Hemingway and Emotion

from Keith M. Ophdal

• 'The story exists to give the reader an emotional reaction'
• Hemingway "The writer may omit things that he knows and the reader... will have a feeling of those things as strongly as if the writer had stated them'
• readers fell context and implication
• language triggers not feelings but images
• almost every word carries an emotional charge
• 'connotation and association mean that every word in a passage floats in a pool of meaning' p113
• one part of mind understand abstract denotation and another feels some of the emotion
• in hemingway feeling is resides within the text, in Fitzgerald it resides within the narrator's voice

Notes from 'Think of England'

Martin Parr 1999

• Begins with questions that he will asking
• Voice behind camera brings in performative element
• Immediately introduces the contrast of class - perhaps answering that Englishness is in fact based on class distinctions
• Uses people's answers to questions to raise queries eg british vs english
• Dialectic approach in way it cuts from a man saying there is no hooliganism to a different man opening a woman's coat to reveal her low cut top
• Introduces concept of Britain vs others, namely Germany the only country Britain is really able to say it rightfully invaded
• Goes from pub to posh people having an extra pimms - the same things but in a different manner
• Things like sport returned to as a uniting point for different people
• No names of places given, focusing on the people
• Interviews while they're doing something
• Begins with Southern accent, moves west, but multiple examples of accents being deceiving - not the same as where people are from necessarily
• Shots of flags in different places
• Social mobility
• Different scenes - city, country fete, beach
• Traditions eg Sunday lunch
• Gradually comes to people who define england as opposed to other countries
• Racism 'send them all back' - whiteness as part of englishness, people who were once subjects of the British empire no longer count
• This is followed by a woman saying she likes the fact that immigrants can find a home is England - multiple perspectives existing in country, neither more english than the other
• Where home is and how use nationality to define yourself
• Normal people not authorities
• Weather
• Goes to places where people gather - filming community
• Different ages
• Unity of englishness - north south divide
• capturing moments of life

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Notes

from Laura Mulvey's article in Screen

• film plays on sexual difference
• sexual difference controls images, spectacle and 'erotic ways of looking'
• patriarchal society unconsciously influencing film form

Phallocentrism 1. Relating to or reflecting a perspective that is predominantly or exclusively male.

2. Dominated or controlled by men: a phallocentric society.

phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning

Laura Mulvey asserts that it:

• 'depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to the world'
• a woman's 'lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies'
• a woman 'first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and thereby raises her child into the symbolic'
• her child is the 'signifier of her own desire to possess a penis'
• 'women then stand as a symbol in patriarchal culture for the male other'
• men can 'live out their phantasies and obsessions... by imposing them on the silent image of a woman, tied to her place as a bearer of meaning, not a maker of meaning'

• 'Destruction of pleasure is a radical weapon'
• hollywood is skilled at manipulating visual pleasure
• 'mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'

The cinema offers many pleasures: 

1. Scopophilia - looking itself is a source of pleasure, 'erotic base for pleasure in looking at another person as an object' 'pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight'
2. 'producing for [the audience] a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy'
3. conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator the illusion of looking in on a private world'
4. develops scopophilia in a narcissistic sense - child imagines mirror image to be more complete than actual body according to Jacques Lacan, 'misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego', ;the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego'
5. hence pleasure can also come from 'identification with the image seen'

How this is affected by gender: 

• pleasure in looking has always been split between male/active and female/passive'
• women have a 'traditionally exhibitionist role' where they're 'simultaneously looked at and displayed'
• 'the determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure'
• women's appearance is strongly coded with to be looked-at-ness
• 'she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire'
• 'her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line'
• traditionally the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: for characters with story and for audience
• 'according to the principles of the ruling ideology... the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual identification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like'
• 'as the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto tht of his like'
• 'the controlling male gaze within the screen scene'

Summary:

'The image of a woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of the man'

'woman as representation signifies castration inducing fetishistic or voyeuristic mechanisms to circumvent her threat'

'the satisfaction, the pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest''

The Grotesque: The Critical Idiom

edited by John D. Jump

• pg38 'associated with caricature'
• pg22 'the grotesque is extravagant'
• pg 61 'the essential paradox of the grotesque: that is is both liberating and tension producing'
• pg 32 'the bizarre... lacks the disturbing quality of the grotesque' kayser

Jean Baudrillard

• telly developing new 'cold' universe of communication
• tv screen keeps subject in a position of alienation
• plentitude offered through changing of texts but is forever defferrred
• the faustian, promethean  period of production and consumption' has given way to 'the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact continuity feedbaxk and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication'
• the whole earlier 'intimate' universe with its domestic scene, interiority, private space time correlative to a public space is all disappearing
• instead 'there is a screen and a network'

