special Issue. Fall 2017. Vol 13. No 2. http://americanaejournal.hu/vol13no2
Intro co-authored by Anna Kérchy and Catriona McAra: The feminist project has radicalised text/i... more Intro co-authored by Anna Kérchy and Catriona McAra:
The feminist project has radicalised text/image relationships in myriad ways, disrupting the contours of discipline and medium. The multifaceted recyclings of a transdisciplinary methodology remind us that although in the past decades text/image studies has become an established academic research field in the first decades of the twenty-first century, its subversive potential to challenge cultural hegemonies has not diminished. On the contrary, intermedial fusions remain loaded with political and ethical issues that are in search of sites of resistance for marginalised, othered social subjects and meanings. The introduction explains how this special journal issue emerges from and is addressed to the politically significant network of feminist researchers -- artists, theoreticians, activists -- we believe we share ties with on account of putting the study of intermediality in the service of 'constructing a radically new understanding of our world in all its horror and hope' (Pollock, 1988: 22)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Year: 2017
DOI identifier: 10.1080/13825577.2017.1369270
Kérchy Anna teli, előíró hangneme árulkodik leginkább a lap által vizionált ideális olvasó kibenl... more Kérchy Anna teli, előíró hangneme árulkodik leginkább a lap által vizionált ideális olvasó kibenlétéről. Képes hetilapról lévén szó, foglalkoztam az illusztrációk változásaival, a kép és a szöveg jelentésmezejében létrejött intermediális interakciókkal is. Elemzésemben következetesen feltüntettem az idézett szöveganyag előfordulási helyét; a pontos forrásmegjelölés hiánya azt jelzi, hogy az adott tartalom több helyen is megjelent a vizsgált lapszámokban.
"This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-se... more "This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Through a corporeal narratological method—a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body— it deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, ‘cultural’ body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material ‘reality’ (are) (de)compose(d by) the Carterian fiction’s destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres.
Reviews
“Kérchy’s “body-text interpretive model” offers an innovative approach that manages to illustrate how a feminist body-text sounds like and why it sounds the way it does. Certainly, this nexus of phenomena and narrative strategies is the most original aspect of Kérchy’s interpretation of Carter’s trilogy. The connection between the freaks that structure her reading (Eve/lyn, Fevvers, Dora and Nora) and the process of “self-freaking” becomes obvious in the reading chapters. Shedding light on textual ruptures, overwritings, palimpsestic strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres – “counter-performances,” as Kérchy calls them, this study forms an important re-evaluation of Carter’s final trilogy as an empowering feminist revision of “culturally ready-made” myths of femininity – standing within women’s literary tradition whilst subverting it internally and outlining “an alternative body- and identity-politics that starts out on the side of the othered freak.” - Prof. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner Universität Salzburg
“Ms. Kérchy’s monograph also contributes to contemporary critical debates on body and identity in their relation to textuality/sexuality, boundaries, difference and power. The author’s focus upon the (re)embodied identity's discursive (de)construction and corporeal (de)formations, its patriarchal marginalization and subversively gender-bendingfeminist pleasures is particularly challenging.” – Prof. György E. Szönyi, University of Szeged, Hungary
“. . . engages at a high level of sophistication with an interdisciplinary conversation about female embodiment and power relations. . . Her reading of Carter illustrates how power relations are undermined, inverted, mocked and reimagined. She makes this point not through what is becoming, in my opinion, a tired form of analysis of “everyday practices” in feminist studies (very popular in cultural studies and anthropological work on the body). But rather she shows how gender is also subverted and reinvented in powerful ways at the level of the imagination. This manuscript reminds us that being able to imagine and revel in the kind of sensuality provided by the artist (in this case, fictional writer) is a powerful means of re/un/doing gender.” - Prof. Allaine Cerwonka, Central European University
"
"Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal to Visual Nonsense in Tim Burton’s Cinematic Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland"
Anna Kérchy, in her article “Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal t... more Anna Kérchy, in her article “Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal to Visual Nonsense in Tim Burton’s Cinematic Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland,” examines how/whether the intermedial shifts accompanying the transmission of a literary text to a visual medium, – and (progressing from image to moving image to 3D CGI live-action animation) to a predictably unreliable computerized/digitalized visual medium that depicts mimetically ‘what has never been’ – bring about changes in our predominant modalities of experience that affect our perception of reality, as well as our strategies of make-believing, the dynamic interaction of our imaginative willingness and reluctance, and our interactive ways of making sense, and making up nonsense. The focus lies on Tim Burton’s 2010 cinematic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice-tales with the aim to explore the different modes of dis/enchantment that media change – the adaptation’s transition from verbal to visual (means of effecting) nonsense – effectuate.
Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Edited by Anna Kérchy. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
These essays analyze the intersection of fairy tale, fantasy and reality in postmodern artistic t... more These essays analyze the intersection of fairy tale, fantasy and reality in postmodern artistic texts. The editor underscores the transformation of both the reader-writer relationship and epistemological and ontological considerations by new technologies and emerging subgenres. This book contains 12 color plates and ten black and white photographs.
Reviews
“…the volume includes essays that present exploratory discussions of modern-day reinventions of the fairy tale and fantasy from a variety of perspectives that draw on emergent critical discourses…” - Prof. Dr. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère
“The editor’s organization of the volume exhibit a strong grasp of how important it is to relate generic, technological, political, and narrative dynamics with one another…”-Prof. Dr. Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawaii
“…this range of objects and of topics makes the volume genuinely timely, genuinely impressive and genuinely worthwhile.”-Prof. Dr. Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia
"As it stands, Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales is an uncompromisingly comprehensive and offers (perhaps too broad) an overview of the field and its potentials, its charming princes and clammy frogs." -- Dr. Karin Kukkonen, St. John's College, Oxford (Review in Marvels & Tales)
"Divided into six sections, the volume includes essays that explore the dynamics of interaction between contemporary reinventions of the fairy tale and fantasy and a wide range of current literary- and cultural theoretical trends, the list of which alone could spin the readers’ mind like the cyclone swooping Dorothy Gale into the magical Land of Oz." Dr. Larisa Kocic-Zámbó, University of Szeged, Hungary (Review in Americana)
"The authors discuss the often multiple rewritings of classic fairy tales, anti-fairy tales, and various master myths of literature, showing that these subvert the genre by imagining the lost voices of fairy-tale tellers, by making central a formerly marginalized character, or by using experimental postmodernist strategies (like permutation and disruption)." Prof. Dr. Enikő Bollobás, ELTE University, Budapest (Americana Review)
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Prof. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère
Preface by Anna Kérchy
SECTION 1: NEW MEDIA LITERACY
Hyperread, New Literacy, E-text
Cyber-Salons, Participatory Culture
Production Design
Critical Dance Studies
SECTION 2: EMERGING GENRES
Urban Fantasy
Steampunk
Forensic Crime Fantasy
Intermedial Text/Image. Graphic Narrative
Guro-Kawaii (Grotesque-Cute) Manga/Art
SECTION 3: REWRITING MYTH
The Interaction of Literature and Criticism. Feminist Imagination, Challenging the Canon
Anti-Fairy Tale, Revisiting Blue Beard
Critical Musicology. Revisiting Beauty and the Beast
Cult Fairy-Tale Romance. Revisiting the Animal-Groom Tale
Metamorphic Pornographic Fantasy. Revisiting Shakespeare
SECTION 4: RE-IMAGINING THE BODY
Body-Theatrical Performance
Feminist Body-Studies
Cyborg Body
Re-fashioning Embodiments
SECTION 5: CREATING FICTIONAL REALITIES
Ludic Simulations in the Virtual Reality of Computer Games
Virtual FairyLands in Trans/Post-humanist Science Fiction
Inventing a Fictitious Fairy Tale
Between Psychopathology and Fantasy
SECTION 6: NARRATOLOGICAL NOVELTIES
Transmedial Narratology, Representations of Race and Gender
Neo-Surrealism, Feminist Stylistics
Affective Narratology and the Emotional Politics of Reading
Corporeal Narratology
Filológiai Közlöny. Utazás, Otthon, Nőiség szám. 56.4. (2010): 367-381., 2010
The AnaChronisT 10 (2004): 97–124 ISSN 1219–2589, 2004
This paper examines performativity in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in ... more This paper examines performativity in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). I wish to reveal parallel spectacular, seductive and tricky performances of bodies and texts. My reading of spectacular corporeal and textual performances focuses on the heroine, revealing how Fevvers' parading deconstructive performances of ideologically prescribed femininity, and its limiting representations, coincide with the narrative's spectacular revisions of literary genres and writing styles, identified by discursive technologies of power with femininity and thus conventionally canonized as sentimentally kitsch or incomprehensibly hysterical modes of writing. My gender sensitive, reader-response approach also highlights the bifocal pleasures, tender irony and sisterly burlesque of the self-mockingly silly and histrionic hysteric "feminine" textual performance in order to reveal that the conventional concepts of a domineering patriarchal language violently incorporating and domineering weaker écriture féminine are demythologized. My final aim is to examine how Fevvers' confidence trick unveils that there are other wor(l)ds available for daring women writers and readers alike.
