Awakening through Literature and Film

Awakening through Literature and Film
Author: Jae-seong Lee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527568431

In order to deeply understand a work of literature or film, one requires the emotional and spiritual experience of the sublime aesthetic power, through which one may glimpse the ultimate reality, as well as the thematic approach. This book, mainly from the perspective of literary criticism of postmodern ethics and kongan (koan)/hwadu Ch’an, Seon, and Zen Buddhism, guides the reader to not simply follow the conventional thematic approach, but to catch nondual, spiritual feelings while appreciating a given work. Through a meditative state, the reading or watching of such work would ultimately be a way of questing for spiritual enlightenment.

Intersecting Aesthetics

Intersecting Aesthetics
Author: Charlene Regester
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1496848861

Contributions by Cynthia Baron, Elizabeth Binggeli, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Priscilla Layne, Eric Pierson, Charlene Regester, Ellen C. Scott, Tanya L. Shields, and Judith E. Smith Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness illuminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives. Their work ultimately explores the effects racial perspectives have on film adaptations and how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions. Several chapters analyze how self-censorship and industry censorship affect Black writing and the adaptations of Black stories in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Using archival material, contributors demonstrate the ways commercial obstacles have led Black writers and white-dominated studios to mask Black experiences. Other chapters document instances in which Black writers and directors navigate cultural norms and material realities to realize their visions in literary works, independent films, and studio productions. Through uncovering patterns in Black film adaptations, Intersecting Aesthetics reveals themes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural dynamics that rightfully belong to accounts of film adaptation. The volume considers travelogue and autobiography sources along with the fiction of Black authors H. G. de Lisser, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Frank Yerby, and Walter Mosley. Contributors examine independent films The Love Wanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939); Melvin Van Peebles's first feature, The Story of a Three Day Pass (1967); and the Senegalese film Karmen Geï (2001). They also explore studio-era films In This Our Life (1942), The Foxes of Harrow (1947), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954) and post-studio films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995).

The Awakening of Miss Prim

The Awakening of Miss Prim
Author: Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476734259

In this #1 international bestseller, a young woman leaves everything behind to work as a librarian in a remote French village, where she finds her outlook on life and love challenged in every way. Prudencia Prim is a young woman of intelligence and achievement, with a deep knowledge of literature and several letters after her name. But when she accepts the post of private librarian in the village of San Ireneo de Arnois, she is unprepared for what she encounters there. Her employer, a book-loving intellectual, is dashing yet contrarian, always ready with a critique of her cherished Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. The neighbors, too, are capable of charm and eccentricity in equal measure, determined as they are to preserve their singular little community from the modern world outside. Prudencia hoped for friendship in San Ireneo but she didn't suspect that she might find love—nor that the course of her new life would run quite so rocky or would offer challenge and heartache as well as joy, discovery, and fireside debate. Set against a backdrop of steaming cups of tea, freshly baked cakes, and lovely company, The Awakening of Miss Prim is a distinctive and delightfully entertaining tale of literature, philosophy, and the search for happiness.

Pregnancy in Literature and Film

Pregnancy in Literature and Film
Author: Parley Ann Boswell
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2014-03-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786473665

This exploration of the ways in which pregnancy affects narrative begins with two canonical American texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1848) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Relying on such diverse works as Frankenstein, Peyton Place, Beloved, and I Love Lucy, the book chronicles how pregnancy evolves from a conventional plot device into a mature narrative form. Especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, the pregnancy narrative in fiction and film acts as a lightning rod with the power to electrify all genres of fiction and film, from early melodrama (Way Down East) to noir (Leave Her to Heaven); from horror (Rosemary's Baby) to science fiction and dystopia (Alien, The Handmaid's Tale); and from iconic (Lolita) to independent (Juno, Precious). Ultimately, the pregnancy narrative in popular film and fiction provides a remarkably clear lens by which we can gauge how popular American film and fiction express our most profound--and most private--fears, values and hopes.

The Awakening Imagination

The Awakening Imagination
Author: Michael D. O'Brien
Publisher:
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781951319168

Based on a lecture Michael D. O'Brien gave at the Centre for Faith and Culture, Oxford, this essay traces the long history of mankind's creative imagination throughout millennia of expansion and growth-citing examples that range from cave painting to classical sculpture, the icon and manuscript illumination to film and contemporary literature. The author weaves together his under-standing of numerous significant works of art, philosophical insights, spiritual reflection, and personal stories, which, combined, offer a multi-dimensional vision of our origin and our future. Underlying it all is the question of Man's nature and what our creative powers reveal about our true identity as children of God. O'Brien proposes that a new iconography is waiting for us, one that will be built upon all that the historical imagination has given, but reinvigorated by a rejuvenated Christian consciousness. Humility alone will allow us to find again our proper place in the hierarchy of creation: "In submission to natural and supernatural law," he writes, "to the absolutes, in obedience and prayer, by opening our interior life and the intellectual life to the full authority of the Holy Spirit, we will germinate a little seed. And from it entire forests can spring and may yet cover the earth."

Teaching Literary Theory Using Film Adaptations

Teaching Literary Theory Using Film Adaptations
Author: Kathleen L. Brown
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009-02-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786439335

This volume introduces ways to use film to ease the difficulty of introducing complex literary theories to students. By coupling works of literature with attendant films and with critical essays, the author provides instructors with accessible avenues for encouraging classroom discussion. Literary theories covered in depth are psychoanalytic criticism (The Awakening and film adaptations The End of August and Grand Isle), cultural criticism (A Streetcar Named Desire and its 1951 film version), and thematic criticism ("Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" and the film adaptation Splendor in the Grass). Other theories are used to clarify and support those referred to above. The work then includes a survey of the image patterns into which film adaptation theories can be grouped and how these theories relate to traditional literary theory.

Teaching Character Education Through Literature

Teaching Character Education Through Literature
Author: Karen Bohlin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2005-05-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134354800

Offering guidance to teachers on including character education within their lessons, this book shows how teachers can provide an encounter with literature that enables students to be more responsive to ethical themes and questions.

Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature

Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature
Author: Kwok-kan Tam
Publisher: Chinese University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2010
Genre: Education
ISBN: 962996399X

Critiquing the fictive nature of socially accepted values about gender, the authors unravel the strategies adopted by writers and filmmakers in (de)constructing the gendered self in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Night Passages

Night Passages
Author: Elisabeth Bronfen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231519729

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown.