Comparative Study of the Novel and Film Adaptation of Emma Donoghue's Room (original) (raw)
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NARRATIVE STRATEGIES AND MIND STYLE IN EMMA DONOGHUE’S ROOM
This study investigates the concept of Mind Style in Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room, which is partly based on the Fritzl case that emerged in Austria in 2008. Donoghue narra- tes the story from the point of view of Jack, a ve-year-old boy who was born and held in captivity along with his mother by Old Nick. Jack’s cognitive development is a ected by his limited access to knowledge and the external world. Here, I apply a linguistic approach to account for the way the receiver perceives Jack’s Mind Style and his linguistic and cognitive development as the events unfold. To this end, I discuss Jack’s peculiar linguistic choices and patterns in terms of grammar, vocabulary, gurative speech and interactional behaviour. The systematic investigation of these stylistic features demonstrates how they can contribute to the understanding of the developmental process of a child’s mind style that may be hindered by external factors and/or traumatic experiences.
Borders and boundaries are not limited to the domain of geography. The discourse and metaphor of borders extend beyond geopolitical to sociological, biological, affective, linguistic, racial, gender concerns and so on. They regulate power as they enforce a spatial code yet are always unsettled. Thus, any instance of border-crossing contests power and leads to the tentative creation of alternative forms of resistance. In this article, I argue that Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) depicts a variety of cross-border assemblages that contain the flow of corporeal, bio-political, and affective borders within traumatic and larger social spaces. This, in turn, leads to the tentative creation of alternative affective communities and resistance to dominant power structures. Key words: Borders, Spatiality, Affect, Trauma, Power, Resistance
Rewriting “Authentic” History in Helene Cixous’ Portrait of Dora
"History" according to Foucault is history from the perspective of the historian and does not suggest an objective truth. He claims that “truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.” (Foucault1980:131) In other words, History thus becomes a signifier of the historical bias that is inherent in each author, each society, and every academic discipline. Contemporary philosophers of history like Michel de Certeau also remind historiographers that no research of the past is free of socio-economic, political, and cultural conditions (Colebrook1975: 65). History is discursively structured and thereby describes a narrative that points towards the situatedness of the story-teller. As the narrator of Rushdie’s Shame puts it:
2018
This paper, by employing comparative study, seeks to highlight the adoption of defense mechanism by analyzing the possible similarities and differences in the behaviors, and the strategies of the characters and the respective impact of the political contexts of The Tempest, the last play written by Shakespeare and Room, the movie nominated for the best picture academy award of 2015. It begins with a discussion about displacement as the most dominant form of defense mechanism employed by the protagonists of the two selected works belonging to different eras, cultures and genres. Both protagonists displace their oppressive puissant onto their children. In The Tempest, Prospero displaces his brother by his daughter, while in Room; Joy " s son displaces her rapist captor. The discussion then turns to the fact that although Prospero and Joy show almost the same behavior, only Joy, Room " s protagonist, is condemned. The Tempest is written in a patriarchal society governed by a monarch, while Room " s happenings are depicted in a liberal society. The deep correlation between political atmosphere and individuals " behavior pushes the study to examine the reasons for the resultant contrast between the two selected texts by focusing on the political context in the production of each. Monarchy needs obedient subjects whereas democracy is meant to respect individuals. Consequently, people, in these societies, think and behave differently. The findings of the research show how political orders result in disorders in the behavior of characters, e.g. patriarchal orders are not only justified by Monarchy " s nature but are also produced by it, while democracy, as shown in the modern setting of Room, harshly condemns violation of individualism and pushes Joy, the protagonist, to a suicide attempt.
Bob Fosse directed Lenny (1974), about the profane American comedian Lenny Bruce at a time when he had won complete artistic control over his films. As an intermedial artist, with equal facility for the stage and movies, Fosse approached film editing with the rhythmic intricacy of his dance style. He developed a film style that eschewed conventional chronology, aiming for an atempo-ral juxtapositional montage closer to poetry and the live performing arts than the narrative causality and temporality of Hollywood cinema. Lenny is an interme-dial biographical collage that straddles divergent narrative strands, subjectivi-ties, mid-twentieth-century periods. It contrasts modes of black-and-white cine-matography, making them forms into themselves. It tells a story (rather than the story, as biopics conventionally insist) of Lenny Bruce, an irreverent, iconoclastic standup comedian who ran afoul of American obscenity laws in the last years before the cultural revolution of the late sixties, even as he helped to change them. Like Fosse's previous film, Cabaret (1972), Lenny juxtaposes cinematic and photographic realism with the heightened reality of the stage, where Bruce speaks to us, bursting the chronology of his own biography, and commenting on his own life story.