scholarly journals A Woman by Nature? Darren Aronofsky’s mother! as American Ecofeminist Gothic

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Hauke

In this essay, I discuss Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 feature film mother! in the context of an intersectional approach to ecofeminism and the American gothic genre. By exploring the histories of ecofeminism, the significances of the ecogothic, and the Puritan origins of American gothic fiction, I read the movie as a reiteration of both a global ecophobic and an American national narrative, whose biblical symbolism is rooted in the patriarchal logic of Christian theology, American history, female suffering, and environmental crisis. mother! emerges as an example of a distinctly American ecofeminist gothic through its focus on and subversion of the essentialist equation of women and nature as feminized others, by dipping into the archives of feminist literary criticism, and by raising ecocritical awareness of the dangers of climate change across socio-cultural and anthropocentric categories. Situating Aronofsky’s film within traditions of American gothic and ecofeminist literatures from colonial times to the present moment, I show how mother! moves beyond a maternalist fantasy rooted in the past and towards a critique of the androcentric ideologies at the core of the 21st-century Anthropocene.

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
Milica Nenezić

History is usually written by the winners; those who lose retain their own. The extent to which these differ and whether the differences affect the fate of mankind are all issues that require constant rendering and re-examination. The future confidently retains the answers, but do these answers change the circumstances? Can philosophy, feminist literary criticism or post-structural theories obscure the meaning of fiction? We are composed of strange particles that create our being and identity, which does not likely pave the way to our becoming true by solely ‘static’ existence, but by one that unites the past, present and the future. Such particles placed on the platform of literary expression sometimes have the character of a more permanent testimony to history, either written, or tobe-written. One figure, who struggled to raise our awareness and to remind us that the essay can represent a dialogue, that the reader carries special importance and a role in both the creation and reception of artistic skills, yet that language and meaning do not have a stable structure, was Virginia Adeline Stephen Woolf, who was rewriting and reclaiming both individual and common histories. Reflecting on the dilemmas and perplexities of both historical and fictional structural norms in literature, Mrs. Woolf unobtrusively portrayed an androgynous and ever-living creature in her novel Orlando, who seeks, among other feats, to re-evaluate the importance of witnessing and re-examining history


PMLA ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy K. Miller

Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.


Author(s):  
Lucyna Marzec

The article is the analysis of the place of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna in contemporary literary discourse. The author of the article claims – using Pierre Bayard’s theory – that the poetess is known “more or less”: she is remembered as someone who got prizes and recognition but at the same time she is impossible to read nowadays. There is political ambiguity and antiquity in her texts that keep her in the past. Marzec points at four areas of literary studies, where Iłłakowiczówna is still present: 1. Poetics: Iłłakowiczówna uses an original and unusual type of the Polish tonic verse. The author of this article analyses it using tools of psychoanalysis. 2. Religious discourse: Iłłakowicz.wna is interpreted as the author of religious poetry but Marzec argues with such interpretations. 3. Post-dependence studies: Iłłakowiczówna has not been analysed in terms of post-dependence studies yet but she is mentioned in the Polish borderlines discourse. 4. Feminist literary criticism: Iłłakowiczówna used to be studied as the author of androgynous poetry, but Marzec points out other motifs such as miscarriage, infanticide or problems of the new woman, like work at government institution, contestation of vitalism and bureaucracy. The aimof this article is to show that writing of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna needs to be read in terms of the history of literature which is devoid of evaluation and judging. Such analysis means going back in terms of modern literary studies which have undergone multiple turns that changed the tools accessible to contemporary critics.


2019 ◽  
pp. 446-461
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Baydalova

The postcolonial studies have been under discussion in the Ukrainian historiography, social science, culture studies and literary criticism since 1990 years. They have originated from American, European, and Australian academic studies and became more and more popular in modern Ukrainian culture recently. The nation and the nationalism, Orientalism, multicultural and ambivalent individuality self-presentation, the search of cultural identity, the problem of ambivalent attitude to the past are in the paradigm of postcolonial studies. The problems of national identity, the totalitarian past, the interactions with neighboring countries especially Russia and Poland, the instable Ukrainian society’s condition are analyzed under the postcolonial ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse. The postcolonial theory has become the main interpretative strategy of the Ukrainian researchers lately. Nevertheless, there is no unconditional modus vivendi in the Ukrainian academia about postcolonial conceptions, strategies and principles. One of the most important unsolved issues is the question of correlation of postcolonial and postmodern components of the Ukrainian national literature. The inclusion of the studies of trauma and anticolonial and posttotalitarian discourses into the framework of the postcolonial studies is the most distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies in the Ukraine.


Author(s):  
Kris McDaniel

This chapter develops a version of ontological pluralism that respects two common intuitions about time: that the present moment is metaphysically distinguished but not in such a way that the past is unreal. The version of ontological pluralism developed—presentist existential pluralism (PEP)—embraces two modes of being, the mode of being that present objects enjoy and the mode of being that past objects enjoy. The author argues that this view fares at least as well, and probably better, than other views in which the present is metaphysically distinguished. The chapter also introduces another form of ontological superiority called “levels of being.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.


1923 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-92
Author(s):  
V. V. Miloslavsky

Hardly any other branch of medical knowledge has ever faced greater challenges, more pressing questions, than hygiene does at the present moment. The past war has uprooted about 6 million healthy, strong individuals - a direct sacrifice on the altar of Mars. To this should be added about 50 million premature deaths caused by an increase of mortality and those who were not born as a result of a decrease in the birthrate. For Russia, the total loss had already reached 21 million souls by the end of 1920, with 25 million disabled.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Samina Akhtar ◽  
Muhammad Rauf ◽  
Saima Ikram ◽  
Gulrukh Raees

This paper is an attempt to portray the plight of Mariam that she undergoes due to her illegitimate social status. The study focuses on the critical societal attitude towards the illegitimate unfortunate women. Mariam begins her life with a “harami” status; continues her struggle for personal identity, suffer and endures as a battered woman and leave this world as a woman of consequences by digging herself out of the lower social status that society attached to her. The study analyzes Mariam’s endurance, struggles and resistance in her strenuous journey to attain legitimate ending. The researcher used feminist literary criticism to interpret the text as a research methodology and adopted close textual analysis of the text by Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns.


Literator ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
H. Mondry

Re-evaluation of the cultural heritage of the past has been an integral part of Soviet literary criticism. From 1987 up to the present, literary criticism has played a leading role in the promotion of the economic, social and political reforms of perestroika. Literary critics use the methodology of social deconstruction in the interpretation of the literary texts of the past, actualising the problematics of the texts in accordance with their relevance to contemporary Soviet issues.


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