Acta Iassyensia Comparationis
Acta Iassyensia Comparationis
Publishing House: Editura Universităţii »Alexandru Ioan Cuza« din Iaşi
Subject(s): History, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Cultural history, Essay|Book Review |Scientific Life, Studies of Literature, Sociology, History of ideas, Book-Review, Theory of Literature
Frequency: 2 issues
Print ISSN: 1584-6628
Online-ISSN: 2285-3871
Status: Active
- 2014
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- 2022
- 2023
- Issue No. 1/13
- Issue No. 14/2
- Issue No. 15/1
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- Issue No. 17/1
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- Issue No. 19/1
- Issue No. 20/2
- Issue No. Special/3
- Issue No. 21/1
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- Issue No. Special/3
- Issue No. 25/1
- Issue No. 26/2
- Issue No. 27/1
- Issue No. 28/2
- Issue No. Special/3
- Issue No. 29/1
- Issue No. 30/2
- Issue No. 31/1
- Issue No. 32/2
- Year: 2023
- Volume: 2
- Number: 32
In the frame of “Literature and Film” subject, the issue hosts a spectrum of highly topical themes, such as: migration, race, the East-West divide, the American dream and its deconstruction, social constraint and abuse, trauma and horror (related to Holocaust and war), journeys across time and space, identity (seen as a new “final frontier").
Articles list
Miguel, le nouveau Dante : voyage entre le film d’animation Coco et le poème dantesque
Miguel, le nouveau Dante : voyage entre le film d’animation Coco et le poème dantesque
(Miguel, the New Dante: Journey Between the Animation Film Coco and Dante’s Poem)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Federico SIRAGUSA
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 1-13
- No. of Pages: 13
- Keywords: Coco; Dante Alighieri; The Divine Comedy; Disney Pixar; animated film; literature;
- Summary/Abstract: In 2017 Disney and Pixar released the animated film Coco. The story revolves around the Mexican festivity Día de los Muertos, when the main character, Miguel Rivera, following a personal and familiar crisis, begins a journey in the afterlife. While the majority of the existing studies concerns mainly the cultural perspective of the festivity and the fundamental role of family, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate a more intrinsic relation, that is the one between the film and literature, especially with the Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The analysis begins with the observations about five characters, then moves to five places and scenes, and finally concludes with three topics. Each of these aspects is compared to the Italian poem. The results lead to the importance of proposing further studies on the same film, or other films, in order to observe the relationship between the literary background, especially the medieval one, and cinema.
L’esthétique de la synesthésie dans Tous les matins du monde de Pascal Quignard, roman et film
L’esthétique de la synesthésie dans Tous les matins du monde de Pascal Quignard, roman et film
(The Aesthetics of Synaesthesia in Pascal Quignard’s Tous les matins du monde, Novel and Film)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Dora LEONTARIDOU
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 15-28
- No. of Pages: 14
- Keywords: Quignard; novel; film; synesthesia; French literature; 20th century;
- Summary/Abstract: The award-winning and commercially successful film Tous les matins du monde (All the mornings of the world), realized in France in 1991, is the outcome of a collaboration between the well-known novelist Pascal Quignard, the director Alain Corneau, and the musician and international baroque music specialist Jordi Savall. Four art forms, namely literature,cinema, music, and painting, contributed to the realization of the aesthetics of synesthesia in the novel and the film. The plot highlights two French composers and viola da gamba players from the 17th century. Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, who held anti-absolutist views, declined the invitation from the king Louis XIV and refused to be introduced to the royal court. His pupil, Marin Marais, went on to build his career in the court of Louis XIV. The tension between their political attitudes also leaves its mark on their musical composition. The film allows for the performance of baroque music pieces and the presentation of paintings by Lubin Baugin. Additionally, there are reminiscences of works by La Tour,Le Nain, and other painters from the same period. The article explores the effects of the aesthetics of synesthesia in both the novel and the film.
Hospice Words. Text Mining and Visualizations in Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and Hauben & Goldman’s Movie Script
Hospice Words. Text Mining and Visualizations in Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and Hauben & Goldman’s Movie Script
(Hospice Words. Text Mining and Visualizations in Ken
Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and Hauben & Goldman’s Movie Script)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Andrei Stipiuc
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 29-38
- No. of Pages: 10
- Keywords: Voyant Tools; Digital Humanity; Text Mining; Novel Visualization; Ken Kesey; Miloš Forman; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest;
- Summary/Abstract: Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest film adaptation released in 1975 captures the essence of Ken Kesey’s novel, additionally making some remarkable “European” differences to match the medium of the long picture format. The movie adaptation was made during a time of significant social and cultural change in the United States and finally put in front of the public something that nobody dared to touch in the industry. From a digital perspective, not many Romanian scientific articles have cobbled together and used data mining tools for textual analysis of distributions, recurrences, and term stylometry criteria to highlight information about the characters, attributes, the fundamental or secondary themes of a literary work. With this aim, and with the help of data synthesis and visual representations offered by Voyant Tools, we tried to quantitatively mark how, both in the book and in the film script, the quickly extracted data can comparatively highlight the main protagonists, themes, correlations and other attributes of the novel and the script. For the corpus analysis, we used the movie script available on DailyScript, and the 50th Anniversary Edition of the book, printed by Viking, Penguin Group, in 2012.
Dal teatro al cinema: la rappresentazione del Lager nazista nel passaggio dal testo teatrale Il vicario (1963) di Rolf Hochhuth al suo adattamento cinematografico Amen. (2002) di Costa-Gavras
Dal teatro al cinema: la rappresentazione del Lager
nazista nel passaggio dal testo teatrale Il vicario (1963) di Rolf Hochhuth al suo adattamento cinematografico
Amen. (2002) di Costa-Gavras
(From Theatre to Cinema: The Representation of the Nazi Lager in the Transition from the Play The Deputy (1963) by Rolf Hochhuth to Its Film Adaptation Amen. (2002) by Costa-Gavras)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Andrea Grassi
- Contributor(s):
- Language: Italian
- Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 39-55
- No. of Pages: 17
- Keywords: Auschwitz; Belzec; unrepresentable; Shoah; Hochhuth; Deputy; Costa Gravas;
- Summary/Abstract: Amen. (2002), by Costa-Gavras, is the film adaptation of the famous play The Deputy (1963), by Rolf Hochhuth. In general, Costa Gavras’ work is very faithful to Hochhuth’s original text: the intrigue is respected, same as the characters. Therefore, if we have chosen, with the following study, to focus our attention on the passage of Hochhuth’s text from the stage to the screen, it is in virtue of a purely aesthetic detail: in particular, we refer to those few scenes in which, both in the play and in the film, the dramatic action suddenly shifts to the interior of a Nazi extermination camp. So, how to represent the extermination, the Lager, on a theatrical stage? And how to do it, instead, on the screen? Given the way in which in theatre, possibly drawing more on the symbolic than on scenic verisimilitude, Hochhuth was able to dramatize horror, what solutions of continuity or rupture should be adopted, on the contrary, in cinema?
Negotiating an Approach to Trauma: where Visual Media and Literature Diverge
Negotiating an Approach to Trauma: where Visual Media
and Literature Diverge
(Negotiating an Approach to Trauma: where Visual Media
and Literature Diverge)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Cătălina-Diana TELIBAN
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 57-64
- No. of Pages: 8
- Keywords: trauma studies; trauma novel; adaptation studies; contemporary - literature; literary devices; visual devices;
- Summary/Abstract: This article aims to uncover and assess some of the most prominent techniques used in the contemporary portrayal of trauma, by analyzing the works of Hanya Yanagihara, Koen Tachelet and Ivovan Hove for the novel A Little Life and its stage adaptation. This case study is particularly complex thanks to the stage adaptation being itself adapted in turn, for streaming platform distribution. The paper shows each medium’s own strengths when it comes to the challenge of accurately portraying the broken psyche of a traumatized individual, as well as highlighting where and how the adaptation is forced to diverge formally from its literary counterpart, in order to create a powerful depiction of the same subject. Close reading is used in order to wholly assess each of the works, both individually, and comparatively. Finally, the article highlights how both visual media and written media can create impactful representations of trauma, so long as each form acknowledges and maximizes its own strengths and makes full use of its range of technical possibilities, adapting the visual where it cannot fully replicate the original text.
Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film
Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film
(Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Ammar KANDEEL
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): History, Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 65-76
- No. of Pages: 12
- Keywords: film; novella; Nakba; writing history; Ghassan Kanafani; Kassem Hawal; Return to Haifa;
- Summary/Abstract: Directed in 1982 and primarily screened to Western audiences, the film Return to Haifa is one of the first visual productions to show to the West a major episode of the Palestinian modern history, namely the expulsion of most of the Palestinian population from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948. This article examines the film of Kassem Hawal, an Iraqi filmmaker engaged in the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as a medium that writes the history of the Palestinian Nakba. Reproducing on the screen Ghassan Kanafani’s eponymous novella (published in 1969), the film borrows major features of the Palestinian author’s visual style, specifically in the use of the narrators’ points of view and in its depiction of the individual experiences lived by the novella’s characters. Yet, far from being a mere adaptation, the film stands out in its representation of the collective experience of the Nakba by Palestinians. The predilection of Hawal for archival images is central to understand the film as a tentative to use the novella in a visual writing of the Palestinian history of 1948. The analysis of interactions between archival and fictional shots demonstrates that Hawal’s film reflects on the types of images that are necessary to write this history. The analysis finally shows the cinematic suggestion of the need of impossible images to visualize the collective experience of Palestinians in 1948.
When Literature Turns into History: Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad and Avatar (2009) by James Cameron
When Literature Turns into History: Heart of Darkness
(1902) by Joseph Conrad and Avatar (2009) by James Cameron
(When Literature Turns into History: Heart of Darkness
(1902) by Joseph Conrad and Avatar (2009) by James Cameron)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Nassima TERKI
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 77-86
- No. of Pages: 10
- Keywords: adaptation; Avatar; film; Heart of Darkness; literature; sign;
- Summary/Abstract: More than one century after the publication of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s conceptualization of the world and representation of both the Whiteman and the African black characters still have an impact on the representation of the Other whether African or non African. This article examines the legacy of Conrad’s novel through James Cameron’s Avatar produced by 20th Century Fox and released in 2009. It mainly refers to Roland Barthes’s view of connotation and denotation and art, in this case image and cinema, as a means to transit meaning. His framework is developed in Mythologies (1972), Image-Music-Text (1977) and Elements of Semiology (1986). The analysis relies on specific selected citations from Conrad’s novel and their equivalent visual quotations from Cameron’s media text focusing on four signs. I study Avatar as a text that reproduces Conrad’s novel, which certifies the internal and external impact of expressions such as “the interminable waterway” and “the European genius” on twenty-first century cinema. Conrad’s masterpiece still draws the faces of the non-Western that Hollywood unconsciously reproduces.
Du papier à l’écran, la ville de Paris dans Le journal d’une femme de chambre
Du papier à l’écran, la ville de Paris dans Le journal d’une femme de chambre
(From Paper to Screen, The Diary of a Chambermaid)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Fathi ADIL
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 87-93
- No. of Pages: 7
- Keywords: movie adaptation; film; novel; Octave Mirbeau; Luis Buñuel;
- Summary/Abstract: “It’s not my fault if the souls, whose veils are torn off and shown naked, exhale such a strong smell of rot”... Luis Buñuel and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière have chosen to transpose the action of the eponymous novel by Octave Mirbeau in 1930, at the time of the birth of the fascist leagues! Mirbeau places the episodes of his novel in the era of the Dreyfus Affair. In this paper, we will try to show the importance of the city of Paris in Octave Mirabeau’s work and the extent to which Luis Buñuel in his film adaptation remained faithful to Mirabeau’s perspective. To do this, we will focus on some differences between the novel and the film in order to show that it is a “Belle-Infidel” and that Mirbeau, watching Buñuel’s film, would certainly not have recognized his child.
