Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823264858
- eISBN:
- 9780823266852
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264858.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This volume draws together an array of distinguished scholars of ancient and modern literatures to consider the ways in which historicism in literary studies can and should be construed and pursued ...
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This volume draws together an array of distinguished scholars of ancient and modern literatures to consider the ways in which historicism in literary studies can and should be construed and pursued today. In particular, the contributors to the volume seek to challenge and complement the historicism that stresses proximate socio-political contexts as well as the more recent and salutary concern with understanding literary production and reception on a global scale with the perspective of the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. Thus, the approach advanced in these essays would complement the world-geographical with the world-historical perspective on the literary process, and where a more traditional historicism would see unified or, at best, “polyphonic” responses to concrete historical dilemmas, the contributors to this volume uncover deep-historical stratifications and non-synchronicities, in which certain formal solutions may display “elective affinities” with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous problems. In their quest for a revitalized and more expansive historicism in literary study, the contributors to the volume build on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg (among others). The volume also seeks to place this critical tradition in dialogue with such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Curtius, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Fredric Jameson, who all have approached literature in a globally-comparativist and evolutionary-historical spirit.Less
This volume draws together an array of distinguished scholars of ancient and modern literatures to consider the ways in which historicism in literary studies can and should be construed and pursued today. In particular, the contributors to the volume seek to challenge and complement the historicism that stresses proximate socio-political contexts as well as the more recent and salutary concern with understanding literary production and reception on a global scale with the perspective of the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. Thus, the approach advanced in these essays would complement the world-geographical with the world-historical perspective on the literary process, and where a more traditional historicism would see unified or, at best, “polyphonic” responses to concrete historical dilemmas, the contributors to this volume uncover deep-historical stratifications and non-synchronicities, in which certain formal solutions may display “elective affinities” with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous problems. In their quest for a revitalized and more expansive historicism in literary study, the contributors to the volume build on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg (among others). The volume also seeks to place this critical tradition in dialogue with such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Curtius, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Fredric Jameson, who all have approached literature in a globally-comparativist and evolutionary-historical spirit.
Marisa Galvez
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226693217
- eISBN:
- 9780226693491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226693491.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This introduction argues that lyrical articulations of crusade are essential for understanding "crusade" as a complex historical and cultural phenomenon. It defines the "courtly crusade idiom" and ...
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This introduction argues that lyrical articulations of crusade are essential for understanding "crusade" as a complex historical and cultural phenomenon. It defines the "courtly crusade idiom" and its emergence during a time when the Roman Catholic Church imagined the need to recover the Holy Land as inseparable from the individual and collective moral reform of its believers. The courtly crusader of vernacular literature sought to reconcile competing ideals of earthly love and chivalry with crusade as a penitential pilgrimage. This introduction gives the historical and cultural context of this version of speaking crusades, in which courtly art forms, such as lyric and romance, and material objects, such as manuscripts, effigies, and tapestries, manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals. Finally, it demonstrates how the idiom responds to Foucault's aveu, and how this book as a whole proposes a descriptive historical poetics.Less
This introduction argues that lyrical articulations of crusade are essential for understanding "crusade" as a complex historical and cultural phenomenon. It defines the "courtly crusade idiom" and its emergence during a time when the Roman Catholic Church imagined the need to recover the Holy Land as inseparable from the individual and collective moral reform of its believers. The courtly crusader of vernacular literature sought to reconcile competing ideals of earthly love and chivalry with crusade as a penitential pilgrimage. This introduction gives the historical and cultural context of this version of speaking crusades, in which courtly art forms, such as lyric and romance, and material objects, such as manuscripts, effigies, and tapestries, manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals. Finally, it demonstrates how the idiom responds to Foucault's aveu, and how this book as a whole proposes a descriptive historical poetics.
Marisa Galvez
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226693217
- eISBN:
- 9780226693491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226693491.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
A study of various manuscripts permits us to track the movement of the idiom from lyric phenomenon to material archive. The chapter first illustrates descriptive historical poetics with two objects ...
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A study of various manuscripts permits us to track the movement of the idiom from lyric phenomenon to material archive. The chapter first illustrates descriptive historical poetics with two objects that embody typical monuments of the crusader and whose meanings seem clear in their respective disciplines of study—a crusader sword in the armored gisant of Jean d'Alluye, and the epitaph on the Frankish stele of Barthélemy Caïn. Understanding the Chinese sword and epitaph as two versions of speaking crusades, we can locate lyrical translations of crusades within and across texts and various possible situations through time and space. The chapter applies this method to manuscripts through modes of adjacency (Thibaut de Champagne, his inquest rolls and chansonnier), genre-existence (Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, his lyric and genres such as the Epic Letter, and their existence in chansonniers), and performative reconfigurations in the Latin East through contrafacture and adaptation of genres (Jehan de Journi's Disme de Penitanche, the lyric of the Templar of Tyre compared to Rutebeuf). The idiom becomes visible through descriptions strategically situated within historical discourses of language, culture, and materiality.Less
A study of various manuscripts permits us to track the movement of the idiom from lyric phenomenon to material archive. The chapter first illustrates descriptive historical poetics with two objects that embody typical monuments of the crusader and whose meanings seem clear in their respective disciplines of study—a crusader sword in the armored gisant of Jean d'Alluye, and the epitaph on the Frankish stele of Barthélemy Caïn. Understanding the Chinese sword and epitaph as two versions of speaking crusades, we can locate lyrical translations of crusades within and across texts and various possible situations through time and space. The chapter applies this method to manuscripts through modes of adjacency (Thibaut de Champagne, his inquest rolls and chansonnier), genre-existence (Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, his lyric and genres such as the Epic Letter, and their existence in chansonniers), and performative reconfigurations in the Latin East through contrafacture and adaptation of genres (Jehan de Journi's Disme de Penitanche, the lyric of the Templar of Tyre compared to Rutebeuf). The idiom becomes visible through descriptions strategically situated within historical discourses of language, culture, and materiality.
Virginia Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282043
- eISBN:
- 9780823285983
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282043.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
In American poetics, lyric and rhythm share a history—and since this is America, it is a racialized history. This essay considers Francis Barton Gummere’s contributions to that history. Although most ...
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In American poetics, lyric and rhythm share a history—and since this is America, it is a racialized history. This essay considers Francis Barton Gummere’s contributions to that history. Although most Anglo-American literary critics have never heard of Gummere, many of the assumptions of that criticism were first articulated by him between 1891 and 1911. By returning to Gummere’s now historically obscure logic, we might begin to trace the overdetermined origins of current critical versions of lyric rhythm as natural culture and to imagine an alternative history of American poetics, a history of the poetics of rhythm not modeled on naturalized (and thus racialized) concepts of culture, on English prosody, or on common sense; an alternative that acknowledges the contradictions of any notion of a shared Anglo-American rhythm or shared Anglo-American poetry, a history in which the idea of rhythm remains central, but central as symptom rather than central as solution.Less
In American poetics, lyric and rhythm share a history—and since this is America, it is a racialized history. This essay considers Francis Barton Gummere’s contributions to that history. Although most Anglo-American literary critics have never heard of Gummere, many of the assumptions of that criticism were first articulated by him between 1891 and 1911. By returning to Gummere’s now historically obscure logic, we might begin to trace the overdetermined origins of current critical versions of lyric rhythm as natural culture and to imagine an alternative history of American poetics, a history of the poetics of rhythm not modeled on naturalized (and thus racialized) concepts of culture, on English prosody, or on common sense; an alternative that acknowledges the contradictions of any notion of a shared Anglo-American rhythm or shared Anglo-American poetry, a history in which the idea of rhythm remains central, but central as symptom rather than central as solution.
Mark Minett
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197523827
- eISBN:
- 9780197523865
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197523827.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The introduction identifies the tension in Altman scholarship between oppositional and assimilationist positions, explaining how they share an understanding of “Hollywood” as a relatively staid and ...