in: The Human Body in Contemporary Literatures in English: Cultural and Political Implications. Eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Marta Fernandez Morales. Frankfurt Am Main: Peter Lang, 2009. 129-150., 2009
Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature. Eds. Christine Reynier, Jean-Michel Ganteau. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. 2010. 145-161., 2010
You never heard of me, I dare Say. Well, I'm here." 2 Stevie Smith is a demythologiser of timeles... more You never heard of me, I dare Say. Well, I'm here." 2 Stevie Smith is a demythologiser of timeless fairy-tale-fragments, an experimenter with inner time, poetic tempo and snapshots of death contrasted with universal, historical temporality, and a (de)composer of nonsense poems accompanied by doodles often contradicting their verbal content, to revel in an absurd illogic. Her elusive, self-destabilising literary text seems independent of her socio-historicalpolitical context. She does not stick by one single place or cause, performs roleplayings and self-maskings, and concentrates on depersonalization, disappearance and the unspeakable. After examining recent critical attempts at Smith's recanonization as a serious author, (a war-writer and a feminist poet), I explore the existential, language-philosophical and ethical issues problematised by her poetry's leitmotifs: death, (mis)communication and self-representation. I argue that Smith provides a metatext on the complex dynamics of subversion and containment, deterritorialization and re-territorialization to locate herself in the in-between, opting for a commitment to autonomy and (de)liberated hesitation.
What Constitutes the Fantastic? Eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner et al. Szeged: JatePress, 2009.
TNTeF (2013) 3.1.
""THE FANTASY OF „MANLY” DISABILITY. ATYPICAL EMBODIMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMP... more ""THE FANTASY OF „MANLY” DISABILITY. ATYPICAL EMBODIMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE. This essay explores representations of the disabled male body in today’s
popular visual media. Its focus is on whether and how the”potently vulnerable” embodiments cherished by normative fan communities’ fantasies can personify alternative masculinities that reject hegemonic gender hierarchies. The ultimate concern is to see if they allow for a greater degree
of imaginative, erotic agency for female spectators. These masculinites are specific in that they let male viewers intimately relate to a non-domineering,imperfectly re-embodied, demythologized mode of manliness.The complexnegotiation of naturalized interconnections of engendered and dis/abled
bodily identities along with daring associations of virility with weakness and vulnerability coincides with an attempt to undo oppressive patriarchal power relations. However, the examples--primarily taken from the popular television series House M.D., The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones and the related fan(fictional) reactions to each of these programs– also demonstrate that the deviation from the normative bodily ideal is only possible within the relative frames of the ideological regime of ableism.""
The Acoustics of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Alice Tales
International Research in Children's Literature
This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures i... more This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass (1865, 1871), published under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, renewed the genre of children's literature by turning the vocal play of literary nonsense into the organising principle of child-centric, non-didactic, ludic narratives. 1 It shows how his language games strategically undermine tyrannical ideological structures, whether in the form of discursive ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 80), the institution of monarchy, the adult–child hierarchy maintained by a pedagogy of fear, or speciesist supremacy of human over animal.
Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens
The Woman 69 Times: Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills
Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale
Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale
European Journal of English Studies, 2010
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: comparative critical and theoretical essays. Ed. Lovalerie King and Lynn Orilla Scott. New York: Palgrave Macmillan., 2006
paper published in Americana e-journal. “Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies... more paper published in Americana e-journal. “Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies” Special Issue. Fall 2017. Vol 13. No 2. http://americanaejournal.hu/vol13no2
Intro co-authored by Anna Kérchy and Catriona McAra: The feminist project has radicalised text/i... more Intro co-authored by Anna Kérchy and Catriona McAra:
The feminist project has radicalised text/image relationships in myriad ways, disrupting the contours of discipline and medium. The multifaceted recyclings of a transdisciplinary methodology remind us that although in the past decades text/image studies has become an established academic research field in the first decades of the twenty-first century, its subversive potential to challenge cultural hegemonies has not diminished. On the contrary, intermedial fusions remain loaded with political and ethical issues that are in search of sites of resistance for marginalised, othered social subjects and meanings. The introduction explains how this special journal issue emerges from and is addressed to the politically significant network of feminist researchers -- artists, theoreticians, activists -- we believe we share ties with on account of putting the study of intermediality in the service of 'constructing a radically new understanding of our world in all its horror and hope' (Pollock, 1988: 22)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Year: 2017
DOI identifier: 10.1080/13825577.2017.1369270
Kérchy Anna teli, előíró hangneme árulkodik leginkább a lap által vizionált ideális olvasó kibenl... more Kérchy Anna teli, előíró hangneme árulkodik leginkább a lap által vizionált ideális olvasó kibenlétéről. Képes hetilapról lévén szó, foglalkoztam az illusztrációk változásaival, a kép és a szöveg jelentésmezejében létrejött intermediális interakciókkal is. Elemzésemben következetesen feltüntettem az idézett szöveganyag előfordulási helyét; a pontos forrásmegjelölés hiánya azt jelzi, hogy az adott tartalom több helyen is megjelent a vizsgált lapszámokban.
"This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-se... more "This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Through a corporeal narratological method—a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body— it deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, ‘cultural’ body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material ‘reality’ (are) (de)compose(d by) the Carterian fiction’s destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres.
Reviews
“Kérchy’s “body-text interpretive model” offers an innovative approach that manages to illustrate how a feminist body-text sounds like and why it sounds the way it does. Certainly, this nexus of phenomena and narrative strategies is the most original aspect of Kérchy’s interpretation of Carter’s trilogy. The connection between the freaks that structure her reading (Eve/lyn, Fevvers, Dora and Nora) and the process of “self-freaking” becomes obvious in the reading chapters. Shedding light on textual ruptures, overwritings, palimpsestic strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres – “counter-performances,” as Kérchy calls them, this study forms an important re-evaluation of Carter’s final trilogy as an empowering feminist revision of “culturally ready-made” myths of femininity – standing within women’s literary tradition whilst subverting it internally and outlining “an alternative body- and identity-politics that starts out on the side of the othered freak.” - Prof. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner Universität Salzburg
“Ms. Kérchy’s monograph also contributes to contemporary critical debates on body and identity in their relation to textuality/sexuality, boundaries, difference and power. The author’s focus upon the (re)embodied identity's discursive (de)construction and corporeal (de)formations, its patriarchal marginalization and subversively gender-bendingfeminist pleasures is particularly challenging.” – Prof. György E. Szönyi, University of Szeged, Hungary
“. . . engages at a high level of sophistication with an interdisciplinary conversation about female embodiment and power relations. . . Her reading of Carter illustrates how power relations are undermined, inverted, mocked and reimagined. She makes this point not through what is becoming, in my opinion, a tired form of analysis of “everyday practices” in feminist studies (very popular in cultural studies and anthropological work on the body). But rather she shows how gender is also subverted and reinvented in powerful ways at the level of the imagination. This manuscript reminds us that being able to imagine and revel in the kind of sensuality provided by the artist (in this case, fictional writer) is a powerful means of re/un/doing gender.” - Prof. Allaine Cerwonka, Central European University
"
"Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal to Visual Nonsense in Tim Burton’s Cinematic Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland"
Anna Kérchy, in her article “Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal t... more Anna Kérchy, in her article “Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal to Visual Nonsense in Tim Burton’s Cinematic Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland,” examines how/whether the intermedial shifts accompanying the transmission of a literary text to a visual medium, – and (progressing from image to moving image to 3D CGI live-action animation) to a predictably unreliable computerized/digitalized visual medium that depicts mimetically ‘what has never been’ – bring about changes in our predominant modalities of experience that affect our perception of reality, as well as our strategies of make-believing, the dynamic interaction of our imaginative willingness and reluctance, and our interactive ways of making sense, and making up nonsense. The focus lies on Tim Burton’s 2010 cinematic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice-tales with the aim to explore the different modes of dis/enchantment that media change – the adaptation’s transition from verbal to visual (means of effecting) nonsense – effectuate.
Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Edited by Anna Kérchy. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
These essays analyze the intersection of fairy tale, fantasy and reality in postmodern artistic t... more These essays analyze the intersection of fairy tale, fantasy and reality in postmodern artistic texts. The editor underscores the transformation of both the reader-writer relationship and epistemological and ontological considerations by new technologies and emerging subgenres. This book contains 12 color plates and ten black and white photographs.
Reviews
“…the volume includes essays that present exploratory discussions of modern-day reinventions of the fairy tale and fantasy from a variety of perspectives that draw on emergent critical discourses…” - Prof. Dr. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère
“The editor’s organization of the volume exhibit a strong grasp of how important it is to relate generic, technological, political, and narrative dynamics with one another…”-Prof. Dr. Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawaii
“…this range of objects and of topics makes the volume genuinely timely, genuinely impressive and genuinely worthwhile.”-Prof. Dr. Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia
"As it stands, Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales is an uncompromisingly comprehensive and offers (perhaps too broad) an overview of the field and its potentials, its charming princes and clammy frogs." -- Dr. Karin Kukkonen, St. John's College, Oxford (Review in Marvels & Tales)
"Divided into six sections, the volume includes essays that explore the dynamics of interaction between contemporary reinventions of the fairy tale and fantasy and a wide range of current literary- and cultural theoretical trends, the list of which alone could spin the readers’ mind like the cyclone swooping Dorothy Gale into the magical Land of Oz." Dr. Larisa Kocic-Zámbó, University of Szeged, Hungary (Review in Americana)
"The authors discuss the often multiple rewritings of classic fairy tales, anti-fairy tales, and various master myths of literature, showing that these subvert the genre by imagining the lost voices of fairy-tale tellers, by making central a formerly marginalized character, or by using experimental postmodernist strategies (like permutation and disruption)." Prof. Dr. Enikő Bollobás, ELTE University, Budapest (Americana Review)
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Prof. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère
Preface by Anna Kérchy
SECTION 1: NEW MEDIA LITERACY
Hyperread, New Literacy, E-text
Cyber-Salons, Participatory Culture
Production Design
Critical Dance Studies
SECTION 2: EMERGING GENRES
Urban Fantasy
Steampunk
Forensic Crime Fantasy
Intermedial Text/Image. Graphic Narrative
Guro-Kawaii (Grotesque-Cute) Manga/Art
SECTION 3: REWRITING MYTH
The Interaction of Literature and Criticism. Feminist Imagination, Challenging the Canon
Anti-Fairy Tale, Revisiting Blue Beard
Critical Musicology. Revisiting Beauty and the Beast
Cult Fairy-Tale Romance. Revisiting the Animal-Groom Tale
Metamorphic Pornographic Fantasy. Revisiting Shakespeare
SECTION 4: RE-IMAGINING THE BODY
Body-Theatrical Performance
Feminist Body-Studies
Cyborg Body
Re-fashioning Embodiments
SECTION 5: CREATING FICTIONAL REALITIES
Ludic Simulations in the Virtual Reality of Computer Games
Virtual FairyLands in Trans/Post-humanist Science Fiction
Inventing a Fictitious Fairy Tale
Between Psychopathology and Fantasy
SECTION 6: NARRATOLOGICAL NOVELTIES
Transmedial Narratology, Representations of Race and Gender
Neo-Surrealism, Feminist Stylistics
Affective Narratology and the Emotional Politics of Reading
Corporeal Narratology
Filológiai Közlöny. Utazás, Otthon, Nőiség szám. 56.4. (2010): 367-381., 2010
The AnaChronisT 10 (2004): 97–124 ISSN 1219–2589, 2004
This paper examines performativity in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in ... more This paper examines performativity in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). I wish to reveal parallel spectacular, seductive and tricky performances of bodies and texts. My reading of spectacular corporeal and textual performances focuses on the heroine, revealing how Fevvers' parading deconstructive performances of ideologically prescribed femininity, and its limiting representations, coincide with the narrative's spectacular revisions of literary genres and writing styles, identified by discursive technologies of power with femininity and thus conventionally canonized as sentimentally kitsch or incomprehensibly hysterical modes of writing. My gender sensitive, reader-response approach also highlights the bifocal pleasures, tender irony and sisterly burlesque of the self-mockingly silly and histrionic hysteric "feminine" textual performance in order to reveal that the conventional concepts of a domineering patriarchal language violently incorporating and domineering weaker écriture féminine are demythologized. My final aim is to examine how Fevvers' confidence trick unveils that there are other wor(l)ds available for daring women writers and readers alike.
