Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality The 'invisibility' of heterosexuality as... more Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality The 'invisibility' of heterosexuality as a normative category of identity is a recurring motif in recent work on heterosexuality; its ' "unmarked" and "naturalised" ' 1 status is understood as serving to perpetuate its power as an identity which tends to be taken for granted and to pass unquestioned. Indeed, as Linda Schlossberg puts it, 'heterosexual culture continually passes itself off as being merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm [emphasis added].' 2 Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction aims to contribute to what Richard Johnson has described as the 'impetus to render heterosexuality visible to critical scrutiny'. 3 Heterosexuality as an institution continues to have immense normative power; while this power impacts most explicitly on non-heterosexual identities it also extends to heterosexual identities which do not conform to familial, marital or reproductive norms-norms which have a particular impact on female identities, the principal concern of this book. Drawing on feminist and queer theories of sex, gender and sexuality, Rereading Heterosexuality takes as its distinctive focus the representation of female identities at odds with heterosexual norms; more specifi cally, it explores representations which serve to question the conventional equation between heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female identity. In this context, it will offer close readings of six novels published by British and American
Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Iri... more Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical fiction based on the life of a nineteenth-century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000), a rewriting of the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the first person to undergo gender reassignment treatment. A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives – whether historical or fictional – have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropria...
The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attrac... more The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attracted significant public debate in recent years. In this context, this article revisits a critically overlooked British film adaptation featuring a woman of African origin as a protagonist in a drama set in Victorian England. The Sailor’s Return (1978), directed by Jack Gold, is an adaptation of a historical fiction written by David Garnett and first published in 1925. This article aims to situate the novel and its adaptation in three important contexts: set in rural Dorset in 1858, the narrative can be considered in the context of Victorian attitudes to people of African origin; written by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, the novel is informed by modernist perspectives on the legacies of the Victorian era; broadcast to a popular audience in the late 1970s, the film can be located in a politically progressive tradition of British television drama. Approached in this way, this multiply me...
This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting. This is now the final o... more This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting. This is now the final opportunity to review your text and amend it prior to publication. Any queries about the text have been inserted using Comment boxes in the Word files. Please answer these queries in your corrections. Once you have responded to a query, you can delete the comment. When making your corrections, please consider the following: • Make sure Track Changes is turned on-this allows us to keep an accurate file history record for the book. • Please do not change the formatting styles used in this file-if a piece of text has been styled incorrectly, please alert your Editor about this by using a Comment box. • To see the changes that have already been made, use the 'Final Showing Mark-up' view. To hide this and just see the final version, use the 'Final' view (in the Review tab). • Edit and return this file, please do not copy/paste anything into a new document. Thank you for your cooperation .
Adaptation in contemporary culture: textual …, 2009
CHAPTER FOUR Affecting Fidelity: Adaptation, Fidelity and Affect in Todd Haynes's Far From H... more CHAPTER FOUR Affecting Fidelity: Adaptation, Fidelity and Affect in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven RACHEL CARROLL Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been widely construed as a contemporary auteur's tribute to Douglas Sirk's 1955 'women's picture'All That ...
Released in a period in which the rights and representation of transgender people were attaining ... more Released in a period in which the rights and representation of transgender people were attaining an unprecedented visibility in the mainstream media and popular culture, the film adaptations examined in this chapter offer sympathetic portraits of their subjects but demonstrate an uneven engagement with contemporary understandings of transgender identity. The significant expansion of Hubert Page’s character in the 2011 adaptation of George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918), achieved through the vehicle of marriage, implicitly validates his masculinity. By contrast, the protracted demise of the marriage between Einar Wegener and Gerda Gottlieb occupies the dramatic centre of the 2016 adaptation of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl (2000), rather than Lili Elbe’s premature death. The prominence of marriage within these film adaptations of twentieth-century texts will be considered in the context of contemporary debates about LGBT activism and neoliberal politics.