Trop tard : littérature et cinéma au travers de Lampedusa, Visconti, Deleuze, Nietzsche et quelques autres
Trop tard : littérature et cinéma au travers de Lampedusa, Visconti, Deleuze, Nietzsche et quelques autres
(Too Late: Literature and Cinema through Lampedusa,
Visconti, Deleuze, Nietzsche and Others)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Laurent Balagué
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Philosophy, Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 95-105
- No. of Pages: 11
- Keywords: The Leopard; too late; truth; nobility; collapse;
- Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyze Visconti’s adaptation of Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard. It seems to us that one of the fruitful ways to approach the text is to consider the relationship to time, which develops on the dimension of the too late. We shall attempt to show that philosopher Gilles Deleuze (in his work Cinéma 2, L’image-temps) was attentive to this aspect, and identified it as a fundamental dimension of Visconti’s cinema. If we accept this interpretation, we may be led backwards to show how it functions in Lampedusa’s novel. To this extent, we have tried to show how this dimension of the too late appears to be central to The Leopard, in its both book and film form. Gilles Deleuze then appears as the philosopher who, having questioned literature and cinema, makes it possible to identify this junction between novel and film.
De la pellicule à la page. Werner Herzog, écrivain du cinéma
De la pellicule à la page. Werner Herzog, écrivain du cinéma
(From Filming to Writing. Werner Herzog, a Writer of Cinema)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Marie-Reine MOUTON
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 107-114
- No. of Pages: 8
- Keywords: Literature; Seventh Art; walking; private diary; creation conditions; improvisation; dream;
- Summary/Abstract: Werner Herzog is known as a German director of documentaries and fiction, but he is also the author of two works that can be read like diaries: Of Walking in Ice (1978) and Conquest of the Useless (2004). The former recounts the journey the author took on foot when he learned of Lotte Eisner’s impending death, a death he tried to ward off by walking and writing; the latter was written during the filming of Fitzcarraldo in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. In the essay that follows we shall explore how these two works can be read through the lens of cinema, while remaining autonomous objects in their literary form. Werner Herzog moves from film to page, from the camera to the pencil, becoming a writer while remaining a director. It is not a chasm, but a hyphen between the two mediums that he subtly draws, leaving the imprint of his wildest dreams on both image and page.
Écrire le réel par le détail : La question de la figure chez Nathalie Sarraute et Robert Bresson
Écrire le réel par le détail : La question de la figure chez Nathalie Sarraute et Robert Bresson
(Writing the real through detail: The question of the figura
in Nathalie Sarraute’s and Robert Bresson’s work)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Maritza Beatriz GARCÍA RODRÍGUEZ
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 115-125
- No. of Pages: 11
- Keywords: Nathalie Sarraute; Robert Bresson; figura; detail; fragmentation; Real;
- Summary/Abstract: Although Robert Bresson’s cinematic work and Nathalie Sarraute’s literary work seem irreconcilable in thematic and material terms, it is precisely through a negative approach that they come together. In other words, they share what they reject –“the surplus”, “what is not yet assimilated” nor “directly figurable”. This essay will explore the various declensions of the term figura, in order to approach the theoretical writings of Bresson and Sarraute, as well as their artistic work. Thus, figura becomes the physical material for modelling – corporeal and gestural– but also the stylistic material – whose form can be textual-discursive and filmic. In this way, the aesthetics of the fragment and the attention paid to details of Bresson and Sarraute’s tableaux –made up of pieces of gesture, bodies and discourse – denarrativizestories and images, while steering narration towards the filmic and textual hors-champ, the space of the Real that brings possibility to the surface.
