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One key aspect of characterization is the construction of character psychology, the attribution to fictional representations of beliefs and desires, personality traits, and moods and emotions. Characters are products of social cognition, the human propensity for making sense of others. However, they are also products of artists who fashion them to appeal to our nature as social beings. Through an analysis of Todd Solondz‘s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), this paper describes three processes of social cognition which are crucial for audiovisual characterization: folk psychology, causal attribution, and emotion expressions.
The critical response to Alien Resurrection marked a departure from negative responses to Alien3. Oblivious to the films parting from the trilogys characterization as ‘simultaneously feminist and gynophobic’, some critics remained steadfast to that trope, insisting ‘Ripley is still the same person.’ Critics of the trilogy determined its sub-text to be concerned with gender and reproduction and went on to assert the same of Alien Resurrection. Where the trilogy offered a vision of Ripley,through a heterocentric lens, with blurred but visible divisions between monstrous and human, (and what distinguished them had to do with means of reproduction), AlienResurrection eradicates boundaries so it becomes impossible to determine whether ‘normal’ human or monster, can even exist in this world. The issue of sexuality becomes paramount to the issue of reproduction and gender. In the course of the trilogy, gender is made obsolete; Alien Resurrection finishes the job in rendering terms of sexual normalcy immaterial. The alien queen who has mutated into a parthenogenetically reproducing creature is described as ‘perfect’; what kind of meaning can that sort of reproduction or creature have in a heterocentric world? This world and its inhabitants are beyond heterosexuality, and perhaps beyond sexuality as we know it. Consequently, reconsidering AlienResurrection through a queer lens which inquires into sexuality offers a fuller and more fruitful reading than does one through gender or the biological labyrinth of reproduction.
Through an extensive study of Dickens’s “new art form,” the illustrated novel, Spectral Dickens sets out to transform certain fundamental assumptions about realism, literary forms, and imitation of personhood that have long defined the discourse of novel criticism and character studies. This book redefines and expands the critical discourse on fictional character by bringing a wider range of modern critical theory to the study of Dickens’s characterization, using in particular the three “hauntological” concepts of the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian Real to give new ontological dimensions to the basic question: “What is a character?” By taking into account visual forms of representation and emphasizing the importance of form in rethinking the strict opposition between real person and fictional character, Spectral Dickens shifts the focus of character studies from long-entrenched values like “realism,” “depth,” and “lifelikeness,” to nonmimetic critical concepts like effigy, anamorphosis, visuality, and distortion. Ultimately, the “spectral” forms and concepts developed here in relation to Dickens’s unique and innovative characters—characters that have, in fact, always challenged implicit assumptions about the line between fictional character and real person—should have broader applications beyond Dickens’s novels and the Victorian era. The aim here is to provide a richer and more nuanced framework though which to understand fictional characters not as imitations of reality, but as specters of the real.
narrative elements of setting, characterization and emplotment into a constructivist theoretical framework, which stresses the social construction of reality, identity and the co-constitution of agent and structure. The third part reflects on questions of ‘causality’ and on reasons for the success and failure of particular narratives, while part four outlines what one may consider particular elements of romantic narratives. The conclusion summarizes the main findings and illustrates how this will be applied to the empirical narratives in the following chapters. The
concept of spectral characterization here. The first has to do with his point concerning the primacy of the visual image. It becomes difficult to discuss this idea from a historical point of view, but the idea that there is a certain force to the image itself, and particularly in its visual form, has a long and rich theoretical history, both within psychoanalysis and outside of it. I will not
chapter is structured as follows. The first part reflects on the historical as well as literary linkage between romanticism, rebellion and revolution. Employing the method of narrative analysis outlined in Chapter 1 and focusing on setting, characterization and emplotment, the second part then emphasizes the romantic side of an ambiguous and partly orientalist narrative about 92 Romantic narratives in international politics the Arab rebel in movies such as Lawrence of Arabia. Following this, the third part of the chapter shows the persistence of these romantic
the English monarchy imagined itself through the visual arts and through the culture of royal entries, masques and triumphal arches. It begins with a reconsideration of Elizabeth’s famous characterization of herself as her tragic ancestor, and then focuses on several striking examples of courtly display in which something went wrong – the actors subverted the text, the monarch refused to play his assigned
-Janovian’ interpretation, Bergman duly accepted and worked with significant Janovian premises as he conceived of the story and characterizations for Autumn Sonata , just as the first interpretation holds, but adds that for various reasons, the director did not, finally, go on to make a thoroughly Janovian work. This interpretation purports, then, to identify unintentional (and indeed serendipitous) non-Janovian elements in the story conveyed by the finished audio-visual display. This is a kind of interpretation that is compatible
. The power wielded in the cultural imaginary by myths of potent masculinity is mercilessly mocked in the film’s visual humour. Les Bronzés constitutes a sketch of the social mores of its time, using the techniques of an oppositional theatrical mode that is clearly identifiable as part of the post-’68 fashion for derisive social satire. Characterization is one-dimensional in Les Bronzés and Leconte
pleasure rather than reproduction (Borris, Same-Sex 24, 26). Given Christianity’s conflicted representation of even marital, heterosexual intercourse and eroticism and its simultaneous valorization of virginity and sexual abstinence in texts such as Revelation 14.3–4 and 1 Corinthians 7.1, same-sex intercourse (sodomy and tribadism) was as a matter of course stringently condemned as one of those special ‘crying sins’1 so heinous that it brings upon its practitioners the immediate wrath of God. In short, same-sex intercourse, especially in its particular characterization