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The introduction identifies the tension in Altman scholarship between oppositional and assimilationist positions, explaining how they share an understanding of “Hollywood” as a relatively staid and uniform tradition until the late-1960s box office downturn uniquely afforded newcomers opportunities to reject or simply update establishment style in order to appeal to a hip, film-educated youth audience. This facilitates accounts of filmmakers’ transcendent visionary powers, supposed to generate uniquely expressive breaks with norms. In contrast, Altman is reconsidered here through a historical poetics approach understanding filmmakers as problem-solving agents pursuing inferable goals within the constraints and affordances of specifiable historical contexts. From this perspective, Hollywood is not a transhistorical style but a storytelling paradigm open to constant reinvention. Focusing on a moment and filmmaker typically thought to embody a break from the establishment clarifies the complex historical texture of Hollywood filmmaking as a vital cite of contestation, innovation, and elaboration.Less
The introduction identifies the tension in Altman scholarship between oppositional and assimilationist positions, explaining how they share an understanding of “Hollywood” as a relatively staid and uniform tradition until the late-1960s box office downturn uniquely afforded newcomers opportunities to reject or simply update establishment style in order to appeal to a hip, film-educated youth audience. This facilitates accounts of filmmakers’ transcendent visionary powers, supposed to generate uniquely expressive breaks with norms. In contrast, Altman is reconsidered here through a historical poetics approach understanding filmmakers as problem-solving agents pursuing inferable goals within the constraints and affordances of specifiable historical contexts. From this perspective, Hollywood is not a transhistorical style but a storytelling paradigm open to constant reinvention. Focusing on a moment and filmmaker typically thought to embody a break from the establishment clarifies the complex historical texture of Hollywood filmmaking as a vital cite of contestation, innovation, and elaboration.
Martina Roepke
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748656349
- eISBN:
- 9780748684274
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748656349.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Academic scholarship has usually explored family films in terms of authenticity and memory, framing them as spontaneous documents of everyday life, and valued as catalysts for acts of reminiscence or ...
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Academic scholarship has usually explored family films in terms of authenticity and memory, framing them as spontaneous documents of everyday life, and valued as catalysts for acts of reminiscence or confirmations of kinship. Any status they might have as crafted stories has, for the most part, been ignored. The fictional character of family films has been largely confined to a sense that they present us with ‘idealised’ moments of life, rather than any more verifiable ‘truth’. This chapter approaches family filmmaking in relation to fiction, in a rather different way, in what could probably best be described as a quest for the ‘historical poetics’ of a lost sub-genre. Unlike family footage in general, ‘family fiction’ explicitly employs strategies of staging, acting and directing, and is frequently based on a prepared script. When and under what circumstances (technological, cultural, social) family fiction was regarded as an appropriate genre for hobby filmmakers, forms a core concern throughout this chapter. The chapter argues that such works should be of interest to any amateur film collection, not due to some supposed ‘authenticity’ or ‘uniqueness’, but as evidences of the way in which cinematic techniques and styles were appropriated by amateurs, and thus extended the cinematographic experience from movie theatres into the daily life of moviegoers.Less
Academic scholarship has usually explored family films in terms of authenticity and memory, framing them as spontaneous documents of everyday life, and valued as catalysts for acts of reminiscence or confirmations of kinship. Any status they might have as crafted stories has, for the most part, been ignored. The fictional character of family films has been largely confined to a sense that they present us with ‘idealised’ moments of life, rather than any more verifiable ‘truth’. This chapter approaches family filmmaking in relation to fiction, in a rather different way, in what could probably best be described as a quest for the ‘historical poetics’ of a lost sub-genre. Unlike family footage in general, ‘family fiction’ explicitly employs strategies of staging, acting and directing, and is frequently based on a prepared script. When and under what circumstances (technological, cultural, social) family fiction was regarded as an appropriate genre for hobby filmmakers, forms a core concern throughout this chapter. The chapter argues that such works should be of interest to any amateur film collection, not due to some supposed ‘authenticity’ or ‘uniqueness’, but as evidences of the way in which cinematic techniques and styles were appropriated by amateurs, and thus extended the cinematographic experience from movie theatres into the daily life of moviegoers.
Reuven Snir
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474420518
- eISBN:
- 9781474435642
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420518.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The Introduction explains why the need for a new theoretical framework for the study of Arabic literature is so urgent. Its main outlines are based on the theoretical achievements of historical ...