Whose imaginary? The televisual apparatus, the female body and textual stratergies in select rock videos on mtv by E. Ann Kaplan

Female Spectators: Looking at film and tv

verso

second edition 1990

Romantic Readings of Hamlet

William Hazlitt 'He is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is no harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes'

Romanticized image of Hamlet as idealised poet

Hamlet's soul too sensitive for the world

William Richardson

• 'he is moved by finer principles, by an exquisite sense of virtue, of moral beauty and turpitude... Gertude's behaviour...cast him into utter agony'
• Hamlet discovering moral depravity in his parentis painful and bitter
• Struggles for utterance
• desires deliverance for painful existence
• Respect for father and inability to revenge comes from Hamlet's virtue
• conflict between Hamlet's parents as the source of Hamlet's moral confusion
• mind falling apart
• Hamlet restores to Gertrude a sense of her own depravity
• abhorrence of the appearance of inhuman actions makes him distrustful of everyone including himself
• his inner virtue cannot succeed in a fallen world

solipsistic prince, inward looking play


contradictions not inconsistencies of narrative but complexity of character

 Henry Mackenzie

• hamelt is 'gay and jocular' whilst in the 'gloom of deepest melancholy'
• 'described as a passionate lover but seems indifferent to the object of his affections'
• basis of his character in his 'extreme sensibility of mind'
• play about the development of Hamlet's mind rather than plot

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship - Goethe

1. 'the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it'
2. strength of nerve makes a hero
3. 'the present is too hard'
4. Hamlets is 'lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature'
5. 'impossibilities required of him' not impossible, but impossible for him to do them
6. loses all purpose from his thoughts without recovering his peace of mind

Schlegel

• Hamlet as inherently flawed, weak character
• calculating consideration shown to cripple action
• 'He has a natural affinity towards... artifice and dissimulation'
• 'he is a hypocrite towards himself'
• 'too much overwhelmed in his won sorrow to have any compassion for others'
• 'has no firm belief in either himself or anything else'
• 'criminals are at last punished... by accidental blow'
• Hamlet is 'out of joint' and therefore a man of his time'
• Hamlet's lack of convictions it what causes his failure to act

Coleridge

• exteriors only interesting when reflected in Hamlet's mind
• placed in the most stimulating of circumstances
• perpetual solicitation of the mind to act
• 'aversion to action which prevails amongst those who have a world within themselves'
• hamlet like poet's understanding of external phenomena is the result of self-reflection
• 'deeply acquainted with own feelings'
• popularity of the play because Hamlet is an everyman

Critical viewpoints on Pride and Prejudice

'There are always reasons for loving in Pride and Prejudice, and Elizabeth loves for the best reasons'

'There is a heroine, there is a hero and there is an obstacle. The obstacle is money.'

'The novel rushes to a happy ending'

'And when Austen wasn’t slicing up the men, she was defining women into tribes (long before the Spice Girls): the pretty, the funny, the clever, the bookish, the bold.'

'Austen descripts how money rules society.'                                                    Victoria Lambert

'Pride and Prejudice shows the reader the results of poor parenting'

'In Pride and Prejudice, Austen's satire is always tinged with cruelty'

'Although the manners of the society depicted in Pride and Prejudice are highly formal, we still learn plenty about the character's emotional lives'

‘We learn most about the characters in Pride and Prejudice when they meet on social occasions.’

‘The restraints that society imposes are felt as sharply by the male as the female characters'

It 'is too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade'

‘Laughter in Pride and Prejudice takes different forms and provides a variety of functions'

'Although much of what happens could have disturbing, even tragic consequences, disasters are successfully averted'

Hamlet Without Hamlet

by Margareta de Grazia

• Real crux of the play is that Hamlet is disposed - this is viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the courts
• in a hereditary monarchy like England this would be unthinkable
• (maybe Hamlet's behaviour is so unfitting to a royal prince because he feels dispossesed)
• 'For I must hold my tongue'
• If he protested would be guilty of treason
• Claudius 'popp'd in between th'election and my hopes' 5.2.65
• Under antic disposition Hamlet no longer needs to hold his tongue
• refers to self as 'naked' and 'alone'
• he refers to himself in terms of lack - thankless beggar,trapped prisoner, hollow reed
• importance of land
• gionzago and lucianus fight over the 'bank of flowers' or the 'estate'
• Laertes and Hamlet fight over flower strewn pit of Ophelia's grave
• Flesh and earth linked like Adam when Hamlet says 'piece of work' (2.2.303) and 'quintessence of dust' (2.2.308)
• 'scholarship has been content to treat the plot as an inert backdrop to the main character'
• (Perhaps Hamlet delays because he can do nothing, stripped of all his power etc)
• Heraldry - Pyrrhus, Laertes calls for heraldic panel after father's death, allusions to classical and biblical women (Niobe, Hecuba, Jepthath's daughter) relating to cutting off of progeny or lineage
• Hamme early german word for home
• hamlet is a cluster of homes: a kingdom in miniature