A range of pedagogic, disciplinary and institutional factors can be inform the construction of a ... more A range of pedagogic, disciplinary and institutional factors can be inform the construction of a curriculum for a course on film and television adaptations; among these factors, the availability of published scholarship on the set texts (whether literary, film or television) may be a key concern for tutors, students and validating committees alike. These pressures might mean that in some circumstances those adaptations which have attracted significant academic interest are more likely to be adopted than those which have been overlooked, and in this way emerging canons can become self-perpetuating. Of course, the very notion of the canon has been critically contested and its potential complicity in hierarchies of cultural power and value interrogated, especially in relation to gender, class and race. However, questions of canon persist, and perhaps especially so when a field of study is relatively new and where the existence of a demonstrable canon might be seen as a necessary condition for disciplinary credibility. In this context it may seem perverse to focus on adaptations which, by definition, offer no supporting critical apparatus. This chapter seeks to explore the value and benefits of teaching contemporaneous adaptations, by which I mean film or television adaptations whose release or broadcast is concurrent with the delivery of the teaching programme; it will do so through a focus on a specific case study in pedagogic practice -an active learning strategy presented under the title of 'Adaptation Watch'. i Students participating in the Adaptation Watch exercise are asked to monitor the discourses of publicity and reception which precede and follow a film or television adaptation whose broadcast or release is concurrent with the course of the module. Working independently, both as individuals and in small groups, students gather and collate evidence from a range of sourceswhether print, broadcast or online -including previews, reviews, interviews, trailers, posters, prizes, awards and merchandising; this material then forms the basis of group discussion. Significantly, for this task students are not required or expected to read the source text, as is standard pedagogic practice where adaptations are concerned; here the emphasis is placed on the televisual, cinematic and critical contexts in which film and television adaptations are produced and consumed. This task has been employed in two contexts, both taking the form of final year option modules offered within an English Honours programme at a UK University. ii The first context is a module dedicated to the study of film and television adaptations which aims to explore the key critical, contextual and historical contexts in which adaptation as a cultural practice can be understood. In this context the Adaptation Watch task is an integral part of a teaching programme which also incorporates the close comparative analysis of a selection of film and television adaptations and their source texts. The second context is a module on twenty first century literary culture which aims to examine the changing conditions of literary production, consumption and reception and their impact on books as a cultural form, authorship as a conceptual category and reading as a collective experience; in this context film and television adaptations are studied alongside topics including literary prize culture, book clubs and reading groups, public reading events, celebrity authorship and literary biopics.
'After years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the m... more 'After years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the move.' 1 So writes Thomas Leitch in a review article in the first issue of the new journal Adaptation. And since, as Leitch argues, 'adaptation study has stood apart from the main ...
... DeLillo's White Noise and Todd Haynes's Safe Rachel Carroll Lawren... more ... DeLillo's White Noise and Todd Haynes's Safe Rachel Carroll Lawrence Buell has noted the emergence of toxicity as a widely shared paradigm of cultural self-identification and of toxic discourse as a commensurately influential ...
Three words. Three difficulties." In this way Christine Brooke-Rose reflected on the condition of... more Three words. Three difficulties." In this way Christine Brooke-Rose reflected on the condition of being an 'experimental woman writer' in her essay "Illiterations", published in Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs's landmark collection, Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction (1989). To these three 'difficulties' we may now add a fourth: the contemporary. What is 'the contemporary'? Where does it begin and when will it end? What is the value of the contemporary as a historicising concept? What are the uses of the contemporary as a marketing category? What are the implications of the contemporary for the visibility -or otherwise -of experimental writing by women authors? This article will seek to provide some frameworks for thinking critically about the construction of contemporary literary fiction. With a focus on the emerging profile of Chris Kraus, an American writer, film-maker and academic whose non-fiction novels combine life writing, art theory and critical reflections on neo-liberal economics and post 9/11 politics, it will examine the convergence of some distinctive enabling conditions for contemporary experimental women's writing: a mutually supporting proximity between academia and experimental writing; a relatively autonomous network of production and reception; and an understanding of writing as an art practice rather than a branch of literary production. The article will suggest that the 'contemporary' should be understood as more than a mere marker of the present; it will argue that the 'difficulties' prompted by the contemporary as a category of literary analysis can be seen as productive for reflecting on the history and future of women's writing.
