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Women of more ordinary physique were to occupy a new space, first of all on the stage, and sometimes on the big screen, since many plays mounted by the Splendid Company were to become films. Female humour and laughter cannot be considered without another powerful element: the motivation of often transgressive laughter. This chapter examines a few examples of Coline Serreau's humour in her comedies in order to assess whether or not she offers an alternative to the traditional male comedy, before considering in more detail and from a more general perspective the devices she uses to create humour. The golden age of French comedy was cut short by the First World War. Although the comedy was by and large a minor genre in the cinema of the Occupation, other forms of light film entertainment either remained (the farce) or emerged (the film zazou).
This article explores the more detached and ironic view of Blake that emerged in the 1970s compared to appropriations of him in the 1960s, as evident in three science-fiction novels: Ray Nelson’s Blake’s Progress (1977), Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), and J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company (1979). In adopting a more antagonistic posture towards Blake, all three of these books reflect increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards the countercultures of the 1960s, and can be read as critical of some of those very energies that the Romantic movement was seen to embody. Thus Nelson rewrites the relationship of William and Catherine, in which the engraver comes under the influence of a diabolic Urizen, while Carter recasts the Prophet Los as a Charles Manson-esque figure. Even Ballard, the most benign of the three, views Blakean energy as a release of potentially dangerous psychopathologies. In all the novels, we see a contrarian use of misprision, rewriting Blake as Blake had rewritten Milton.
the street with a suitable handheld device – transformed the fundamentals of human connectivity in the electronic age. Significantly, in explaining the impact of the Net on our lives and consciousness, not only architects and urbanists but also writers in other fields commonly fall back on metaphors originating in the physical and spatial world of cities and urban communities, as well as other analogies with familiar cultural and social concepts. Even when the most fervent devotees of the Net, including science fiction writers like the much-quoted William Gibson,1
suppose it's unlikely that I will ever know much more, and I'm not sure that I would care to. In my imagination, the man has assumed a mythic stature proportionate to his name. Banister had a wide-ranging career as a writer, driven by an amateur's interest in art, science fiction, and mechanical tinkering. He had been a fireman, a Marine on Okinawa
slightly away from post-May ‘68 agendas to more consensual 1980s’ topics and filmic genres. Twenty years after making a documentary which is still hailed as the feminist documentary par excellence, she came back with her latest film so far – La Belle Verte, released in France in September 1996 – to 1970s’ preoccupations such as ecology and the defence of the environment via a science fiction tale, with a typically 1990s’ flavour. Although she shares similarities with other French female filmmakers who started their career in the
universe” – is materialized in science fiction, the kind of science fiction that, as Marx would put it, is meant “not only to interpret the world but to change it.” Neither cosmist narratives nor their most ambitious and exuberant genre, pre-Revolutionary science fiction, could be called daydreams. Not only did they describe alternative ways of life but they were also used as a tool by which real-life proponents of those alternative ways of life wanted to propel history towards those alternatives. Such narratives were intended both to describe life in utopia and to
Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.
point where generic categorisation has lost all meaning are ultimately too rigid and too ahistorical. While 2010 saw the release of Jonah Hex, described as a supernatural western, and Cowboys and Aliens, a science-fiction western, one of the most successful films of the year was the Coen brothers’ True Grit, a generically grounded remake of the 1969 John Wayne western of the same name
. The Inheritors (1901), a deliberately bizarre mixture of political thriller, science fiction and culture critique, presents Brown as the antitype to a world where feverish activity and replication have become the main signs of authenticity. In a literary production in which everything is driven by the meliorism of time-travelling Nietzschean super beings, Brown appears in the guise of an enigmatic and reclusive artist called Jenkins, whose ‘long struggle with adversity’ is contrasted to the glitzy world of modern
intervention, rather than as a thing. The science-fiction inspired imagination of the NET research project led to the realisation of an actual, integrated, hybrid work. Our cultural imaginary is infused with technophilic musings and aesthetic potentialities. We absorb our ideas of future interface from special effects in films that also offer a vision of space-time transformations