scholarly journals Rituaalikuolema ja perhetragedia

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Heidi Kosonen

Elokuvissa ja erityisesti angloamerikkalaisissa elokuvissa kuvataan itsemurhaa usein. Niiden representaatiot heijastelevat kulttuurisia käsityksiä itsemurhasta, mutta myös itsenäisesti vaikuttavat käsitysten syntymiseen. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelen Ari Asterin folk-kauhugenreä edustavaa elokuvaa Midsommar – loputon yö (2019). Elokuvassa sisarensa tekemää murha-itsemurhaa sureva Dani matkustaa Yhdysvalloista Ruotsiin fiktiiviseen Hårga-kommuuniin poikaystävänsä ja tämän ystävien kanssa. Hårgalainen juhannusrituaali paljastaa eroja amerikkalaisen ja hårgalaisen kulttuurin välillä muun muassa kuolemasuhteeseen, tunteiden ilmaisuun ja perheeseen liittyen.Keskityn artikkelissa yhtäältä itsemurhaan tai omaehtoiseen kuolemaan tabuluonteisena kuolemana, johon liittyvää samanaikaisen näkymättömyyden ja hypernäkyvyyden dynamiikkaa elokuva mielenkiintoisella tavalla käsittelee. Midsommarin tarinankaaressa itsemurha näyttäytyy vaiettuna traumana ja oikeuttamattomana surun lähteenä, jonka käsittelyä Danin lähipiiri ei tue. Samalla elokuva heijastelee itsemurhan välineellistymistä ja pornoistumista angloamerikkalaisessa viihteessä.Toisaalta keskityn omaehtoisen kuoleman määrittelyn kysymyksiin tarkastelemalla elokuvan esittämää kulttuurista törmäyspistettä, jossa vastakkain asettuvat kahdenlaisten selitysmallien alle asettuvat itsemurhat. Näitä kuolemia voidaan määritellä egoistiseksi ja altruistiseksi viitaten durkheimilaiseen typologiaan, jossa itsemurha esiintyy aina suhteessa yhteiskuntaan. Toisaalta Midsommarin tarinamaailmassa itsemurhat redusoituvat ”diagnostisiksi” ja ”kultistisiksi” marginalisoiduiksi kuolemiksi ja siten heijastelevat normatiivisen biovallan selitysmallien valtaa itsemurhan määrittelyn kysymyksiin.Avainsanat: tabu, kuolema, itsemurha, folk-kauhu, biovaltaRitual Death and Family Tragedy: On Suicide’s Definition and Taboo in Folk Horror Film MidsommarFilms, especially Anglo-American ones, frequently depict suicide. Their representations reflect cultural understandings of suicide, but also independently influence how self-willed death is perceived. In this article I study how suicide is depicted in Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsommar (2019). In the film, the protagonist Dani, who is mourning her sister’s murder-suicide, travels from the US to a Swedish commune, Hårga, with her boyfriend and his friends. The Hårgan midsummer ritual reveals differences in the two cultures’ relationships to death, emotional expression, and family.One the one hand, I focus on the way the film reflects suicide’s nature as a taboo, as something simultaneously hidden and hypervisible. In the diegesis, suicide appears as a silenced trauma, as a source of disenfranchised grief, and as a death the protagonist is not allowed to mourn. Simultaneously the film reflects suicide’s instrumentalization and pornification in Anglo-American entertainment.On the other hand, I focus on questions related to the definition of suicide or self-willed death. The film depicts conflicts between two cultures, where different explanation models of self-willed death are juxtaposed with one another. On display are two types of suicides that can be referred to as “egoistic” and “altruistic” by reference to Durkheim’s typology, which takes into account suicide’s relationship to society. Yet in Midsommar’s diegesis, these deaths appear as psychologized and culturally marginalized “diagnostic” and “cultist” suicides, and thus reflect the power of normative biopower over how self-willed death is understood and made sense of in the west.Keywords: taboo, death, suicide, folk-horror, biopower

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Delgado ◽  
David Fancy

The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltès's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltès asserted in 1986 that ‘I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life’; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltès translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer. Maria Delgado is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and David Fancy is a freelance director based in Canada who is currently completing a PhD on Koltès's work.