In Julian Barnes's 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, the discovery of ... more In Julian Barnes's 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, the discovery of a forgotten letter prompts the narrator, Tony Webster, to reconsider the suicide of a brilliant school friend, Adrian Finn. The dramatic revelation of the existence of Finn's adult son (also called Adrian), borne of an extra-marital affair with his girlfriend's mother, is presented as offering a possible answer to the mystery of Finn's death. In this context, this article seeks to examine the representation of Finn's adult son as a person with a learning disability. In their book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse , David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder critically examine the uses to which disability is put in narrative; this article will focus on the ways in which cognitive impairment is constructed in this novel. Depictions of disability in The Sense of an Ending will be situated within the context of representations of heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female sexuality; employing critical frameworks informed by both feminist and disability studies, this article will investigate the relationship between disability, maternal sexual transgression and discourses of normativity as represented in Barnes's novel.
Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality The 'invisibility' of heterosexuality as... more Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality The 'invisibility' of heterosexuality as a normative category of identity is a recurring motif in recent work on heterosexuality; its ' "unmarked" and "naturalised" ' 1 status is understood as serving to perpetuate its power as an identity which tends to be taken for granted and to pass unquestioned. Indeed, as Linda Schlossberg puts it, 'heterosexual culture continually passes itself off as being merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm [emphasis added].' 2 Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction aims to contribute to what Richard Johnson has described as the 'impetus to render heterosexuality visible to critical scrutiny'. 3 Heterosexuality as an institution continues to have immense normative power; while this power impacts most explicitly on non-heterosexual identities it also extends to heterosexual identities which do not conform to familial, marital or reproductive norms-norms which have a particular impact on female identities, the principal concern of this book. Drawing on feminist and queer theories of sex, gender and sexuality, Rereading Heterosexuality takes as its distinctive focus the representation of female identities at odds with heterosexual norms; more specifi cally, it explores representations which serve to question the conventional equation between heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female identity. In this context, it will offer close readings of six novels published by British and American
Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Iri... more Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical fiction based on the life of a nineteenth-century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000), a rewriting of the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the first person to undergo gender reassignment treatment. A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives – whether historical or fictional – have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropria...
The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attrac... more The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attracted significant public debate in recent years. In this context, this article revisits a critically overlooked British film adaptation featuring a woman of African origin as a protagonist in a drama set in Victorian England. The Sailor’s Return (1978), directed by Jack Gold, is an adaptation of a historical fiction written by David Garnett and first published in 1925. This article aims to situate the novel and its adaptation in three important contexts: set in rural Dorset in 1858, the narrative can be considered in the context of Victorian attitudes to people of African origin; written by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, the novel is informed by modernist perspectives on the legacies of the Victorian era; broadcast to a popular audience in the late 1970s, the film can be located in a politically progressive tradition of British television drama. Approached in this way, this multiply me...
This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting. This is now the final o... more This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting. This is now the final opportunity to review your text and amend it prior to publication. Any queries about the text have been inserted using Comment boxes in the Word files. Please answer these queries in your corrections. Once you have responded to a query, you can delete the comment. When making your corrections, please consider the following: • Make sure Track Changes is turned on-this allows us to keep an accurate file history record for the book. • Please do not change the formatting styles used in this file-if a piece of text has been styled incorrectly, please alert your Editor about this by using a Comment box. • To see the changes that have already been made, use the 'Final Showing Mark-up' view. To hide this and just see the final version, use the 'Final' view (in the Review tab). • Edit and return this file, please do not copy/paste anything into a new document. Thank you for your cooperation .
Adaptation in contemporary culture: textual …, 2009
CHAPTER FOUR Affecting Fidelity: Adaptation, