The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

El ascenso a la superficie: Eurídice en The World's Wife de Carol Ann Duffy y Retrato de una mujer en llamas de Céline Sciamma

Este artículo compara dos lecturas contemporáneas de la figura de Eurídice: el poema “Eurydice”, parte de la colección The World’s Wife de Carol Ann Duffy, y la película Retrato de una mujer en llamas, dirigida por Céline Sciamma. Lejos de limitarse a narrar el mito desde una perspectiva femenina, el trabajo que Duffy y Sciamma realizan supone una reflexión sobre las resonancias actuales de esta historia, en especial sobre la necesidad de que las experiencias de las mujeres puedan representarse bajo sus propios términos, tanto en la literatura como en el cine. Para sustentar este argumento, ambas obras se concentran en la mirada y la creación de imágenes como actos de poder y pronuncian fallidas aquellas representaciones que omiten la aportación de las mujeres que posan. Además de comentar las conexiones y los contrastes entre la poesía de Duffy y la película dirigida por Sciamma, este trabajo concuerda con el entendimiento de Sciamma del cine como colaboración, con su rechazo a la figura de la musa, y su deseo de narrar una historia de amor basada en el consentimiento y la equidad. Por último, sostengo que en la obra posterior de Duffy, específicamente en los sonetos amatorios de su poemario Rapture, se encuentra una propuesta comparable: transformar la lírica para poder representar una relación amorosa entre iguales.

Dreadful Dolls: Female Power in Carol Ann Duffy

The article scrutinizes some female characters in four poems of the Scottish poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Starting from the issue of gender construction and feminist theories, the author then shifts the focus onto the deconstruction and then re-writing of identities. The “Dreadful Dolls” of the title are women struggling to regain control of their bodies, and lives. The author points out how these women change their own body nature and appearance to determine the effects on those who claim power over them. These heroines become aware of the power of their gaze, which they use as a weapon or as a shield. They even manipulate their attire in order to reveal or, contrarily, to hide something about themselves. In this work, the author presents women performing the re-writing of their identity and power.

Contemporary Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing: Tradition and Innovation

The work examines the development of contemporary Scottish and Irish women’s writing and explores what unites contemporary Scottish and Irish woman writing with other types of narrative and what makes it special. The theoretical basis and methodology for the study is the attention to the vector of women’s prose development, including postcolonial literature and contemporary feminist critical theories. Postmodernist and meta-modernist theories (including the rhizome concept and “oscillation” principle) are also considered. Contemporary Scottish women’s writing (the example of Carol Ann Duffy) provides insights into the development of the Scottish woman writer image; works by Jenny Fagan allow to trace controlling practices of contemporary society. Kate Clanchy’s writing reveals the interconnection between cultures incorporated into the social problem of migration. Contemporary Irish women’s prose is characterized by addressing the issue of religion and Catholicism as well as the concept of home, which is well revealed in the writings of most authors who are rebelling against the tradition and, at the same time, associate themselves with it.

Examining Duffy’s Textual Space in “Water” and “Cold” through the Unnatural Ecopoetics Concept

Unnatural ecopoetics presents new directions for poetry scholars. It is a theoretical lens that studies how texts use self-reflexive language and formal experimentation to create a textual space where material and nonmaterial environmental elements are uncovered. The term material stands for all physical objects and places, whether man-made or occurring naturally in the world. Nonmaterial, on the other hand, refers to the invisible emotional, historical, political, and personal elements that influence the speaker’s experience of space and the translation of it to the textual space of a poem. Post-modernist poet Carol Ann Duffy has played a pivotal role in contemporary English poetry. While many studies have dealt with her poetry, few have examined Duffy’s poetry in light of the unnatural ecopoetics concept. In this paper, the reader is invited to read within the textual space of Duffy’s “Water” and “Cold” (2011) through the lens of unnatural ecopoetics. This article argues that Duffy’s experience and memories of her mother’s last days configured nonmaterial elements fused with material elements of her environment. The findings of this study provide a new way of analysing contemporary poetry through ecopoetics reading by delving into literary texts and examining all the environmental elements and situations around a persona in a poem or the poet.

“Daughterlands”: Personal and Political Mappings in Scottish Women’s Poetry

Scottish women’s poetry in recent years has evinced an interest in mapping daughterhood, frequently through linguistic negatives that challenge binary thinking. This essay argues that such “daughterlands” offer an imaginative alternative to the more familiar “motherland”: encompassing past, present, and future and positioning women in multiple roles, they have played a transformative role in the poetic imagining of “Scotland” in the new millennium. The essay considers the deployment of daughterly spaces by influential writers such as Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie and then traces more recent instantiations by a younger generation of poets such as Claire Askew, Theresa Muñoz, and Em Strang. In conclusion, it demonstrates the experiential and metaphoric potential of daughterhood for shaping broad political thinking in an explicitly public poem by Kay.