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The Novelist, the Lecturer, and the Limits of Persuasion: J. M. Coetzee and Elizabeth Costello on the Lives of Animals and Men

Michael Bell

in Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to ... More

J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to translate the authority of his writing into its supposed political or ideological equivalents. This chapter is devoted mainly to a close reading of The Lives of Animals in its original form and context as one of the 1998 Tanner lectures at Princeton. Costello herself is far from being a simple mouthpiece for the author and her account of the novelist's sympathy is vulnerable as well as eloquent. Although it is often discussed, and not inappropriately, for its thematic contribution to public debate on the human relation to animals, the mutual embedding of formal lecture and fictional narrative gives the work a philosophical focus on the incommunicability of all radical conviction that falls outside conventional norms.Less

I Want To Suck Your …: Fluids and Fluidity in Dracula Porn

Laura Helen Marks

in Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of ... More

This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of Dracula, porn adaptations of the novel must carefully navigate gender and sexuality. These adaptations reveal how hardcore film as a whole operates on anxious ground similar to that of Stoker’s novel, simultaneously invoking and resisting sexual anxieties concerning gendered penetration, gendered fluids, and consumption. Dracula, as a culture text, mobilizes queered, gendered, and raced reformulations of consumer and consumed, queering ostensibly straight pornographies, destabilizing supposedly rigid gender dynamics, and resituating the colonial Other. Dracula adaptations invoke and redeploy the racialized implications of nineteenth-century vampirism, channeling racial and sexual subjectivity through vampirism. Dracula penetrates a supposedly sanctified pornotopia, enabling diverse and perverse sexual representations that are instructive in understanding pornography as erotically engaged with sexual fluidity, genre instability, and oscillating power dynamics.Less

Mise-en-Scène

Terry Chester Shulman

in Film's First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos

An introduction to Maurice Costello and the entertainment world as it existed in America at the beginning of the twentiethcentury. As the rise of film brought about the decline of theater, New York ... More

An introduction to Maurice Costello and the entertainment world as it existed in America at the beginning of the twentiethcentury. As the rise of film brought about the decline of theater, New York became a battleground as the two mediums foughteach other for dominance. Maurice, then a struggling stage actor, waded into this maelstrom of cultural and technological change with afamily to support and a growing dissatisfaction with his profession that would eventually lead him to consider a different option.Less

Mae

Terry Chester Shulman

in Film's First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos

Maurice meets Mae and they marry in secret. Immediately after the ceremony he leaves her for six months to go on tour. She says nothing of the marriage to her stepfather, Vincent Tresham, leaving ... More

Maurice meets Mae and they marry in secret. Immediately after the ceremony he leaves her for six months to go on tour. She says nothing of the marriage to her stepfather, Vincent Tresham, leaving that task for her new husband upon his return. Maurice and Tresham have words when the truth comes out, andthe newlyweds storm off to begin married life ontheir own. Mae’s introduction to the itinerant life of struggling stage performer goes from bad to worse when she becomes pregnant and, since Maurice is on the road, has to go live with Maurice’s family in the slums of Pittsburgh.Less

Writing, music, dancing, and architecture in Elvis Costello's “Pills and Soap”

David Brackett

in Interpreting Popular Music

This chapter examines Elvis Costello's Pills and Soap in relation to writing, music, dancing, and architecture. It looks at Pills and Soap through contemporary critical discourses about his music, ... More

This chapter examines Elvis Costello's Pills and Soap in relation to writing, music, dancing, and architecture. It looks at Pills and Soap through contemporary critical discourses about his music, his own statements about his music, discourses on modernism and postmodernism, on the aesthetics of those with legitimate and popular taste and the conflict between 1960s countercultural and 1970s punk aesthetics. It also considers the gap between Costello's 1994 reflections on the artistic process and his 1983 statement which appears to advocate a Romantic notion of unmediated artistic spontaneity.Less

Hollywood’s Great Deluge

Alan K. Rode

in Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film

This chapter provides a detailed account about the making of Noah’s Ark (1928). Jack Warner threw out Curtiz’s scenario,which was paired with the biblical flood saga.Curtiz ended up directing a ... More

This chapter provides a detailed account about the making of Noah’s Ark (1928). Jack Warner threw out Curtiz’s scenario,which was paired with the biblical flood saga.Curtiz ended up directing a script written by his future wife, Bess Meredyth, and Anthony Coldeway; the entire production was overseen by Darryl Zanuck. Curtiz’s penchant for realism resulted in the infamous flooding sequence that caused multiple injuries and the alleged fatalities of several extras, which remain unproven to this day. Archival interviews with the stars, Dolores Costello and George O’Brien, and the cameraman Byron Haskin add heft to a detailed account of one of Hollywood’s most notorious productions. Although historically categorized as a flop, Noah’s Ark was a financial success that was Hollywood’s last silent epic, despite the mawkish Vitaphone talking sequences.Curtiz was shielded from any repercussions from the flooding debacle by the brothers Warner, and after an opulent post-premiere party at Bess Meredyth’s house, he looked forward to making more films at Warner Bros.Less

Prison Overcrowding and the Legal Challenge to Florida’s Prison System, 1970–1980

Heather Schoenfeld

in Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration

This chapter describes the origins and initial developments around Costello v. Wainwright, the 8th Amendment lawsuit against Florida’s prison system. The chapter argues that prison conditions ... More

This chapter describes the origins and initial developments around Costello v. Wainwright, the 8th Amendment lawsuit against Florida’s prison system. The chapter argues that prison conditions litigation grew out of the Civil Right Movement. In addition, it demonstrates how the federal court’s definition of the problem as prison “capacity” and the white supremacist racial project shaped state officials’ options for legal compliance. Finally, it reveals how reformist corrections bureaucrats used the court order to demand more resources for state prisons.Less

The Melodramatic Reality of Film and Literature: Or: Elizabeth Costello’s Cinematic Sisters

Stephen Mulhall

in The Self and its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts

In a recent exchange of essays between Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, both found reason to take philosophical pleasure as well as philosophical instruction from J. M. Coetzee's decision to deliver ... More

In a recent exchange of essays between Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, both found reason to take philosophical pleasure as well as philosophical instruction from J. M. Coetzee's decision to deliver his Tanner lectures in the form of fictional tales devoted to the celebratory occasion on which Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello delivered the Gates Lecture at Appleton College. This chapter attempts to provide an additional layer of complexity to the portrait of Elizabeth Costello by considering a suggestion that prompted by Diamond's original essay, which paired Coetzee's Costello with Ted Hughes' poem ‘Six Young Men’ as her two leading examples of what it might mean to encounter a difficulty of reality.Less

Telling Stories about Assertions and Arguments

Michael Hampe

in What Philosophy Is For

This chapter begins with Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello lectures to engage with questions about translating experiences through fictions.