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This article addresses the current state of film studies as a discipline, profession and institution, arguing that the hunt for cultural authority has been the defining feature, motivating force and tragic flaw of film studies. The current self-reflexive soul- searching reveals that the field – no longer a radical upstart – still lacks the gravitas of more established subjects. Departments have responded to identity crises and changing enrolment patterns by mummifying, killing off or burying foundational emphases. The nostalgia for film studies origins and the jeremiads about an unmanageable, unruly and recalcitrant discipline yield rose-tinted fantasies about community and mutual intelligibility that must be ultimately resisted.
Beckett’s Afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of his own developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it nuances the long-held view that he opposed any form of genre crossing. Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett’s work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the ‘Beckett canon’ to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives on the texts and enhances their significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The featured essays explore a wide variety of forms (prose, theatre, performance, dance, ballet, radio, music, television, film, visual art, installation, new/digital media, webseries, etc.), in different cultural contexts, mainly from the early 1990s until the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, to spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, even creative rewritings of Beckett’s biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author’s work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses. Viewed from this perspective, Beckett’s Afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation constitute forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival as well as the continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett’s work in the twenty-first century.
division is symbolised at its conclusion by the detonation of the atom bomb over Hiroshima, an event that marks the transition from full-scale military conflict to the beginning of the Cold War. But if The English Patient is concerned on one level with the transition between two phases of modern international history, it is also a novel about the nature of Englishness. In order to grasp the full implications of this statement, we need to understand ‘Englishness’ as a mode of cultural authority rather than a repertoire of social conventions. Englishness in this sense
– literally and psychologically – for wider society. For her peers her determination to adhere to certain modes of behaviour was welcomed with enthusiasm. Hers was the voice of cultural authority and her performance encouraged and stimulated the establishment of like-minded groups, which became powerbases for local society. Such groups generated their own ideas and modes of behaviour on the basis of site-specific circumstances, incorporating them into the broader philosophies of their British heritage. This helped to foster stability in
society. The notion of black ‘expertise’ or natural affinity for the jitterbug provided black dancers with a degree of cultural authority in the eyes of white Britons, but it also perpetuated longstanding and problematic biological assumptions about racial difference. For instance, Swing Fever Jitterbug asserted that the talents displayed by black dancers in performing the jitterbug, as well as the steps of the dance, could be traced back to their ancestors’ ‘far-off jungle days’.44 Within the shifting racial discourses that surrounded the dance, there were also new
, ‘the establishment of a reputation for being likely to have important and interesting things of this type to say and for having the willingness and capacities to say them effectively through the appropriate media’. 19 This definition is neither positively nor negatively connoted but describes a type of activity; moreover, its applicability to particular individuals varies – being a matter of ‘degree not kind’ – and the ‘public’ addressed may be a smaller fraction of the general public. 20 The result is what Collini calls ‘cultural authority’, which grants its
the global and the local it also ‘keeps “Cali” (as in California) or, more specifically, Hollywood, as the central point of discursive reference’ (‘Shakespeare, “Glo-cali-zation”’ 16). Put another way, Fiennes’s Coriolanus consolidates the cultural authority of Hollywood Shakespeare by drawing upon such typical features of the blockbuster as narrative clarity, frenetic
Chapter 1 Women’s poetry and classical authors: Lucy Hutchinson and the classicisation of scripture Edward Paleit Introduction: the distant muses – early modern women poets and classical antiquity E arly modern women poets’ search for cultural authority and poetic voice involved a vexed, sometimes contradictory relationship to literary models (as Sarah Ross and Line Cottegnies explore further in chapters 2 and 3). Classical poetry was especially awkward for women writers to accommodate and imitate, for a variety of social and cultural reasons. Greek and
. 137 Readers could relatively affordably – but with sufficient willpower – improve their own health. According to self-help authors, rejection of the cultural authority of orthodox medicine and the adoption of more carefully balanced pathways to health constituted the most intelligent and rational form of self-care. Notes 1 A. Weil, 8 Weeks to Optimum Health , 2nd edition, 4th reprint (London
el curso de lecturas y viajes, comprendemos lo que no somos, lo que ya no compartimos con los intelectuales del mundo industrializado. (Fornet, 1971: 36)4 Curiously, however, this internationalism bore traces of cultural nationalism; in 1961, the pre-UNEAC Congress had stressed the rescue and conservation of cultural traditions and folklore (Revolución, 1961e: 5), and even the PSP cultural authorities advocated returning to popular (often rural) traditions, García Buchaca talking of rehabilitating the cultural past and folklore (Revolución, 1961f: 6). Hence, all