scholarly journals Moulding Malvolio into Modern Adaptations of “Twelfth Night”

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 299
Author(s):  
Lisa-Jane Roberts

This paper explores how target-audience expectations and generic limitations on modern, mass-culture adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night mould the characterization of his officious steward Malvolio, and dictate the degree of centrality that his subplot holds in each different version. A trans-generic application of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s work on characterization will expose how the character of Malvolio is constructed and presented, first in the original play and then in three modern adaptations of Twelfth Night into different popular genres. The works selected for contrastive analysis with the original play each represent different generic fields found on today’s mass-culture market – romance fiction, teen cinema and the web-comic. Respectively, they are: The Madness of Love, a contemporary romance novel by Katharine Davies, published in 2005; She’s the Man, a Hollywood teen film directed by Andy Fickman in 2006; and a web-comic retelling of Twelfth Night by Mya Lixian Gosling, which was published on her website Good Tickle-Brain Shakespeare in 2014.

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov

›Ikonen‹ sind heute nicht mehr nur die Ikonen der christlichen Kirche, sondern vor allem die Ikonen der modernen Massenkultur. Beide Arten von Ikonen werden in der neueren Kunstreflexion aufgegriffen: Kunst gilt entweder, verstanden als Erbin der religiösen Ikone, als Phänomen, das Absolutes in singulärer Weise anschaulich er- fahrbar macht. Oder aber die Kunst gilt umgekehrt lediglich als Klasse in der Welt der säkularen Ikonen. Demgegenüber wird im Beitrag erstens die These vertretenwerden, daß die neuere Kunst sowohl Aspekte transzendenter als auch immanenter Ikonen umfaßt. Zugleich ist es aber, so die zweite These, für unser Kunstverständnis charakteristisch, ein theoretisches Kontrastverhältnis zwischen Kunst und Ikone an- zunehmen. Dieses gründet auf einer spezifischen Reflexivität der Kunst, durch die sie sich von der Ikone beiderlei Art kategorial unterscheidet. Today, the word ›icon‹ usually no longer refers to the icons of the Christian church, but to the icons of the modern mass-culture. Both sorts of icons play a key-role in the recent discussion about art: Either art is supposed to be a descendant of the religious icon, a phenomenon that gives us a singular visual experience of the Absolute. On the other hand, art is supposed to be just one class among others in the wide world of the secular icons. In contrast to these two positions this essay contends that modern art comprehends aspects of transcendent as well as of immanent icons. Furthermore, it argues that at the same time it is characteristic for our notion of art to suppose a contrast between art and icon. This contrast is based on a specific reflectivity of art, which marks a categorical difference between art and both sorts of icons.


Author(s):  
Maria Sibirnaya

Nowadays the influence comprehension of the mass media as one of the most significant factors affecting contemporary culture, acquires the special significance. All kinds of new information receiving by media channels obtain the stereotyped, frequently repeatedly cultural and axiological orientations, which become fixed in people's consciousness. Skillful manipulation of information makes the power of suggestion from mass media practically unlimited. Therefore, the public opinion is created by the mass media. Being so closely intertwined with the mass media, the modern mass culture is coming through all elements of people's lives. Moreover, it appears in the literary works, which reflect the influence of the mass media on the consciousness, mentality, point of view and decisions of the literature characters, using their set example in the literature. Odessian playwright Aleksander Mardan presents his characters in the context of the events, which entails new circumstances both due to the characters decisions and out of more extensive economic and political changes. One may notice the presence of mass media in the form of music, information broadcasts and press almost in all Mardan's play. One may track out the influence on the character’s consciousness and reveal the difference between the official version and what happened in the real life. Using the performance tool, there is the action in the play showing the influence of the stereotypes implicated by the mass media. The performance reveals not only the stereotypes affection influencing the mentality of the characters, but also the viewers whose interpretation of the play’s direction is not always critical enough. Therefore, the question about the relationship between the society and mass media, about the level of freedom in mass media from the society and concerning the influence exerted by mass media on the modern culture and the human's consciousness is repeatedly presented in Alexander Mardаn’s plays.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (33) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Rhema Hokama

In 1974, the Honolulu-based director James Grant Benton wrote and staged Twelf Nite O Wateva!, a Hawaiian pidgin translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In Benton’s translation, Malolio (Malvolio) strives to overcome his reliance on pidgin English in his efforts to ascend the Islands’ class hierarchy. In doing so, Malolio alters his native pidgin in order to sound more haole (white). Using historical models of Protestant identity and Shakespeare’s original text, Benton explores the relationship between pidgin language and social privilege in contemporary Hawai‘i. In the first part of this essay, I argue that Benton characterizes Malolio’s social aspirations against two historical moments of religious conflict and struggle: post-Reformation England and post-contact Hawai‘i. In particular, I show that Benton aligns historical caricatures of early modern puritans with cultural views of Protestant missionaries from New England who arrived in Hawai‘i beginning in the 1820s. In the essay’s second part, I demonstrate that Benton crafts Malolio’s pretentious pidgin by modeling it on Shakespeare’s own language. During his most ostentatious outbursts, Malolio’s lines consist of phrases extracted nearly verbatim from Shakespeare’s original play. In Twelf Nite, Shakespeare’s language becomes a model for speech that is inauthentic, affected, and above all, haole.