Simone Weil’s Practice of Attention as a Ritual of Prayer: Robert Bresson and Georges Bernanos
Simone Weil’s Practice of Attention as a Ritual of
Prayer: Robert Bresson and Georges Bernanos
(Simone Weil’s Practice of Attention as a Ritual of
Prayer: Robert Bresson and Georges Bernanos)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Vida Gertrude VOIGT-HOGG
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Philosophy, Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 127-138
- No. of Pages: 12
- Keywords: attention; affliction; ritual; prayer; God; grace; soul;
- Summary/Abstract: In Simone Weil’s religious and metaphysical philosophy, the concept of attention is a human practice of concentrated awareness that can be directed toward a single thought, an object, another being, the self, or one’s soul. Attention is a learned practice, not an innate human characteristic. The practice of attention is integral to Weil’s philosophy because it assists one to identify attachment and through introspection,transcend affliction. The curé in Robert Bresson’s Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) loses his capacity for prayer when his faith becomes an attachment, and yet, his soul desires union with God, and thus grace. Grace, from the perspective of the curé, will provide reparation for his affliction: the acceptance of himself and the burden of his faith, the circumstances of his childhood,terminal illness, and the anticipation of death. This article engages in analysis of Journal, through the lens of Weil’s philosophical concept, attention, while it also examines the parallel between Weil and the curé in their demeanor, compromised health, and emphasis toward the ritual (or habit) of prayer. Georges Bernanos, author of the novel that Bresson adapted, shares a similar view of grace, which supports the comparison of Weil’s and Bresson’s attention toward the soul.
Macbeth: distilări cinematografice
Macbeth: distilări cinematografice
(Macbeth: Cinematic Distillations)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Cristina STANCU
- Contributor(s):
- Language: Romanian
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 139-149
- No. of Pages: 11
- Keywords: Macbeth; William Shakespeare; appropriation; movie adaptation; Orson Welles; Roman Polanski; Joel Coen;
- Summary/Abstract: Macbeth is undoubtedly one of the most popular Shakespearean plays in the realm of adaptations and appropriations, immensely influential on film directors who have chosen over the decades to transform the tyrant figure into a versatile character, open to many interpretations and ways of reading: an unfortunate soul sold to the Devil, a Faust avant la lettre, a Machiavellian king, a sheer victim of his wife’s ambitions, or a symbol of the not always fair fight between Good and Evil. In this article my main objective is analyzing and contrasting three film adaptations of Macbeth (Orson Welles, 1948; Roman Polanski, 1971 and Joel Coen, 2021), identifying to what degree do they honour the connection to the original text and how appropriate or innovative are the new aesthetic solutions and the new insights they come up with. What’s the difference between a plausible and an implausible adaptation? How does the cinematic medium succeed in assimilating a material originally created for the specific purpose of being represented on stage?
Where Does Pip Migrate to? Unexpected Parallels in Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip and Adamson’s Mr. Pip
Where Does Pip Migrate to? Unexpected Parallels in Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip and Adamson’s Mr. Pip
(Where Does Pip Migrate to? Unexpected Parallels in Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip and Adamson’s Mr. Pip)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Dolores AICEGA, Mercedes VERNET
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 151-160
- No. of Pages: 10
- Keywords: Great Expectations; Mister Pip; neo-Victorianism; film adaptation; metafiction; migrations;
- Summary/Abstract: This article explores the neo-Victorian novel Mister Pip (2006), written by Lloyd Jones, and Andrew Adamson’s adaptation for the cinema, Mr. Pip, which was released in 2012. We trace connections between these works and the Victorian novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861). Indeed, the novel and the film can be regarded as ways of (re)discovering and (re)recreating the Victorian novel. More specifically, we look into the parallelisms that can be established between Dickens’s character Pip and the different characters in Jones’s novel and Adamson’s film as we explore the intertextualties that allow the reader to make journeys between contexts which are geographically, temporarily, and culturally distant. We also analyze the metafictional elements in Mister Pip and Mr. Pip in order to account for the self-reflexive aspects of these works. We show the ways by which the metafictional strategies employed by the narrative voice reveal the writing process. Jones’s novel and Adamson’s film tell stories of migration of different sorts (migrating into the past, migrating geographically, migrating socially, and migrating culturally among others). In the following pages we reflect on these migrations in the hope that we can answer the question “Where does Pip migrate to?”.
