Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Children of a Posthuman Realism: Alfonso Cuarón’s Posthuman Adaption of P.D. James\u27 The Children of Men
No full textThis essay focuses primarily on the way in which Alfonso Cuarón’s use of filmic techniques typically associated with Bazinian cinematic realism reconfigures P.D. James’ dystopian novel The Children of Men into a posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism. First, this essay illustrates that James’ novel is inherently humanistic in its construction of the narrative so that the worldwide infertility epidemic that structures the novel becomes a “natural” or environmentally produced contagion for man to overcome and dominate. Subsequently, after a brief exposition of the central tenets of Bazinian cinematic realism, my argument contends that through the use of depth of shot, long sequence-shots, and non-diagetic dialogue that far from replicating a humanistic text about the ascent of man, Cuarón’s film actually deconstructs the anthropocentrically dominated narrative. Cuarón’s use of techniques such as depth of shot, which creates a horizontal hierarchy of images, both human and non-human, creates a situation where the human characters on screen slowly fade into the natural décor in the background. With this in mind P.D. James’ novel, where the overall message is one of hope in the individuality and strength of mankind, is transformed into a posthumanist agenda that seeks to level the hierarchy and the boundaries between the human and the non-human, all the while showing the audience how the two are already interconnected.
Death Imagery in Paz\u27s Blanco
No full textThe idea of death is a distinctive aspect of the work of the Mexican writer and philosopher Octavio Paz. His work not only reflects Paz’s concern with the Mexican identity problem, but his personal obsession with death. While there is a consensus on the central role of the idea of death in some of Paz’s texts such as The Labyrinth of Solitude, most scholars have overlooked its overwhelming presence in some of his other works, such as his seminal poem Blanco. Along with its death imagery, Xavier Villaurrutia’s influence on this poem has also been neglected, despite the fact that Paz cited him as his most important precursor. Villaurrutia’s poetry –as well as Paz’s criticism of it— is relevant to the reading of Blanco, because it helps unravel its death images; when Villaurrutia’s influence is taken into consideration, Blanco’s use of the color white as its title, its use of the images of silencio, huesos, la nada, and tierra become clear death references. Since death is the unifying force of Paz’s oeuvre, its identification within Blanco will result in a deeper reading of this poem that can lead to a better understanding of Paz’s work. Furthermore, Blanco’s death symbols also attest to Paz’s participation in the construction of a collective view of death that helped create a much needed national identity in post-Revolution Mexico.
Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera: Love and Death as New-World Mosaic
No full textFrom title to ambiguous ending, Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera explores the intimate and ever-altering relationship between love and death, a complex relationship directly attributable to the novel’s New-World Baroque essence. Most studies of García Marquez’s writings focus on his development of Magical Realism. Far less attention has been paid to Love in the Time of Cholera’s genesis in what Alejo Carpentier identifies as Latin America’s Baroque spirit, an artistic impulse far outliving the seventeenth century explosion of opulent European plastic arts in the Baroque style. Among the defining features of this Baroque spirit is coincidentia oppositorum, the conjoining of opposites—elements, emotions, actions—usually considered contradictory. Love in the Time of Cholera exhibits this artistic trope in its entwining of transcendence and naturalism, otherworldliness and eroticism. This essay examines the productive tension the novel creates between transcendental love and corporeal death. The novel’s protagonist Florentino Ariza stands the embodiment of the proliferating love/death relationship which engages the Baroque stylistic strategy of horror vacui (fear of empty space) as a means of intensifying the novel’s thematic coincidencia oppositorum. By exploring the way love defeats death (Florentino’s obsessive preservation of himself for love) even as death ennobles love (via its erasures of marital conflict), this study offers a Baroque lens through which Love in the Time of Cholera may be viewed. Through this lens, the novel emerges as a literary manifestation of the Baroque need to overwhelm human reason and inflame the soul with passion
Signifying the Abstract: The Male Gaze, Maternal Power, and Homosocial Bonds in Geoffrey Wright’s Film Adaptation of Macbeth
