Prosperity as an American Dream: A Study on Ben Fowlkes’S You’Ll Apologize If You Have To

You’ll Apologize If You Have To (2015), a short story by Ben Fowlkes, portrays the struggle of an American in pursuing his dreams. The primary data of this research is the narration and dialogues uttered by the characters: Wallace, Kim, Molly, the Old Lady, and the Green-Jacket Man. Those data are classified based on the American dreams (Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Livingston, & Sherman, 2014; Cullen, 2003; Mailer, Thompson, & Wolfe, 2009), specifically those related to material wealth. The result of this research reveals that in their daily life, the characters have their perspectives on seeing America as the land of dreams. Generally, they dream of a better life and happiness. However, this short story also portrays American dreams as a paradox because not all Americans have the privilege to achieve those dreams.

Dream weaving and sonic metalepsis in Jan Troell’s Land of Dreams

Jan Troell’s Sagolandet (Land of Dreams) (1988) presents itself as a documentary about 1980s Swedish society, but is also a film about filmmaking, the imagination, memory and autobiography. The film has multiple narrative levels: interviews, home movie footage, autobiographical anecdotes and imaginative sequences. Commentary and guiding themes are drawn from the theories of psychoanalyst Rollo May. These strata and themes have associated musical motifs and/or sound effects, which, as the film progresses, serve as an ontological bridge between the different strata. Land of Dreams is structured as both a multistrand and multiform narrative with the intercutting of multiple stories with multiple protagonists (multistrand) mixed with dream worlds and internal-subjective perspectives of Troell (multiform). The different narrative strata invite metalepsis, a type of narrative ‘transgression’ that occurs across the boundaries of distinct narrative worlds. In Land of Dreams, voice, music and sound effects act as metaleptic agents, transgressing different strata through four interrelated techniques: (1) metaleptic ‘i-voices’; (2) musical structures made up of ironic and disjunctive musical textures; (3) musical motifs transgressing narrative and ontological boundaries and (4) musical metaleptic warps. Musical metalepsis in Land of Dreams functions in a way that is emblematic of how political decisions and public policy infiltrate the private sphere, human consciousness and even dreams of the future.

This is neither America nor Paris: The east‐west divide in Eastern European queer-themed films

The fantasy of the west as a land of 'dreams come true' is a long tradition in the Eastern European cultural imagination and in cinema as well. Eastern European queer-themed films imagine the west as a utopian dreamland and depict the East (Eastern Europe) as backward and futureless. By analysing relevant Eastern European queer-themed films from three different decades, this article points out how the inherited fantasy of the west as imagined during the state socialist era infiltrates Eastern Europe's self-perception, when ‐ in an act of self-colonization ‐ the films create a hierarchy of values within which the liberal west is contrasted with the depiction of Eastern European spaces through othering strategies central in western thought. When the characters' dreams do come true ‐ and they reach the west ‐ disappointment is inevitable. Their retreat to their Eastern origins results in double disappointment, being trapped between crushed western dreams and Eastern nightmares.

The Self and the Other in "The Land of Dreams"

This paper is a study of the post-colonial polarity of the Self/the Other in Hanan Al Shaykh's short story "The Land of Dreams". It investigates the sub-textual tensions between her admiration of the European model (the Self) and her status as an Arab writer representing the Other. Thus, Al Shaykh presents a prejudiced text in which the Other is misrepresented and rather stereotypically portrayed. While the Self is civilised and a savior-like figure, the Other (Yemini men and women) is primitive, superstitious and ignorant. Furthermore, the researcher will show that what seems to be a meaningful connection across the racial line where the Self (Ingrid; the civilised European) and the Other (Yemini people) find a contact zone is no more than an illogical oversimplification of the relationship. While Hanan Al Shaykh introduces this model of racial liberation through unification of the Self and the Other, the question remains to what extent would that relationship sustain the pressures of the primitive culture of the Other? Indeed, Al Shaykh tends to simplify and generalise the relationship to the point of producing romantic and idealised images of a human contact beyond cultural and racial gaps, which strikes the reader as naïve and unrealistic.