The Wrong Side of History

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
N. M. Cedeño ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Wrong Side

Is it appropriate to hold politicians accountable for their past votes, their past actions, and their past opinions, even if they are not reflective of them today? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Senator McCoy is 130 years old and is considered a "national treasure" for his nearly century of public service. Shortly before his retirement he is confronted by a member of an extremist organization (that supports eugenics) who have found evidence of a paper he published in college where he supports abortion. Given the modern political climate where every person is needed to build society, this information would forever stain his legacy. Senator McCoy hires a "fixer" to find and destroy the source material and preserve his legacy. However, things go wrong and the would-be blackmailer crashes the Senators party in an attempt to expose him. The Senator is nearly killed, but is finally able to enjoy an untarnished retirement legacy free from the truth of his past.

Crime and punishment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Alan Turing ◽  
Wrong Side ◽  
Universal Turing Machine ◽  
Male Prostitution ◽  
Interplanetary Travel

In 1952 Turing was arrested and tried for being gay. The court convicted him and sentenced him to chemical castration. It was disgraceful treatment by the nation that he had done so much to save. Turing faced this ordeal with his usual courage. Turing wrote a short story. Although only a few pages long and incomplete, it offers an intimate glimpse of its author. The central character—a scientist by the name of Alec Pryce, who works at Manchester University—is a thinly disguised Alan Turing. Pryce, like Turing himself, always wore what Turing described as ‘an old sports coat and rather unpressed worsted trousers’. Turing called this Pryce’s ‘undergraduate uniform’, saying that it ‘encouraged him to believe he was still an attractive youth’. At just the wrong side of 40, Turing must have been feeling his age. Pryce, whose work related to interplanetary travel, made an important discovery in his twenties, which came to be called ‘Pryce’s buoy’. The nature of the discovery is left unexplained, and Pryce’s buoy is obviously a proxy for the universal Turing machine. ‘Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used’, Turing wrote revealingly. ‘The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too’, Turing continued. ‘He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the “u” ’. Pryce, we are told, has not had a sexual relationship since ‘that soldier in Paris last summer’. Walking through Manchester, Pryce passes a youth lounging on a bench, Ron Miller. Ron, who is out of work and keeps company with petty criminals, makes a small income from male prostitution. He responds to a glance that Alec gives him as he passes, calling out uncouthly ‘Got a fag?’. Shyly Alec joins him on the bench and the two sit together awkwardly. Eventually Alec plucks up courage to invite the boy to have lunch at a nearby restaurant. Beggars can’t be choosers, Ron thinks meanly. He is not impressed by Alec’s brusque approach and ‘lah-di-dah’ way of speaking, but says to himself philosophically, ‘Bed’s bed whatever way you get into it’.

Biblical Responses: Past and Present Retellings of the Enigmatic Mrs. Job

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 97-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily O. Gravett
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Masoretic Text

AbstractHer namelessness, her uneventful fulfillment of maternal duties, her short and unclear speech, and her departure after the second chapter of the book of Job have piqued, rather than quelled, interpreters' interest in Job's wife throughout history. This article first describes what little we can glean about Mrs. Job from the 'original' Masoretic Text (MT) and then tracks Mrs. Job's appearance in two post-biblical retellings: the ancient Testament of Job and a contemporary short story, “Job's Jobs,” by Aimee Bender. These retellings seem to be, in their own ways, addressing three important questions: “what kind of relationship does she have with her husband Job?,” “what effects do Job's series of tests have on her life?,” and “why might Mrs. Job have said such surprising and seemingly terrible words to her husband amidst his suffering?” It is suggested that the retellings respond in consonant ways—particularly through their development of her relationship with Job, the suffering she experiences because of his tests, and her various speaking parts. Because the similarities are found in more than one retelling, the article argues that readers can rightfully return to the biblical source material, in order to query whether the Bible implied those questions in the first place and to use their interpretations to re-read the book of Job, proffering a rich, viable, and alternative literary interpretation for the character of Mrs. Job.