Life Wins in the West. Agnieszka Holland’s East European Interpretation of The Secret Garden
Life Wins in the West. Agnieszka Holland’s East European Interpretation of The Secret Garden
(Life Wins in the West. Agnieszka Holland’s East European Interpretation of The Secret Garden)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Ewa ŁUKASZYK
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 161-172
- No. of Pages: 12
- Keywords: The Secret Garden; Agnieszka Holland; European values; Western civilization; culture of death;
- Summary/Abstract: The author of this essay interprets Agnieszka Holland’s cinematographic adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden as a work of an East-European creator musing on the essence of Western civilisation and comments on it in the context of the present-day questioning of the European unity, values, and standards in Polish culture. In the analysis of Holland’s cinematographic version of the novel, a special relevance is given to cultural (in)visibility of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The East-West divide is interpreted in terms of divergent conceptualisations of the major human transformative actions: work and sacrifice. In the multimodal idiom of Holland’s film, the music composed by Zbigniew Preisner occupies a special place. The East-European interpretation of the children’s classic promotes a vision of Englishness (treated as a pars pro toto exemplification of the broader concept of “the West”) as a space of resilience and triumphant life, against manipulative messages presenting the West as a space of corruption and “culture of death”.
Sullivan’s Travels (1941): The American Gulliver or Deconstructing the American Dream
Sullivan’s Travels (1941): The American Gulliver or
Deconstructing the American Dream
(Sullivan’s Travels (1941): The American Gulliver or
Deconstructing the American Dream)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Laura-Victoria STOICA
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 173-181
- No. of Pages: 9
- Keywords: satire; Depression; American Dream; genre revision;
- Summary/Abstract: In my paper, I will focus on the director Preston Sturges’ intervention in the Depression-era comedy, rooted in the satirical format of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in an attempt to highlight the ways in which his revolutionary approach to narrative and character undermined the coherence of representations of the American Dream. Preston introduced non-linearity and Naturalistic and Absurdist elements in typical comedy formats (like the screwball comedy), thus challenging the veracity of American Dream narratives. Sullivan’s Travels (1941), in which socially conscious endeavors only prolong social misery and unrest, postpones narrative resolution to the point of becoming the ultimate deconstruction of the American Dream. Moreover, Preston Sturges’ movies play with narrative in such a way as to unravel the constructedness of the American Dream. By choosing to foreground moral ambivalence over clear-cut categorizations, his films delight in the characters’ misadventures without passing moral judgment. Rooted in genuine feeling rather than prescribed reactions, Sturges’ movies lend a paradoxically empathetic skepticism to the interpretation of the American Dream, privileging humanity over stereotype.
Ghost in the Shell as a Cyberpunk Rhapsody
Ghost in the Shell as a Cyberpunk Rhapsody
(Ghost in the Shell as a Cyberpunk Rhapsody)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Silvio Tamaso D’ONOFRIO, André Luiz SILVA DE SOUZA
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 183-196
- No. of Pages: 14
- Keywords: Ghost in the shell; cyberpunk; rhapsody; influence; emulation; mimesis;
- Summary/Abstract: The article proposes a reading of one of the constituent aspects of the feature film Ghost in the Shell (2017), its plot, as a compendium of influences of what is usually considered to belong to the science fiction genre. According to the reading, the movie presents ideas and an aesthetics that points to the newest trends of science fiction, such as cyberpunk, suggesting passages of many previous films, something that can help draw the constitutive master lines of the plot as similar to the concept of rhapsody, an old, if not ancestral concept. In an attempt to understand this pendulum-like movement that presents the new but is made up of the past, one of the canons of Western literature of all times was sought as the theoretical support for an attempt to explore this old facet in a futuristic film. From this point of view, concepts such as mimesis and emulation were used in this approach to the filmographic version of the homonymous manga published in Japan in 1982, a film that presents itself as a challenging puzzle whose resolution finds, in this article, a beginning and also an incentive for future studies.