Author(s):  
Sidoní López Pérez

Resumen: Este artículo se centra en las obras teatrales, Grandma y Grandpa (1984) del dramaturgo nativo, Hanay Geiogamah, con la intención de reflejar cómo los personajes indígenas a menudo se encuentran en medio de una confrontación entre la cultura nativa y blanca que intentan reconciliar. Por una parte, es importante para ellos preservar sus tradiciones nativas y su identidad indígena; por otra parte, también ven necesario adaptarse a los cambios y costumbres de la sociedad moderna occidental, consiguiendo así una especie de conciliación entre ambas culturas que les permite asegurar su perpetuidad cultural y existencial a través del teatro nativo contemporáneo. Palabras clave: teatro nativo, tradición nativa, cultura indígena, representación, sociedad occidental.Abstract: This essays focuses on Grandma and Grandpa (1984), two theater plays by the Native playwright, Hanay Geiogamah, in order to reflect how indigenous characters often experience a confrontation between Native and white culture that they try to reconcile. On the one hand, it is important for them to preserve their Native traditions and identity; on the other hand, they are also aware of the necessity of adapting themselves to the changes and customs imposed by modern Western society, whilst achieving a union between the two cultures that allows them to ensure their cultural and existential survival through contemporary Native theater. Keywords: Native theater, Native culture, indigenous culture, performance, Western society.


Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219
Author(s):  
Liz Shek-Noble

Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria, received critical acclaim upon its publication by Giramondo in 2006. As the recipient of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007, Carpentaria cemented Wright's position as the country's foremost Indigenous novelist. This article places Carpentaria within contemporary discussions of “big, ambitious novels” by contemporary women novelists by examining the ways the novel simultaneously invites and resists its inclusion into an established canon of “great Australian novels” (GANs). While critics have been quick to celebrate the formal innovations of Carpentaria as what makes it worthy of GAN status, the novel nevertheless opposes the integrationist and homogenizing myths that accompany canonization. Therefore, the article finds that Wright's vision of a future Australia involves moments of antagonism and mutual understanding between white settler and Indigenous communities. This article uses the work of Homi Bhabha to argue that Carpentaria demonstrates the emergence of a third space wherein negotiation between these two cultures produces knowledge that is “new, neither the one nor the other.” In so doing, Wright shows the resilience of Indigenous knowledge even as it is subject to transformation upon contact with contradictory ideological and epistemological frameworks.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 126-141
Author(s):  
S.S. Kulakov

The increasing number of dysfunctional families causes an increase in the number of civil litigation on the education of the child, where the relationship between the persons are highly conflictual. The actual task is study the one of components in the structure of the psychological relationship - emotional and semantic constructs underlying semantic perception of each other and the child's parents. Examination of 42 testees (parents) from harmonious families and 54 testees (parents) during the forensic psychological and psychiatric examination (regarding the definition of child`s residence or the order of meetings for the child and the parent who don`t live with it) by methods "Geometric test of relations" and "Semantic Differential" showed that in families where is highly conflictual relationship, there is positive assessments of herself and her child, while assessment of the spouse (wife) characterized inversion. This negative attitude toward the spouse (wife) is not the other parent's negative characteristics. It is the ignoring the other parent's positive characteristics. The positive acceptance of all family members was revealed in harmonious families.


2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (101) ◽  
pp. 122-139
Author(s):  
Thor Grünbaum

Action in Narratology, Literature, and LifeIn this article I argue that the representation of simple, bodily action has the function of endowing the narrative sequence with a visualizing power: It makes the narrated scenes or situations ready for visualization by the reader or listener. By virtue of this visualizing power or disposition, these narrated actions disrupt the theoretical divisions, on the one hand, between the narrated story and the narrating discourse, and on the other hand, between plot-narratology and discourse-narratology. As narrated actions they seem to belong to the domain of plot-narratology, but in so far as they serve an important visualizing function, these narrated actions have a communicative function and as such they can be said to belong to the domain of discourse-narratology. In a first part of the article, I argue that a certain type of plot-narratology, due to its retrospective epistemology and abstract definition of action, is unable to conceive of this visualizing function. In a second part, I argue that discourse-narratology fares no better since the visualizing function is independent of voice and focalization. In a final part, I sketch a possible account of the visualizing function of simple actions in narratives.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (114) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Tarja-Lisa Hypén

THE BRAND OF THE CELEBRITY AUTHOR IN FINLAND | In the 21st century, the celebrity author has begun to interest researchers not only as a marketing phenomenon, but also as the literary institution’s own phenomenon. In my article, I explore the relationship of the celebrity author to the so-called acclaimed authors of modern times. In Anglo-American research, the celebrity author and the bestselling author are distinguished as separate author types, but in the case of Finnish Jari Tervo, these types combine. For almost 20 years, Jari Tervo has been amongboth the most sold and the most visible celebrity authors in his home country. I examine how the publicity and brand of the Finnish celebrity author are formed. I consider how the brand affects the author’s works on the one hand, and the reception of the works on the other. I point out the limiting effects of the brand, but I also examine how, in combining the high and the low, it affords mobility in the literary fields while it also offers an opportunity to influence society.