Literary form, hierarchies and the meeting of two plots in Patrick Gale’s ‘A Slight Chill’

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Ue
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article incorporates Gerald Prince’s and Caroline Levine’s work on form to reveal some of the innovations in Patrick Gale’s ‘A Slight Chill’ ([1996] 2018). This short story juxtaposes two antagonistic plots: the vampire Lotta Wexel’s gastronomic activities and her teacher Angel Voysey’s romance. By attending to, and drawing connections between, smaller forms (e.g. allusions and metaphors) and larger ones (plots and genre), I argue that we may better understand Gale’s project. Lotta’s plot effectively exposes and frustrates Angel’s. In foregrounding such interactions, he encourages the reader to reassess both the affordances and the inadequacies of the models and expectations that Angel inherits. This article goes on to analyse Gale’s screenplay for his upcoming film adaptation to show how he gives a new application to his earlier project. If the short story is particularly invested in the decisions before Angel, then the screenplay explores, even more so than its source material, how and why we categorize characters into hierarchical forms. This article contributes to knowledge, then, by examining Gale’s writing programme, which has received inadequate scholarly attention; by illuminating some of its complexities; and by demonstrating the value of thinking about the short story in terms of form.

‘Something to be haunted by’: Adaptive monsters and regional mythologies in ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-122
Author(s):  
Adam Ochonicky
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Adaptation ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cross Cultural Adaptation ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
Urban Legends ◽  
Regional Dynamics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
A Site

Since Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) was first released more than 25 years ago, there has been a great deal of scholarly commentary on the film’s treatment of class, race, gender and urban legends. To a lesser degree, Clive Barker’s short story, ‘The Forbidden’ (1986), has received some critical attention largely because of its status as the source material for the film’s general premise and now-iconic central monster. This article expands on such existent scholarship by analysing regional mythologies and the cross-cultural adaptation of place-specific monsters within and across both texts. To develop these primary arguments, this article extracts a theory of adaptation and location from Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods ([2001] 2011), and applies that theory to the acts of adaptation pervading ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman. In complementary ways, all three of these texts explicitly reflect on the complexities of adapting monsters to precise locales. Notably, both American Gods and Candyman take place in the American Midwest; this regional setting greatly impacts the conceptualization of each narrative’s supernatural beings (Gaiman’s cohort of gods and the Candyman, respectively). Within popular culture, the Midwest is regularly depicted as both a site of nostalgic memory and a cultural space defined by the willful forgetting or elision of history. This article asserts the importance of recognizing the Midwest as a recurrent staging ground for horror narratives, particularly those featuring monsters who embody forgotten, misremembered, suppressed or denied pieces of history. Further, by examining such regional dynamics in American Gods and Candyman, this article develops the concept of ‘adaptive monsters’, which describes horrific beings who assume symbolic attributes of the historical, cultural and/or spatial environments into which they are adapted. Overall, through analyses of ‘The Forbidden’, Candyman and American Gods, this article demonstrates how regional mythologies (especially those of the Midwest) shape the adaptation of monstrous beings in horror narratives and across textual forms.

scholarly journals „Niewiasty kresowe”

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 9-33
Author(s):  
Krystyna Samsonowska
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
The Family ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
The 19Th Century

Women of the Kresy. The Female in the Works of Józef Antoni Rolle – from History to Literature and MythThe article offers an analysis of depictions of women in Józef Apolinary Rolle’s literary output. The source material are Rolle’s numerous short stories published in a number of collections and series in 1872-1894, including a collection entitled Women of the Kresy. In his works Rolle created the myth of woman of the eastern territories of interwar Poland (Kresy Wschodnie), a courageous amazon, a female warrior, by sketching portraits of historical €gures of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the short story entitled Women in Kamianets under Turkish Siege (1672) the author expressed this myth in a collective portrait of women of different nationalities and faiths who defended the fortress of Kamianets Podil’skij against the Turks. In other works Rolle depicted women engaged in politics and struggling to strengthen their family’s position. The latter attitude became dominant in the 18th century, when women were no longer directly engaged in warfare. The women described by Rolle enjoy considerable individual freedom, which provides thems with more opportunities (including the freedom to choose a husband and the freedom to divorce) compared to their compatriots in the Polish west. Women who lived in partitioned Poland in the 19th century were depicted by Rolle as ones who were responsible for the family, and for the transmission of family traditions, which €fits in with the myth of the Polish Mother. More broadly, the image of women of the Kresy €fits in with the myth of the region itself. This tradition was continued and developed in the early 20th century by the author’s son, the historian and publicist, Michał Rolle, among others.

scholarly journals Politik dan Intertekstualiti dalam Juara

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-232
Author(s):  
Mawar Safei ◽  
◽  
Tuan Rusmawati Raja Hassan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
The Relationship

