395 research outputs found
Introduction: #SocialmediaShakespeares
No full textIn their introductory essay, Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill explore the interrelations between
social media and Shakespeare(s), providing a theoretical consideration of both categories that ultimately
moves toward an argument for their rhizomatic intersections. Shakespeare increasingly "becomes"
through social media (in a Deleuzian sense), and indeed, forms of social media are rearticulated
through Shakespeare. The essay also guides the reader through this special issue in which the
contributors variously map, define, scrutinize, and challenge social media, Shakespeare and their
uncanny convergence
“In States Unborn and Accents Yet Unknown”: Spectral Shakespeare in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die).
No full textThe paper focuses on Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) (2012), an Italian adaptation of Julius Caesar set in a high security prison in Rome with a cast entirely made of convicts or former convicts. It explores how this adaptation "deconstructs" and "rewrites" Shakespeare (from an "Interview" with the film directors), especially by setting Julius Caesar in the "unborn state" of a prison, and through the use of a number of "accents yet unknown"--the inclusion of "dialects" from the South of Italy that not only displace the English "original" but also "standard" Italian translations of the play. The paper argues that the "Shakespeare" that emerges from this film is a "spectral Shakespeare", simultaneously material and evanescent, some kind of pharmakon that is not only "cure" but also "poison". As "cure" and "poison", this "Shakespeare" relates in complex ways with the largely US-based tradition of "prison Shakespeare", a tradition that insists on figuring "Shakespeare" as catalyst of spiritual growth, reformation and redemptio
‘‘This is my home, too’’: Migration, spectrality and hospitality inRoberta Torre’s Sud Side Stori (2000)
No full textThe article explores Roberta Torre’s film Sud Side Stori (2000), an extravagant Italian re-vision of Romeo and Juliet set in the Sicilian city of Palermo which displays awareness of the global circulation of the story of the two ‘‘star-crossed lovers’’. In the film, which combines neo-realist cinematographic techniques with the artificial style of the musical, Shakespeare’s young lovers become Toni Giulietto, a lousy local rock singer, and Romea Wacoubo, a beautiful Nigerian prostitute who falls in love with him when she sees him standing on his balcony.
Not unlike West Side Story, the inter-racial passion between Toni and Romea exacerbates pre-existing ethnic conflicts. It is opposed not only by the two lovers’ ‘‘households’’ _ respectively, Toni’s three ugly aunties and Romea’s closest friends Mercutia and Baldassarra _ but also by the whole Nigerian immigrant community, including those African characters who run the racket of prostitution, and,
more indirectly, by the local Mafia. The article argues that Torre’s film is a reiteration which ‘‘produces’’ the ‘‘textual body’’ of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as an ensemble of spectral/textual fragments which remain to be translated into
Italian, and thus draws attention to translation as an interminable process. It adds that these fragments are often re-mediated, de-contextualized and forced to cohabit with the language of the body, music and dance, or even with the
conventions of silent films, in ways which are reciprocally illuminating. The article also shows that in Torre’s film ‘‘Shakespearecentric’’ concerns _ what counts as
Shakespeare, which includes the multifarious ways in which Romeo and Juliet has been recycled in contemporary global media culture _ and ‘‘Shakespeareccentric’’ concerns repeatedly interact with one another. Particularly significant in this respect is the fact that the film often brings an allegorical dimension to bear on the issues of migration and hospitality it continually foregrounds, so that the response to the alterity of the body of the ‘‘other’’/foreigner/migrant (i.e. especially Romea but also the similarly displaced ‘‘native’’ Toni Giuletto) becomes inextricably intertwined with the question of the incorporation of the ‘‘foreignness’’ of Shakespeare, a ‘‘textual body’’ which itself migrates from an Anglophone to a non-Anglophone context
Approximate Bodies. Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy
No full textThe early modern period was an age of anatomical exploration and revelation, with new discoveries capturing the imagination not only of scientists but also of playwrights and poets. Approximate Bodies examines the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period’s anatomical and gynaecological treatises. The book traces a number of emblematic figurations of the body, which it sees as dramatized and rearticulated in the period’s texts: the eroticized, deformed body of the outsider, for example, or the effeminate body of the desiring male and the disfigured body parts of the desiring female. Drawing on the theories of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan and working through close readings of key plays and treatises, the study examines the way in which social and psychic domains are involved in the early modern construction of the body. Crucially, the book argues that the early modern body is obsessively construed in terms of differentiating markers of power such as gender, race, status and eroticism. At the same time, bodies are presented as unstable and unfinished entities, uncannily proximate to one another.
Link to Routledge website with details of the book: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415345613
Exilic/Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient.
No full textJacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961) is about a literature
student, Anne Goupil, who becomes involved with a group of
bohemians centering around the absent figure of Spanish
musician, Juan. The film incorporates the attempt by theatre
director Gérard Lenz – in many ways a simulacrum of Rivette
himself – to stage Pericles, even though this is a play that he
himself defines as “incoherent” and “unplayable.” This essay
explores the significance of this incorporation, and shows how the
reiterated, fragmentary rehearsals of this “unplayable” play are
essential to an understanding of the (disjointed) logic of the film
as well as the atmosphere of conspiracy it continually evokes. It
also argues that the “Shakespeare” included in the film is an
“exilic Shakespeare” that does not properly belong, a kind of
spectre haunting the film characters. This construct uneasily
coexists with a version of “Shakespeare” that the film
simultaneously emphasizes – a “Shakespeare” that takes place
“on anothe
Spectral Shakespeares. Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century.
No full textThe book is an exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations foreground a cluster of self-reflexive "themes" - from incorporation to reiteration, from migration to addiction, from silence to survival - that contribute to the redefinition of adaptation, and Shakespearean adaptation in particular, as an unfinished and interminable process. The "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary, mediatized, and heterogeneous presence, a spectral Shakespeare that leaves its mark on our contemporary mediascape
“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)
No full textThe paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscape haunted by other stories, as a language that is already in itself the “language of the other” (Derrida). In particular, it will claim that Shakespearean fragments are often used in an idiosyncratic way, and they repeatedly resonate with some of the most fundamental ethical and political issues of the film, such as the question of England as “home” and migration. The paper will also argue that the decontextualization and recontextualization of these fragments makes them re-emerge as part of an interrogation of the mediality of the medium, an interrogation that also offers insights into the circulation of Shakespeare in the contemporary mediascape
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