in: The Human Body in Contemporary Literatures in English: Cultural and Political Implications. Eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Marta Fernandez Morales. Frankfurt Am Main: Peter Lang, 2009. 129-150., 2009
Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature. Eds. Christine Reynier, Jean-Michel Ganteau. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. 2010. 145-161., 2010
You never heard of me, I dare Say. Well, I'm here." 2 Stevie Smith is a demythologiser of timeles... more You never heard of me, I dare Say. Well, I'm here." 2 Stevie Smith is a demythologiser of timeless fairy-tale-fragments, an experimenter with inner time, poetic tempo and snapshots of death contrasted with universal, historical temporality, and a (de)composer of nonsense poems accompanied by doodles often contradicting their verbal content, to revel in an absurd illogic. Her elusive, self-destabilising literary text seems independent of her socio-historicalpolitical context. She does not stick by one single place or cause, performs roleplayings and self-maskings, and concentrates on depersonalization, disappearance and the unspeakable. After examining recent critical attempts at Smith's recanonization as a serious author, (a war-writer and a feminist poet), I explore the existential, language-philosophical and ethical issues problematised by her poetry's leitmotifs: death, (mis)communication and self-representation. I argue that Smith provides a metatext on the complex dynamics of subversion and containment, deterritorialization and re-territorialization to locate herself in the in-between, opting for a commitment to autonomy and (de)liberated hesitation.
What Constitutes the Fantastic? Eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner et al. Szeged: JatePress, 2009.
TNTeF (2013) 3.1.
""THE FANTASY OF „MANLY” DISABILITY. ATYPICAL EMBODIMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMP... more ""THE FANTASY OF „MANLY” DISABILITY. ATYPICAL EMBODIMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE. This essay explores representations of the disabled male body in today’s
popular visual media. Its focus is on whether and how the”potently vulnerable” embodiments cherished by normative fan communities’ fantasies can personify alternative masculinities that reject hegemonic gender hierarchies. The ultimate concern is to see if they allow for a greater degree
of imaginative, erotic agency for female spectators. These masculinites are specific in that they let male viewers intimately relate to a non-domineering,imperfectly re-embodied, demythologized mode of manliness.The complexnegotiation of naturalized interconnections of engendered and dis/abled
bodily identities along with daring associations of virility with weakness and vulnerability coincides with an attempt to undo oppressive patriarchal power relations. However, the examples--primarily taken from the popular television series House M.D., The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones and the related fan(fictional) reactions to each of these programs– also demonstrate that the deviation from the normative bodily ideal is only possible within the relative frames of the ideological regime of ableism.""
Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales. How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings Edit... more Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales. How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings
Edited by Anna Kérchy
The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
Hardcover, illustrated, 520 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-1519-X
ISBN13: 978-0-7734-1519-5.
What keeps the spirit of Alice alive after all these years? And what makes us so spontaneously tu... more What keeps the spirit of Alice alive after all these years? And what makes us so spontaneously turn into armchair travelers ready to unconditionally follow a little girl on her fantastic journeys down a rabbit hole into topsy-turvy worlds? Alice's unfailing ability to amaze is due to her characteristic ambiguity that entails a plethora of interpretive possibilities and hence a rewarding adaptability to multiple mixed media forms which stimulate senses beyond the verbal games establishing the trademark charm of the original children's classic. Popular postmodern post/millenial re-configurations of Victorian fantasy, in particular late 20 st century and especially early 21 st century adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales , reveal how intermedial transitions elicit different modes of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment which both shape and reflect contemporary fantasists' strategies of make-believing, and circumscribe a metafantasy commenting on limits and potentials of the fantasy genre as well as the dys/functioning of imagination. Adventures get curiouser and curiouser once Alice ventures into Transmedia Wonderland, transgressing the confines of the written text towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic and digital new media regimes of representation. Contemporary adaptations dynamically interact with their Victorian source texts as well as one another to enhance the immersion into an elaborate fictional universe and maximalize audience engagement, while retelling a story that remains recognizably the same, yet turns radically different with each new retelling. The journey to Wonderland today signifies a metafantasmagoric, metamedial mission urging all to interactively explore the cultural critical and ethical stakes of our embodied imaginative experience of making sense of nonsense.