Identity: The New Final Frontier. Singularity and Multitudes in The Very Pulse of the Machine
Identity: The New Final Frontier. Singularity and
Multitudes in The Very Pulse of the Machine
(Identity: The New Final Frontier. Singularity and
Multitudes in The Very Pulse of the Machine)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Ștefana IOSIF
- Contributor(s):
- Language: English
- Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 197-206
- No. of Pages: 10
- Keywords: sci-fi; feminism; identity; singularity; adaptation; post-humanism;
- Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the question of identity and individuality as explored in Michael Swanwick’s short story, The Very Pulse of the Machine, and its subsequent adaptation into a short animated film. The story follows the surviving explorer Martha Kivelson in her attempt to save herself after an accident on Io, while also dragging the lifeless body of her partner, Julier Burton back to their lander. Our aim is to unearth the potentialities of the dissolution of individual identity boundaries, followed by the joining with the singular mega-consciousness, while also employing a feminist reading of the text as a safe haven for womanhood and the female expression of commonality. The genre of science fiction offers us the appropriate medium for such daring considerations and interrogations, liberating both the authors of the texts, as well as the reader from traditional gazes and expectations. Our sight is thus turned to the treatment of identity as the new final frontier, where limitation and glass ceilings are shattered in a new understanding thereof.
Littérature et film en classe de FLE. Ce que la transécriture cinématographique pourrait apporter au texte littéraire. Quelques réflexions
Littérature et film en classe de FLE. Ce que la
transécriture cinématographique pourrait apporter au texte littéraire. Quelques réflexions
(Literature and Film in Class of French as a Foreign Language. What Cinematographic Transcription Would Give to the Literary Text. Some Remarks)
- Publication: (32/2/2023)
- Author(s): Stefana SQUATRITO
- Contributor(s):
- Language: French
- Subject(s): Foreign languages learning, Studies of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
- Issue: 32/2/2023
- Page Range: 207-215
- No. of Pages: 9
- Keywords: literature; film; adaptation; language teaching; French language;
- Summary/Abstract: In foreign language teaching, the role of the literary text has undergone profound changes as various teaching methods have succeeded one another. In this article, we shall first reflect on the specific features of literary texts and the advantages of using them in the foreign language class, then focus on the didactic use of film adaptations, which may have a major impact on acquisition and learning. It allows, in fact, to restore the oral dimension to the written text and thus to work on multiple skills. Thanks to the presence of several semiotic codes, it can also stimulate different learning styles, attract students’attention, and encourage them to speak up, enabling all students, even the weakest, to access the meaning of the message. Finally, its relative brevity allows learners to access the full text and put it into context, taking due account of the work as a whole.
Short Description
The Comparative Literature Department of the Faculty of Letters of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University (Iasi, Romania) is the editor of Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, an academic open-access peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary studies stimulated and justified by the universality of the literary phenomena in their close connections with the other arts and related humanistic fields, such as cultural anthropology, the history of ideas and mentalities, cultural and gender studies. Contributions to our journal have come from different parts of the world: Europe, Africa, North & South America, Asia, and we count among our collaborators recognized and distinguished specialists, as well as young researchers. Founded in 2003 as a world and comparative literature journal, Acta Iassyensia Comparationis has acquired in time a larger scope, but it has preserved its thematic profile. Beginning with the year 2013, it became an exclusively online publication, issued biannually. The journal welcomes scholarly articles and book reviews written in one of the following languages: Romanian, English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Submission and publication of articles and book reviews, as well as access to the online AIC journal are tax-exempt.
