"I'm not just a protector. Even a hero has desires." A hot, forceful kiss, his fingers and tongue sliding over my bare skin... I never thought that heroes would do these things.
Much of the criticism on Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular 'Twilight' novels has underrated or even disparaged the books while belittling the questionable taste of an audience that many believe is being inculcated with anti-feminist values. Avoiding a repetition of such reductive critiques of the series's purported shortcomings with respect to literary merit and political correctness, this volume adopts a cultural studies framework to explore the range of scholarly concerns awakened by the 'Twilight novels and their filmic adaptations. Contributors examine 'Twilight's debts to its predecessors in young adult, vampire, and romance literature; the problems of cinematic adaptation; issues in fan and critical reception in the United States and Korea; and the relationship between the series and contemporary conceptualizations of feminism, particularly girl culture. Placing the series within a broad tradition of literary history, reception studies, and filmic adaptation, the collection offers scholars the opportunity to engage with the books' importance for studies of popular culture, gender, and young adult literature.
Today's many popular aesthetic pleasures have a very long history. Paul Duncum considers the historical critical discourses, and socio-political issues raised by aesthetic pleasures in fifteen thematic chapters. Using illustrative examples from the past, present, and across cultures, he challenges the idea of any decline of cultural standards and argues that no grounds exist for cultural pessimism. Refusing to condemn popular culture on the basis of taste, he reserves critique for the socio-political ideologies aesthetics invariably serve. Art history, film, cultural studies, and philosophical aesthetics are each employed to show that the sensory/emotional lures of today's popular culture are mostly identical to those of premodern fine art. They include the violent, the horrific, the sentimental, the exotic, the erotic, and the humorous. Some of these pleasures derive from our evolutionary biology; they are all an important part of what it means to be human, and central to understanding contemporary society. Examples are wide-ranging, including British seaside postcards, Disney films, Nazi propaganda, burlesque, modern advertising, as well as many exemplars of fine art. The book reveals fresh insights for all those studying visual culture, art history, aesthetics, media studies, and media and art education.
The Rajputs ruled the vast majority of the kingdoms that were joined together after Indian independence to form the state of Rajasthan, "Land of Kings." An important part of Rajput religion is the worship of "heroes" who have died in battle. This practice has attained new significance in recent years, as right-wing Hindu activists have deployed narratives about heroism in Rajput wars with Muslim emperors. In this book, Lindsey Harlan explores the idea of the Rajput hero. She is particularly interested in the role played by gender in stories about heroes and in their worship. She looks at the differences between female and male storytellers, the relationships of the hero to the women in his tale, and the relationship of the hero to the goddess for whom he is both sacrifice and henchman. She obtains her materials from interviews with Rajput families and their servants, from songfests, from bystanders at shrines, from ritual specialists. Ultimately she shows how heroic traditions encapsulate and express ideals of perfection and masculinity, defined most visibly against the backdrop of domesticity and femininity. More broadly she argues that heroes reflect ever-changing valuations of history, and serve as sources of inspiration for facing contemporary challenges (domestic, communal, national) and concerns about the future.
A guide to understanding the major genres of the story world by the legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story, John Truby. Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the films, video games, TV shows, and books that people consume. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. That’s why businesses—movie studios, production companies, video game studios, and publishing houses—buy and sell them. Writers who want to succeed professionally must write the stories these businesses want to buy. Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres. The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works is the legendary writing teacher John Truby’s step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of the story world. He details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and analyzes more than a dozen major genres and the essential plot events, or “beats,” that define each of them. As he shows, the ability to combine these beats in the right way is what separates stories that sell from those that don’t. Truby also reveals how a single story can combine elements of different genres, and how the best writers use this technique to craft unforgettable stories that stand out from the crowd. Just as Truby’s first book, The Anatomy of Story, changed the way writers develop stories, The Anatomy of Genres will enhance their quality and expand the impact they have on the world.
