Documents found
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274.More information
It has become a truism that contemporary multi-season TV dramas are inheritors of the methods and aims of Victorian serial fiction, or, as the New York Times editorial page put it in 2006, that if “Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it.” While not absolutely denying the validity of such assertions, this essay reconsiders them. Sergei Eisenstein's 1949 essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," now a locus classicus for thinking about the links between nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth- and twenty-first-century cinematic media, first formulated a model that has remained influential for considering Victorian fiction, and especially Dickens's novels, as offering a “pedigree” and parentage for filmic media. But through a reading of several test cases of contemporary neo-Victorian adaptation, broadly construed—including Dickensian references in The Wire, South Park's animated Great Expectations adaptation episode, and references to George Eliot in Kazuo Ishiguru's novel Never Let Me Go—this essay questions and complicates Eisenstein's paradigm of the Victorian novel as parent to contemporary media.
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275.More information
Anorexia nervosa opposes a strong resistance to social analysis. A variety of conceptual and theoretical frameworks has been deployed, but none can really go beyond the discourse to explain its social origin. As a matter of fact, it seems that one ought to study the embodied experience of anorexia, and put the body at the forefront, to reach the social processes involved in the phenomenon. As a consequence, anorexia invites us to explore the sensible, embodied experience of social life, and represents a rich field to progress in the making of a conceptual framework addressing this issue.
Keywords: anorexie, corps, subjectivité, santé mentale, sensations
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276.More information
This paper aims at exploring a social semiotics of Buddhists. This approach encompasses issues such as the social uses of the signs of “Being Buddhist”, the modes of decoding adherence to Buddhism, by means of exposing behavioral, discursive or clothing signs, within communities of practitioners. These latter are labels by which is traced a frontier between “community” (saṇgha) and the “rest of the world”, and signals embedded in material culture by which religious adherence or belonging are expressed – and easily identified as such in the Asian context. In Western Buddhism, however, these semiotic “decipherings” of religious belongings are much more blurred for two reasons. First, because the ways to relate to Buddhist norms and symbols are malleable. Second, because the ways to display ostensibly or to hide Buddhist signs, usually framed by religious norms, partake of other logics – individualization, schisms, heterodoxy… Based upon ethnographic empirical data, gathered in France and in other national contexts, this paper examines the manners to play with the semiotic codes of belonging to Buddhism, and in conclusion, the ways they disclose the broader issues of adaptation of Buddhism in the West.
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277.More information
AbstractRumors appear in literary texts in different ways. The following essay deals with rumors as they appear in different contexts, and tries to establish a typology of theirs functions in narratives. The analysis of texts by A. Waberi, S.L. Tansi and J. Becker shows that rumors – through the way they emerge and circulate – play an important role not only on the topical level of the novel, but also on its structure. The presence of rumors in literary texts marks a distinct shift in their writing from truth to verisimilitude. But it appears that the genuine collective nature of rumors as a social phenomenon has also consequences on the literary form, which tends to distinguish itself through the use of polyphony. The literary texts studied here help us establish the link between discursive (literary) forms and social consciousness, as well as between esthetical project and its ethical consequences.
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279.More information
Mordecai Richler's last novel, Barney's Version (1997), presents itself as the memoirs of Barney Panofsky, embodying the character's autobiographical narrative. At the same time the novel's subtext is filled with cultural and memory-related references that evoke a community of readers—a chosen group defined by the fact that its members recognize the textual signs of Jewishness. This article shows how this network is (re)activated through the construction of an imaginary library defined as a place of memory that makes patrilinear legacy possible. On this basis, it then shows how Richler's Yiddishized English embodies a sedimentation of Jewish identity: through a double movement of opening to community and withdrawing into secrecy, it operates as a kind of rite, functioning as a shibboleth to ensure that only insiders have access to signs.