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The Introduction explains why the need for a new theoretical framework for the study of Arabic literature is so urgent. Its main outlines are based on the theoretical achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian Formalism and its theoretical legacy. The basic assumption is that all potential inventories of canonized and non-canonized Arabic literary texts ― including children’s literature and translated texts ― are to be seen as forming one dynamic, autonomous literary system.Less
The Introduction explains why the need for a new theoretical framework for the study of Arabic literature is so urgent. Its main outlines are based on the theoretical achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian Formalism and its theoretical legacy. The basic assumption is that all potential inventories of canonized and non-canonized Arabic literary texts ― including children’s literature and translated texts ― are to be seen as forming one dynamic, autonomous literary system.
Mark Minett
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197523827
- eISBN:
- 9780197523865
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197523827.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the ...
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Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the “Hollywood Renaissance” or “New Hollywood” period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs a historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman’s filmmaking history and profile—lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate on their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman’s work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.Less
Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the “Hollywood Renaissance” or “New Hollywood” period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs a historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman’s filmmaking history and profile—lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate on their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman’s work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.
Sebastian Matzner and Gail Trimble
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198846987
- eISBN:
- 9780191881930
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198846987.003.0011
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The epilogue takes stock of the volume’s insights, reflects on the connections and tensions between the contributors’ individual approaches, and delineates how the kinds of critical intervention and ...
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The epilogue takes stock of the volume’s insights, reflects on the connections and tensions between the contributors’ individual approaches, and delineates how the kinds of critical intervention and conceptual recalibration offered here can set the scene for future interdisciplinary work. It sums up and explores the variations in perspective that remain in the light of the volume as a whole, while also sounding out the emerging common ground that can be established in spite of the sometimes irreducible—and productive—differences. It also draws out and comments on the recurring concerns of this volume—which cluster in particular around the issues of historically contingent reception aesthetics, dynamics of performance, affect, intermediality, narrative ontology, and differences between genres—in order to show how the volume as a whole advances the developing theoretical field of historical narratology. In doing so, it makes the case for the importance of expanding the scope and methods of narrative theory through incorporating specifically classical parameters of narration to confront and address some of the unsatisfactory dimensions of structuralist narratology. In this way, the epilogue also sketches avenues for future research and points out the ways in which the present volume seeks to set an agenda for new directions in classical and interdisciplinary scholarship.Less
The epilogue takes stock of the volume’s insights, reflects on the connections and tensions between the contributors’ individual approaches, and delineates how the kinds of critical intervention and conceptual recalibration offered here can set the scene for future interdisciplinary work. It sums up and explores the variations in perspective that remain in the light of the volume as a whole, while also sounding out the emerging common ground that can be established in spite of the sometimes irreducible—and productive—differences. It also draws out and comments on the recurring concerns of this volume—which cluster in particular around the issues of historically contingent reception aesthetics, dynamics of performance, affect, intermediality, narrative ontology, and differences between genres—in order to show how the volume as a whole advances the developing theoretical field of historical narratology. In doing so, it makes the case for the importance of expanding the scope and methods of narrative theory through incorporating specifically classical parameters of narration to confront and address some of the unsatisfactory dimensions of structuralist narratology. In this way, the epilogue also sketches avenues for future research and points out the ways in which the present volume seeks to set an agenda for new directions in classical and interdisciplinary scholarship.
Sebastian Matzner and Gail Trimble (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198846987
- eISBN:
- 9780191881930
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198846987.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
‘Metalepsis’ is a classical term. Ancient critics, however, only used it within the confines of rhetoric and stylistics to describe certain usages akin to metaphor and metonymy. In the twentieth ...