Kronborg Castle, Denmark

• 'identified with the beginning of the modern age'
• depends on Senecan formula of murder, madness and revenge
• 'in the first decades of the play Hamlet's signature action may have been not paralysing thought but frenzied motion'
• plays pipes and dances jig after success of play, leaping into Ophelia's grave
• hyperactivity linked with 'roustabout clown of medieval folk tradition'
• Pope compared Shakespeare's word to 'an ancient, majestic piece of Gothick architecture'
• Thomas Robertson 'Hamelt in his sole person, predominating over and almost eclipsing the entire action of the drama'
• Coleridge sees 'Shakespeare as heaping one provocation after another in order to dramatize his protagonist's utter indifference to them'
• what need for plot/action 'among such as have a world within themselves'
• Hamlet's inwardness a dramatical counterpart of Martin Luther's 'introversion' of the soul upon itself/turning faith inwards
• Hamlet's anachronistic futurity

• Before Freud Hamlet had been compared to Orestes rather than Oedipus
• For Freud Hamlet's conflict is unconscious rather than conscious
• Jacques Lacan 'From one end of the play to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning'
• Hamlet's problems one of modern society - the truncated and furtive rites of mourning in the play - King Hamlet's death without final unction, Polonius's 'hugger mugger' bburial, Ophelia's abbreviated service
• Present abandonment of rites and ceremonies which compensated loss
• Death when not repaired by rituals triggers the male 'scar of castration' which mourner tries to fix with imaginary projections or mirages
• Nicolas Abraham - Hamlet's guilt in father's crimes but because of appending of sixth act where revealed tha Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras wih poisoned sword - 'phantom effect'

• Horatio to grounded in 'scholar' knowledge' to speak to ghost properly
• Harold Bloom thinks play reveals the 'internalization of the self'

• death as great leveller - discussion of class in graveyard
• more desirable to buried in a church
• plague meant problems with consecrated ground
• labourers descendants of adam
• shovels might have recalled protests against land enclosures
• gravediggers lack of respect for those who were higher than him in life
• hamlet realising own position as well as criticising court
• hamlet  on 'receiving end of antic disposition'

Metz's Film Theory

• Metz believed film should be regarded as a language - organizes and encodes material in accordance with a set of cultural conventions
• addressed two problems: determining artifice which qualifies cinema as a language, distinguishing features of films that were common and on which a classification system could be based 

The cinema: langue or langage?

• Langue as spoken and written in linguistic sense, langage as broader term for signs of communication

Used Martinet's Theory:

• language is distinguished form less systematic communicative modes by 'double articulation'
• any linguistic utterance can be analysed into smaller

Bazin's Theory of Film Language

'The Evolution of the Language of Cinema' Written when the artistic prestige of Hollywood had reached an all time low

• rejected the typical antithesis of silent vs sound cinema
• Thought there were 'directors who believe in image and those who believe in reality'
• former favoured montage to allow them to impose an interpretation of the events they portrayed
• Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Griffith
• the other would use long takes that preserved as far as possible the unity of time and space to disengage the 'deep structures' of reality and to bring out 'pre existing relations'
• Welles, von Stronheim, Jean Renoir
• in his opinion film should be evaluated 'according not to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it'
• Called for aesthetic that would preserve the continuity of experience
• Condemned trick effects such as expressionistic devices and low angle shots
• image should ideally produce an objective record of reality rather than the illusion of realism by means of a network of signs
• need to enlist artifice to give the illusion of transparency generated a creative tension that was crucial
• true mimesis would result in flat and unheightened naturalism
• 'Realism in art can only be achieved only in one way -artifice'
• ideally wanted cinematographic image to be an objective record
• 'there is not one but several realisms'

Significance:

• Broke out of the dogma that film had gone into irremediable decline
• realism not as a symptom of degenracy but as a medium of expression which one could achieve artistic excellence
• influence on Metz

Anti-Bazin Position:

• related to the philosophy of Personalism
• His criterion of reality was of harmony and unitary - based as much on ideological premises as those that pictured the world as discordant and contradictory that he rejected
• Bazin denying that film is a culturally determined language system
• Saw Relationship between signified and signifier was intimate and existential not arbitrary
• analogies between death masks or fingerprints with photography
• naively optimistic in thinking that cinema was evolving towards perfection
• Contradiction in his ideas that he stressed the actuality rather than the ideal
• inability to resolve the contradiction between film as a record of reality and as a producer of meaning