1994 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Kasher

In his introductory essay on the philosophical sources of The Guide of the Perplexed, Shlomo Pines points out a well-known contradiction between two conceptions of God in Maimonides' theology. On the one hand, Maimonides borrowed the Aristotelian definition of God as the intellect that cognizes itself; on the other, in line with Avicenna's Neoplatonic theory of attributes, Maimonides denied the possibility of saying anything positive about God. Pines proposes two possible solutions; first, that Maimonides was well aware of the contradiction, or, second, that he fell into the contradiction inadvertently. As Pines himself admits, however, neither solution is satisfactory.


2021 ◽  
pp. 264-269
Author(s):  
P. A. Moiseev

The review deals with Luc Boltanski's Mysteries and Conspiracies [Enigmes et complots]. The following is noted as defects of the reviewed book: detective fiction is associated with anxieties that question the framework of modern reality. Such attribution, it is argued, results from inaccurate comparison of detective fiction to a spy novel. The reviewer identifies contradictions in the definition of detective fiction: on the one hand, it is characterised by the proverbial anxiety. On the other, the writer suggests that unravelling a mystery normalises the ‘integrity of predictable expectations.' In addition, Boltanski confuses detective fiction with police procedural novels as well as the concepts of genre and theme with regard to spy novels (as a result, he dwells on ‘the genre of the spy novel,' even though spy novels are written in a number of genres). The review particularly criticises Boltanski's assessment of A. Conan Doyle's prose.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104-116
Author(s):  
Ivan O. Volkov ◽  

For the first time, in the article, Vladimir Titov’s letter (dated 12/24 February 1869) is published and commented. In the 1820s, in Russia, Titov was well-known as a writer and literature theorist, the author of a romantic novella The Remote House on Vasilyevsky Island (1829) close to Society of Lyubomudriye. The letter extracted from the archives of the National Library of Russia is addressed to Duke Vladimir Odoevsky whose relationship with Titov was friendly from the very beginning of their acquaintance. The letter focuses on Ivan Turgenev’s speech published in the first issue of Sovremennik and titled “Hamlet and Don Quixote”. Reacting to Turgenev’s article, Titov shortly and critically accesses the comparison concentrating mainly on the image of Hamlet and thoroughly expresses his opinion on the essence of his tragic state. Titov’s opinion is just the opposite of Turgenev’s complex and multidimensional interpretation. Having experienced the great impact of the philosophy of German idealism at the beginning of his career, Titov to a great extent idealizes Shakespeare’s character whom he long knows and whom he is clearly eager to vindicate. Meanwhile, Titov does not pursue the aim to absolutely advocate the romantic halo of Hamlet as a Titanic personality (grandiose intellect and scale of feeling) and to enact the tragic pathos of the inner fight only. Developing Goethe’s definition of the essence of the character’s inner conflict, Titov, on the one hand, approaches its real understanding underlying the prince’s necessity to stay in a derogatory position of a “pitiful semiclown, indecisive grouch and shred”. On the other hand, the assessment can not be absolutely objective because Titov wants to see Hamlet as a victim of the fatal fortune which turns him into a character of an almost classical tragedy of fate. Titov’s bright and developed reaction (in the document of private nature) to Turgenev’s article is attractive and important first of all for its vividly demonstrated novelty and creativity of the writer’s view, wideness and multimodality of the author’s perception of Hamlet’s image. For the first time, Turgenev gave a developed interpretation of Shakespeare’s image in the tale “Hamlet of Shchigrovsky Province” (1848). Continuing his searches in the area of “Russian” (or “steppe”) Hamlet, Turgenev creates moral and philosophical problems of the English tragedy in the crisis socio-historical and cultural atmosphere of Russia of the 1840s. However, the principles of the artistic generalization and the peculiarities of the new reading, not mentioned and not fully comprehended by his contemporaries, were surprising and rejected when the speech “Hamlet and Don Quixote” appeared, in which Shakespeare’s character is presented ultimately vividly and lively in the then current interpretation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula Renz

Spinoza's ethics is grounded by a conviction which is as simple as it is programmatic: Subjective experience can be explained, and its successful explanation is of ethical relevance. For it makes us smarter, freer and happier. This is the programmatic conviction behind Spinoza's ethics and motivates many of the theses it puts forward. Ursula Renz shows which kind of a theory of the human mind informs this program. The systematic differentiation of theory parts in the architecture of ethics proves to be a decisive move: A theory part that deals with questions of the ontology of the mental is followed by a definition of the human mind as a kind of subject theory, which in turn is separated from a theory part dealing with the constitution of content. This structure makes it possible to deal separately with different problems that arise in the course of the explanation of experience. In the end, Spinoza succeeds in avoiding both reductionisms and skepticisms right from the start. In this way, two intuitions are brought together that are often considered incompatible: on the one hand, the view that experience is something irreducibly subjective, and on the other hand, the assumption that there are better and worse explanations of experience.


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