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‘Metalepsis’ is a classical term. Ancient critics, however, only used it within the confines of rhetoric and stylistics to describe certain usages akin to metaphor and metonymy. In the twentieth century, metalepsis was then reframed much more broadly as a crossing of the boundaries that separate distinct narrative worlds. This modern notion of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette, has proved highly insightful for exploring interactions between the worlds of author and text, such as scenarios in fiction—typically postmodern, typically novelistic or cinematic—where an author and a character enter into conversation. Yet metalepsis has a much greater potential to address all sorts of transgressions between ‘worlds’ or ‘levels’, not only in postmodern but also pre-modern literature. If metalepsis consists fundamentally in the breaking down of barriers, to what sort of barriers and what sort of transgressions can the concept be fruitfully applied? Can it be used within approaches other than narratology? Does metalepsis require recognizable levels of reality and fictionality, and if so, what role might be played by other planes, such as the past, the mythical, or the divine? What form does metalepsis take in less obviously ‘narrative’ genres (such as lyric poetry)? And how should it be understood in visual media (such as vase-painting)? As classicists begin to examine what metalepsis might mean in ancient literature, this volume uses such questions to consider where metalepsis can most productively join other critical concepts in classical research, and how explorations of ancient metalepsis might change, refine, or extend our understanding of the concept itself.Less
‘Metalepsis’ is a classical term. Ancient critics, however, only used it within the confines of rhetoric and stylistics to describe certain usages akin to metaphor and metonymy. In the twentieth century, metalepsis was then reframed much more broadly as a crossing of the boundaries that separate distinct narrative worlds. This modern notion of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette, has proved highly insightful for exploring interactions between the worlds of author and text, such as scenarios in fiction—typically postmodern, typically novelistic or cinematic—where an author and a character enter into conversation. Yet metalepsis has a much greater potential to address all sorts of transgressions between ‘worlds’ or ‘levels’, not only in postmodern but also pre-modern literature. If metalepsis consists fundamentally in the breaking down of barriers, to what sort of barriers and what sort of transgressions can the concept be fruitfully applied? Can it be used within approaches other than narratology? Does metalepsis require recognizable levels of reality and fictionality, and if so, what role might be played by other planes, such as the past, the mythical, or the divine? What form does metalepsis take in less obviously ‘narrative’ genres (such as lyric poetry)? And how should it be understood in visual media (such as vase-painting)? As classicists begin to examine what metalepsis might mean in ancient literature, this volume uses such questions to consider where metalepsis can most productively join other critical concepts in classical research, and how explorations of ancient metalepsis might change, refine, or extend our understanding of the concept itself.
Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474406727
- eISBN:
- 9781474430470
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474406727.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do ...
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Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.Less
Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.
Mark Minett
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197523827
- eISBN:
- 9780197523865
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197523827.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Calling into question authorship criticism’s tendency to treat undersupported claims about formal design as starting points for the deployment of an interpretive hermeneutics aimed at revealing ...
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Calling into question authorship criticism’s tendency to treat undersupported claims about formal design as starting points for the deployment of an interpretive hermeneutics aimed at revealing political and expressive significance, the conclusion instead considers how a historically precise rethinking of Altman’s innovations broadens the field of questions we might ask about the possibilities of Hollywood authorship. In its recognition of elaborative authorship as a position within Hollywood filmmaking practice, the account presented here suggests a reconsideration of the nature of Hollywood norms. The conclusion argues that Altman’s novelty is best understood not as rejection or assimilation but in the context of a Hollywood cinema whose norms have always been a work in progress on multiple levels. It is not only Hollywood’s conventions and techniques that are constantly in play, contingently open to a range of modifications and renegotiations, but also its underlying principles and aims.Less
Calling into question authorship criticism’s tendency to treat undersupported claims about formal design as starting points for the deployment of an interpretive hermeneutics aimed at revealing political and expressive significance, the conclusion instead considers how a historically precise rethinking of Altman’s innovations broadens the field of questions we might ask about the possibilities of Hollywood authorship. In its recognition of elaborative authorship as a position within Hollywood filmmaking practice, the account presented here suggests a reconsideration of the nature of Hollywood norms. The conclusion argues that Altman’s novelty is best understood not as rejection or assimilation but in the context of a Hollywood cinema whose norms have always been a work in progress on multiple levels. It is not only Hollywood’s conventions and techniques that are constantly in play, contingently open to a range of modifications and renegotiations, but also its underlying principles and aims.