Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic Fragment: ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’

Charlotte Brontë’s eighteen-page fragment, ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’, written shortly after the publication of Villette in 1853, combines the gothic and realism and uses multiple narrators to tell a disturbing story of cruelty towards a child. The generic instability and disordered temporal framework of this fragment make it unlike anything Brontë had previously written, yet it has attracted the attention of few scholars. Those who have discussed it have condemned it as a failure; the later fragment ‘Emma’, also left incomplete by the author's premature death, has been seen as the more likely beginning of a successor to Villette. ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ reveals Brontë at her most experimental as she explores the use of different narrative voices, including that of an unnamed genderless ‘ghost’, to tell a story from different perspectives. It also shows Brontë representing a child's experience of extreme physical abuse which goes far beyond the depictions of chastisement in Jane Eyre (1847). This essay argues that ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ affords rich insights into Brontë’s ideas and working practices in her final years, suggesting that it should be more widely acknowledged as a unique aspect of Brontë’s oeuvre, revealing the new directions she may have taken had she lived to complete another novel.

Generic instability in a frozen legal genre?

Though legal discourse has undergone several steps of metamorphosis to evolve from a law and language discourse that considers the subject of the law sacred to a language of the law discourse that views “language as social action and law as social discourse” (Goodrich 1987: 76), it is still believed that “legal language has to be the way it is” (Danet 1980: 541). This is relevant especially to those genres at the frozen written end of the legal discourse scale. However, the fact that legal texts “can be relatively precise, or quite general or vague, depending on the strategic objectives of the drafter” (Tiersma 2008: 7) can create blurs within the determinacy of such genres. In this context, the genre of Life Insurance Contracts which belongs to the written mode and frozen style end of the legal language continuum is studied to investigate to what extent we can talk about challenging generic stability in such a genre. The focus is put specifically on the frequency of use of personal pronouns in this genre that claims functional redundancy. The experiential meta-function of Systemic Functional Linguistics is also used to detect the participant roles assigned to these pronouns and to find out if the frequency of certain roles is generic. These frequencies that are computed using the UAM computational CorpusTool in a corpus made up of 16 contracts counting 174.288 words are studied in relation to the purposes of the legal genre of Life Insurance Contracts.

Troubling the Tragic Paradigm: Genre and Epigraph in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

The rarely discussed epigraph to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles – ‘Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed | Shall lodge thee’ – at first seems an odd choice. Tess is usually read as a tragedy; the epigraph’s source, Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is a comedy. The speaker of these lines in the play is a woman, the ‘wounded name’ a man’s, and the immediate context one of erotic playfulness as Julia tears up Proteus’s love letter and then tenderly gathers up the fragments. Yet the apparent mismatch works, because it gestures towards both the generic instability of Two Gentlemen, and the novel’s own unstable genre. Hardy recurrently raises the question of how Tess Durbeyfield’s story should be read. Tess’s ‘fall’ is at different times and for different people a fatal blot on her prospects, a venial error, and material for an amusing or satirical story. Novel and heroine hover between genres; generic interpretations are complicated by gender and class. Early reviewers who refused to read Tess as a tragedy may seem wrong-headed and puritanical in hindsight, but they were in some ways more alive to the novel’s generic slippages than many later readers. Hardy at once invokes and unsettles generic models, in his choice of epigraph and throughout the book.

Generic substitutions of antiepileptic drugs: Is it possible to put an end to the discussion?

A policy on generic substitutions, which is aimed at reducing the cost-effectiveness of pharmacotherapy, was proposed by the WHO at the end of the 20th century; however, but the debate about their economic benefits has continued until now. There have been the most active discussions of whether an epileptic patient may be switched from brand-name to generic antiepileptic drugs. The paper gives data obtained in Russian and foreign studies of the therapeutic efficacy and safety of anticonvulsant generics versus their brand- name drugs, as well as the impact of generic substitutions on the cost-effectiveness of antiepileptic therapy. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the quality of generic medicines, their dosage forms, and regulatory requirements for registration of generics. The problem of generic instability is under discussion.

Margins and thresholds of French cinema: Ménilmontant, Le Sang des bêtes, Colloque de chiens

The author addresses singularity, figural expression and transgression in three experimental shorts that picture the margins of Paris the better to interrogate the limits of cinematic language itself. To what extent might filmmakers who refuse the codes of an audience-ready cinema of the juste milieu stake a claim to an art of the periphery? Linking the working-class neighbourhood of its title to crime, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s silent Ménilmontant (1926) gestures towards melodrama even as it proposes an introduction to avant-garde film poetics. Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949), on Paris’s slaughterhouses, strikes a formal balance between poetic décor on the one hand and, on the other, the drama of livestock being steamed, stunned and decapitated. Deep generic instability and distanced humour characterise Raúl Ruiz’s off-kilter parody of surrealism Colloque de chiens (1977). Throughout these works, the internal and external borders of Paris work as zones of latent or overt violence to dissolve genre; scenes of fragmentation and dismemberment upend any pretention to a balanced and harmonious cinema of the juste milieu. The suburb becomes an ideal projective screen.