The first look at the philosophy behind the Iron Man comics and movies, timed for the release of Iron Man 2 in March 2010 On the surface, Iron Man appears to be a straightforward superhero, another rich guy fighting crime with fancy gadgets. But beneath the shiny armor and flashy technology lies Tony Stark, brilliant inventor and eccentric playboy, struggling to balance his desires, addictions, and relationships with his duties as the Armored Avenger. Iron Man and Philosophy explores the many philosophical issues that emerge from the essential conflicts found in the decades of Iron Man stories in comics and movies. What kind of moral compass does Tony Stark have? Is Iron Man responsible for the death of Captain America after the Marvel Universe “Civil War”? Should people like Stark run the world? How does Tony’s alcoholism impact his performance as Iron Man, and what does it say about moral character? Ultimately, what can Iron Man teach us about the role of technology in society? As absorbing as Iron Man comic books and movies, Iron Man and Philosophy: Gives you a new perspective on Iron Man characters, story lines, and themes Shows what philosophical heavy hitters such as Aristotle, Locke, and Heidegger can teach us about Tony Stark/Iron Man Considers issues such as addiction, personal responsibility, the use of technology, and the role of government Whether you've been reading the comic books for years or have gotten into Iron Man through the movies, Iron Man and Philosophy is a must-have companion for every fan.
This is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way, and to explain its relationship to the epic's narrative structure and audience reception. Rachel H. Lesser offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters' desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters' desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as eros, himeros, pothe, menos, thumos, boule, and eeldor, as well as through the epic's thematic emotions of grief and anger. Desire in the Iliad shows how the mortals' and gods' triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus' withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the "superplot" of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener's-or reader's-own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad's full story, sympathetic desire for characters' welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.
This bilingual work identifies and explains the subversive rewriting of ancient, medieval and modern myths in contemporary novels. The book opens with two theoretical essays on the subject of subversive tendencies and myth reinvention in the contemporary novel. From there, it moves on to the analysis of essential texts. Firstly, classical myths in works by authors such as André Gide, Thomas Pynchon, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino or Christa Wolf (for instance, Theseus, Oedipus or Medea) are discussed. Then, myths of biblical origin – such as the Flood or the Golem – are revisited in the work of Giorgio Bassani, Julian Barnes and Cynthia Ozick. A further section is concerned with the place of modern myths (Faust, the ghost, Ophelia…) in the fiction of Günter Grass, Paul Auster, or Clara Janés. The contributors have also delved into the relationship between myth and art – especially in the discourse of contemporary advertising, painting and cinema – and myth’s intercultural dimensions: hybridity in the Latin American novels of Augusto Roa Bastos and Carlos Fuentes, and in the Hindu-themed novels of Bharati Mukherjee. This volume emerges from the careful selection of 37 essays out of over 200 which were put forward by outstanding scholars from 25 different countries for the Madrid International Conference on Myth and Subversion (March 2011). Este volumen bilingüe identifica y explica la práctica subversiva aplicada a los mitos antiguos, medievales y modernos en la novela contemporánea. Abren el libro dos estudios teóricos sobre la tendencia subversiva y la reinvención de mitos en la actualidad. Prosigue el análisis de diversos textos de primera importancia. En primer lugar se revisan los mitos clásicos en autores como André Gide, Thomas Pynchon, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino o Christa Wolf (p. ej., Teseo, Edipo, Medea). En segundo lugar, la reescritura de los mitos bíblicos según Giorgio Bassani, Julian Barnes o Cynthia Ozick (p. ej., el diluvio o el Golem). En tercer lugar, mitos modernos en la ficción de Günter Grass, Paul Auster o Clara Janés (p. ej., Fausto, el fantasma, Ofelia). El volumen presta igualmente atención a las relaciones entre mito y arte (su recurrencia en la publicidad, la pintura y el cine contemporáneos) y a la vertiente intercultural de los mitos: el mestizaje en la novela latinoamericana de Augusto Roa Bastos y Carlos Fuentes, o en la de temática hindú de Bharati Mukherjee. La compilación resulta de una exquisita selección de 37 textos entre los más de 200 propuestos para el Congreso Internacional Mito y Subversión (Madrid, marzo de 2011) por investigadores de prestigio procedentes de 25 países.
Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies examines the diverse ways that literary works and paintings can be read as screens onto which new images of masculinity and femininity are cast. Esther Bauer focuses on German and Austrian writers and artists from the 1910s and 1920s —specifically authors Franz Kafka, Vicki Baum, and Thomas Mann, and painters Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and Egon Schiele—who gave spectacular expression to shifting trends in male and female social roles and the organization of physical desire and the sexual body. Bauer’s comparative approach reveals the ways in which artists and writers echoed one another in undermining the gender duality and highlighting sexuality and the body. As she points out, as sites of negotiation and innovation, these works reconfigured bodies of desire against prevailing notions of sexual difference and physical attraction and thus became instruments of social transformation.