2008 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitra Sharafi

Today, the term Victorian implies snobbishness and rigidity. Our world, the result in part of a rebellion against Victorian formality and social hierarchy, celebrates the classless, the democratic, and the popular. It professes faith in the artistic judgment of all members of society regardless of ethnic origin, level of education or wealth. From the Victorian point of view, however, twentieth-century mass culture is accessible to all by appealing to the lowest common denominator; it is inclusive at the cost of a loss of education, refinement, and profundity. Turn-of-the-century America is the ideal subject for a study of the interaction between Victorian high culture and modern mass culture; the period from 1870 to 1915 was one of drastic cultural metamorphosis. Social change threatened the foundations of high culture and eventually killed it, but not without the unintentional help of the Victorians' own self-alienating behaviour.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (W1) ◽  
pp. W289-W294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Sharifi ◽  
Yuzhen Ye

Abstract MyDGR is a web server providing integrated prediction and visualization of Diversity-Generating Retroelements (DGR) systems in query nucleotide sequences. It is built upon an enhanced version of DGRscan, a tool we previously developed for identification of DGR systems. DGR systems are remarkable genetic elements that use error-prone reverse transcriptases to generate vast sequence variants in specific target genes, which have been shown to benefit their hosts (bacteria, archaea or phages). As the first web server for annotation of DGR systems, myDGR is freely available on the web at http://omics.informatics.indiana.edu/myDGR with all major browsers supported. MyDGR accepts query nucleotide sequences in FASTA format, and outputs all the important features of a predicted DGR system, including a reverse transcriptase, a template repeat and one (or more) variable repeats and their alignment featuring A-to-N (N can be C, T or G) substitutions, and VR-containing target gene(s). In addition to providing the results as text files for download, myDGR generates a visual summary of the results for users to explore the predicted DGR systems. Users can also directly access pre-calculated, putative DGR systems identified in currently available reference bacterial genomes and a few other collections of sequences (including human microbiomes).


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-319
Author(s):  
Daniela Lucas da Silva Lemos ◽  
Renato Rocha Souza

The lack of standardization in the production, organization and dissemination of information in documentation centers and institutions alike, as a result from the digitization of collections and their availability on the internet has called for integration efforts. The sheer availability of multimedia content has fostered the development of many distinct and, most of the time, independent metadata standards for its description. This study aims at presenting and comparing the existing standards of metadata, vocabularies and ontologies for multimedia annotation and also tries to offer a synthetic overview of its main strengths and weaknesses, aiding efforts for semantic integration and enhancing the findability of available multimedia resources on the web. We also aim at unveiling the characteristics that could, should and are perhaps not being highlighted in the characterization of multimedia resources.


2016 ◽  
Vol 160 ◽  
pp. 101-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo Augusto ◽  
José Miguel Castro ◽  
Carlos Rebelo ◽  
Luís Simões da Silva
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-277
Author(s):  
Alexander V. Tavrizyan

This article analyzes the aesthetics of modern Western audiovisual art by the example of the opening titles of “Six Feet Under” TV series (2001—2005). This titles sequence, as well as the series itself, were proclaimed as “cult art” and became widely influential in the US television culture. The visuals of the sequence had been created by a team of Digital Kitchen designers on the basis of music by Thomas Newman, who was a trend setter of the soundtrack genre in the 1990s—2010s. This work is of interest, being one of the most significant in modern mass culture, which allows to analyze the aesthetic trends within the postmodern audiovisual art in general. The research is based on R. Barthes’ method of analyzing objects of mass culture, in which the literal meaning of artistic ima­ges and the symbolic one (connotations, metaphors, allegories) are considered separately. T. Newman’s music is ana­lysed by using M. Chion’s view upon soundtrack as both musical work and acoustical image. The article analyzes the coherence between the music, the frame (literal) content of the video, and the connotative (symbolic) meaning of the visual images. The concept of “affect”, taken by the historians-poststructuralists G. Deleuze and F. Guattari from the aesthetic theory of Baroque art, is used to describe similar phenomena in postmodern art. Interviews, additional materials and other sour­ces that tell about the idea of the series’ creators and about its workflow expanded the source base of the study. The audiovisual composition’s analysis revealed the aesthetic techniques of artistic images’ affective (feelings-emotional) transmission, “counterpoint” of allegorical and realistic (naturalistic) images in the visuals and the music, central role of the pairs of images-antithesis (warmth/coldness, movement/static, life/death, and some others). The author concludes that the studied aesthetic model is similar, both in its content and in the form of expression, to the Baroque aesthetics in a modified postmodern form (Neo-Baroque).


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