No full textShakespeare’s Macbeth has always been a favorite work for directors and screenwriters to adapt into film. It has everything a filmmaker could ask for: battles, murder, witchcraft, domestic drama, dark humor, and it is much shorter in comparison to longer tragedies like Hamlet. If you combine these attributes with the fact that no one has to pay Shakespeare royalties, Macbeth’s popularity for film adaptation is easy to understand. Certainly, Geoffrey Wright’s 2006 film adaptation of Macbeth fulfills these criteria. Displaying sexual acts and nudity in the scenes where Macbeth and the Weird Sisters interact, viewers are treated to what, on the surface, appears to be a puerile and obvious attempt at drumming up ticket sales by objectifying women’s bodies. The nubile and sexually aggressive witches seem to provide little more than vicarious sexual pleasure for heterosexual men in the audience, dumbing Shakespeare down for a knuckle-dragging patriarchal audience. A cursory examination of these scenes invites the conclusion that the film is yet another case of an unreflective use of the male gaze. However, the film’s juxtaposition of the male gaze in scenes involving the Weird Sisters with scenes in which Macduff and Fleance reject feminine images entirely indicate a more subtle approach in the narrative. This approach successfully signifies, for a contemporary audience, very abstract Early Modern problems with Macbeth’s performance of masculinity. The film consciously utilizes the male gaze of the camera to portray Macbeth as trapped by his own sexual solipsism; because that gaze is attached to scenes between Macbeth and the Weird Sisters, not Macduff and Fleance, the film adequately signifies abstract concepts relating to Early Modern masculinity, imparting to the audience the wrongness of Macbeth’s dependence on the Weird Sisters.
Estudio Diacrónico Preliminar de la Variación –se/-ra en España
No full textThe Spanish imperfect subjunctive verb tense has two competing forms –ra and –se which vary in frequency of use according to the country of usage, the dominant political power, the century in question and context. These two forms of the imperfect subjunctive have their origin in two different verb tenses in Latin, namely the pluperfect indicative (amaveram Latin amara Spanish) and pluperfect subjunctive (amavissem Latinamase Spanish). This present study of peninsular Spanish is a diachronic examination of the hypothesis that the –se form has gradually decreased in use while its opposing form has gradually increased in use resulting in a linguistic shift of the imperfect subjunctive. In this preliminary study of the –se/-ra forms from early Castilian to modern Spanish, special consideration will be given to contextual variables affecting the selection of –ra or –se forms. These variables include the type of literature and the differing levels of formality thereof (narrative, historical and scientific prose) in which the verb forms are found in order to analyze the selection of one form or another as a potential function of the class of literature. Another factor under examination is the placement of the verb within the protasis or apodosis of the sentence (the if or then clause) to analyze the degree to which the reality vs. the probable/hypothetical nature of an action affects the verb choice. A review of the related literature, the analysis of data samples, historic linguistic trends and correlations observed in the usage of the imperfect subjunctive will be presented
Exploring Ernest Hemingway and Gene Stratton-Porters’ Representations of the WW I Veteran Home from the Front
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An Angel in the Midst of ‘Dark Business’
No full textGender representations in late Victorian literature have been a widely debated topic with special attention to how women’s roles in these novels both perpetuate and challenge women’s class distinction in relation to men. However, few have analyzed the use of the Victorian ideal of a passive womanhood to shape and inform male gender roles. My paper will address masculine identity of male characters through their relationships with the female characters in two adventure novels: The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars. Both novels highlight a growing discomfort with colonial interests abroad and feature a feminine character threatened by foreign powers. My definition of the ideal Victorian woman will begin with Martha Vicinus’ essay, “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House” and her representation of the ‘angel in the house’ as a model of love, intuition, beauty, and virtue. I will argue that this female role not only informs but also creates a masculine identity in the midst of Victorian England where a growing concern about a man’s ability to display the characteristics of strength, valor and gallantry sent many looking to the dark places on the map for true adventure. Through this argument, I hope to reveal the agency in a passive representation of female virtue that gives new significance to her role in Victorian society