Family dramas: film and modernity in Thailand (original) (raw)
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Canonical Adventures of a Popular Genre. Aesthetic Revisiting of Melodrama with O. Pamuk and J. Barnes. This paper analyzes the reframing of a popular genre, melodrama, in the novels of two already canonical postmodernist writers: Orhan Pamuk and Julian Barnes. Their quite recent novels, The Museum of Innocence (2008) and, respectively, The Sense of an Ending (2011) draw on the features and techniques of melodrama (the use of love triangles, suspense, the trespassing of social boundaries and norms, etc.), while at the same time employing refined intertextual readings of Flaubert and Proust. Thus melodrama proves its dynamism and metamorphic qualities by transgressing the borders of genre and medium, as well as the division between " high " and " low " culture. REZUMAT. Aventurile canonice ale unui gen popular. Valorizări estetice ale melodramei la O. Pamuk și J. Barnes. Articolul urmărește reinterpretarea unui gen popular, melodrama, în romanele a doi scriitori postmoderniști din canonul literaturii universale: Orhan Pamuk și Julian Barnes. Romanele acestora publicate recent, The Museum of Innocence (2008) și, respectiv, The Sense of an Ending (2011) valorifică trăsăturile și tehnicile specifice melodramei (triunghiul amoros, suspense-ul, depășirea granițelor și încălcarea normelor sociale etc.), propunând totodată lecturi intertextuale rafinate din Flaubert, Proust ș.a. Astfel, melodrama își demonstrează dinamismul și calitățile proteice, depășind frontierele genului și mediului, ca și diviziunea dintre cultura de elită și cea populară.
Националната идея в съвременното тайландско кино: образи, сюжети, персонажи.
http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/authordetails.aspx?authorid=62d130ef-f98e-46d4-b197-0e7d00c8261f "The text presented here emphasizes on those contemporary films which represent the history of Siam/Thailand and manifest the typical for the country triad “King – religion – nation”. This research focuses on the confrontation between the traumatic and the triumphant memory of historicity and its mission is to construct the image of “self” (the image of the greatness of Siam/Thailand) and to promote a public, controlled image of the nation. The cinema presents the extraordinary opportunity to actualize the aesthetic distance of the events which took place back in time. The film has two perspectives – on one hand, it represents the past, and on the other hand it projects “once” in the present “now”. In this train of thoughts the epic genre takes over once more characters from history in order to construct and represent collective national memory in a quest for (and also creation of) these places of memory. The text also focuses on the establishment of Thai cultural memory through plots which represent the ordinary human and the super-hero (who has once been also an ordinary human), who is not part of the Crown or the religious community sangha, but who manifests the national identity and idea strongly enough. Lastly, the text touches upon those images and plots, which point to an alternative direction of expressing national identity: through specific characters, some of which remind of Michael Herzfeld’s ideas and his thesis for cultural intimacy.""
Бахтинский вестник 2019 №2, 2019
Annotation. M.M. Bakhtin didn't wrote about cinema but his works and those signed by his friends P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov would be later read as a source of inspiration to think of cinema as language in a new way, both by studies dealing with cinema semiotics itself and also by those exploring the links between cinema and literature through the analysis of adaptations (as we will see in the last years the study of cinematic adaptations of literary works has developed into a whole discipline of its own and Bakhtin ideas were pivotal in helping scholars of this discipline to go beyond the dilemmas about "fidelity"). We will sketch here these two developments in two separate parts, although some of the scholars involved in both discussions might be the same. By examining this debates we will find new evidence of the potential of the Bakhtin circle's theories to understand not only literary texts but any cultural process.