Makalah ini menumpukan pemerhatian terhadap hubungan dan proses antara teks dalam penghasilan novel Melayu. Hubungan dan proses itu dikaitkan dengan intertekstualiti, iaitu fenomena wujudnya teks dalam sebuah teks atau apa yang dinamakan dialog antara teks. Kerangka kajian ini memanfaatkan gagasan oleh Julia Kristeva. Rumus intertekstual tersebut membentangkan hubungan antara hipoteks (cerpen) dengan hiperteks (novel) bagi melihat makna, proses yang diajukan dan kewajarannya dilakukan oleh pengarang. Kajian ini merujuk kepengarangan S. Othman Kelantan yang memperlihatkan kecenderungan dan ketekalan terhadap karya yang bersifat intertekstual. Novel yang menjadi mauduk kajian ini ialah Juara. Kajian ini menemukan bahawa dalam kerangka intertekstualiti, kepengarangan S. Othman Kelantan memperagakan kesetiaannya terhadap teks awal dalam genre cerpen yang kemudian dikembangkan menjadi novel. Hal ini berlaku terhadap Juara yang dikembangkan daripada cerpen “Pahlawan Lembu”. Langgam kepengarangan S. Othman Kelantan menunjukkan sensitifnya pengarang terhadap cuaca politik semasa; keyakinan dan ideologinya dibancuh sama secara metaforikal dalam Juara . Hubungan intertekstualiti dalam cerpen ke novel dalam Juara termasuklah tema dan plot yang dikerjakan pengarang melalui proses transformasi, eksistensi dan modifikasi. Proses yang dilakukan oleh pengarang ini akibat beberapa faktor antaranya persekitaran, latar peribadi dan pengalaman hidup Kata kunci: S. Othman Kelantan, novel Juara, cerpen “Pahlawan Lembu”, Julia Kristeva, intertekstualiti Abstract This article focuses on the interrelationship between texts in Malay novels, and the processes that take place related to intertextuality. For the framework of this study, the intertextuality theory of Julia Kristeva was used. This theory is concerned with the relationship between the hypotext (short story) and hypertext (novel) in order to study meaning, the process presented and the author’s rationale. This study focuses on the writings of S. Othman Kelantan, who appears to have a tendency towards producing intertextual works, focusing on his novel Juara . The study reveals that with reference to intertextuality, the writings of S. Othman Kelantan display a loyalty towards the prior text, as well as to the short story genre. Juara , which is an expansion from the short story “Pahlawan Lembu”, is an example of this. The style of S. Othman Kelantan’s writing reveal his sensitivity towards the contemporary political climate; his conviction and ideology is presented in metaphor in Juara . The intertextual relationship between the short story and the novel Juara is evident in both theme and plot. The writer employs transformation, extension and modification, influenced by several factors including environment, personal background and his own life experience. Keywords: S. Othman Kelantan, Juara , “Pahlawan Lembu”, Julia Kristeva, intertextuality

The Relationship of Interrogative Suggestibility to Memory and Attention

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.C. Howard ◽  
A. Chaiwutikornwanich
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Oddball Paradigm ◽  
Memory Processes ◽  
Memory And Attention ◽  
Irrelevant Distractors ◽  
Alternative Hypotheses ◽  
Visual Oddball Paradigm ◽  
Interrogative Suggestibility ◽  
Task Irrelevant

This study combined an individual differences approach to interrogative suggestibility (IS) with ERP recordings to examine two alternative hypotheses regarding the source of individual differences in IS: (1) differences in attention to task-relevant vis-à-vis task-irrelevant stimuli, and (2) differences in one or more memory processes, indexed by ERP old/new effects. Sixty-five female participants underwent an ERP recording during the 50 min interval between immediate and delayed recall of a short story. ERPs elicited by pictures that either related to the story (“old”), or did not relate to the story (“new”), were recorded using a three-stimulus visual oddball paradigm. ERP old/new effects were examined at selected scalp regions of interest at three post-stimulus intervals: early (250-350 ms), middle (350-700 ms), and late (700-1100 ms). In addition, attention-related ERP components (N1, P2, N2, and P3) evoked by story-relevant pictures, story-irrelevant pictures, and irrelevant distractors were measured from midline electrodes. Late (700-1100 ms) frontal ERP old/new differences reflected individual differences in IS, while early (250-350 ms) and middle latency (350-700 ms) ERP old/new differences distinguished good from poor performers in memory and oddball tasks, respectively. Differences in IS were not reflected in ERP indices of attention. Results supported an account of IS as reflecting individual differences in postretrieval memory processes.

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