PROCEEDINGS OF NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE
PROCEEDINGS OF NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE: Contemporary Issues in Islam and English Literature, 2019
This paper explores how Malaysian literature in English has always gestured towards religion or religiosity in its narratives, including Islam in noir fiction. Noir fiction that is evolved from crime fiction and is associated with stories of darkness, criminality and violence is found to incorporate Islam in KL Noir (2013-2014)—noir anthologies published in Malaysia. In the Western noir tradition, noir fiction is employed to capture the aftermath of the wars with their chaos, gloom, and absurdity. Moving away from such tradition, KL Noir is distinctively constructed by darkness that stems from the failure of embracing Islam and the violation of Islamic rules. Therefore, this paper examines how KL Noir anthologies incorporate Islam to demonstrate their distinction from the Western noir tradition. Portrayals of Islam as the underlying religious principle imposed in the family shown in “The Runner” and “Victims of Society” are found to be the source of the darkness as they depict violation of Islamic rules and laws. When Islam is not faithfully embraced, it brings consequences that severely affect the noir characters and thus darken atmosphere and ambugity of the stories, yet at the same time such circumstance sheds the light of how life has been perfectly guided by Islam. Finally, this is how the incorporation of Islam in KL Noir functions to be noir yet enlightening. Keyword: Islam, noir fiction, noir tradition, Malaysia
Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film
""The theories of the Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) are highly suggestive for helping to understand cinema, yet their usefulness has yet to be fully and accessibly articulated in relation to the key debates of Film Studies. At the heart of this text is the key notion of chronotope, which Flanagan adapts to show how time and space 'fuse together' in cinematic narrative. Similarly crucial are the Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism and polyphony, which help to address fundamental questions about film form and reception. The 'unfinalizable' Bakhtinian word seems to hold great significance for a changing media world where meanings seem constantly renewable, and diffuse practices of spectatorship outgrow earlier, rigid models of interpretation. Via case studies of a diverse range of films (from Die Hard 4.0 to House of Games, The Searchers to The Incredibles), this book vividly demonstrates that Bakhtin's theories can bring about an exciting intervention into some of the most contested areas of film theory. 'A well-needed instalment in the sparse critical work on Bakhtin and cinema...this study unlocks new ways of understanding the circulation and production of film meaning.' - Hunter Vaughan, New Review of Film and Television Studies""
Criticizing Genres: Bakhtin and Bali
Bulletin of the John Ryland Library, 1991
How adequate are Western academic categories for the analysis of cultural production in quite different societies? The piece questions how relevant they are by examining Balinese theatre performances to show that conventional concepts of narrative, space, time, agency and so on fundamentally fail as an explication of how Balinese themselves produce, understand and engage with their own cultural life. Such frameworks also impose assumptions about genre, textuality and agency that are manifestly contradicted by Balinese practice. Drawing instead upon Bakhtin and Vološinov’s approaches turns out to be far more fruitful. Treating theatre performances as dialogues between actors and spectators is revealing, while Bakhtin’s more recondite ideas like heteroglossia, which might seem confined to European literature, flourish in Balinese and Javanese theatre. Even the radical notion of polyphony, which might have appeared applicable largely in Dostoyevsky’s novels, thrive in shadow theatre.
A Companion to Literature and Film
2004
This series aims to provide theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within cultural studies, whether as single disciplines (film studies) inspired and reconfigured by interventionist cultural studies approaches, or from broad interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives (gender studies, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies). Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned articles and also to provide the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions. An overarching Companion to Cultural Studies will map the territory as a whole.
From dialectics to dialogue: Bakhtin , White and the ‘moorings’ of fiction and history
Scholars have noted the ‘remarkable proliferation’ of historical fiction in the postmodern period, and Hayden White has described the neo-historical novel as ‘the dominant genre and mode of postmodernist writing’. This recent acknowledgment of the status of neo-historical fiction raises questions about the long estrangement between the discourses of history and the historical novel since 19th century historians began defining their discipline as a social science. Historians remain preoccupied with time-space specific ‘observable or perceivable’ events, while imaginative writers also engage hypothetical and invented ones, however, this article argues that the theoretical grounds for a vigorous interdisciplinary dialogue between fictional and non-fictional historiography are apparent in the work of White and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of the novel and concepts of dialogism and polyphony are now much discussed in scholarly discourse. By remaining open to the historical referent, rejecting structuralism’s closure in the text, and acknowledging the subjective tendencies in all forms of historiography, White and Bakhtin make new and exciting conversations possible in an environment in which history and fiction can be defined as competing but complimentary discourses.
2005
European auteur cinema has frequently relied on adapting qualitatively superior literary texts into screenplays. Moreover, with the advent of digital film, the modes of reception of literature and film converge and are increasingly characterized by the principles of hermeneutics and its circular, and cyclical, process of analysis. In the present study, we explore both the similarities in the artistic processes of creating fiction on the page and on the screen, as well as the transformations necessary in the process of adapting literature to film. Basing our analysis on critical concepts such as Lubbock's showing vs telling, Edward Said's Orientalism, and Brian Jarvis's observations on the literary leitmotif of walking and watching, we strive to show how novelist and filmmaker choose divergent strategies to achieve similar effects. McEwan's strategy rests on a disorienting narrative set in an incomprehensible foreign city conveyed to the reader through the conscience ...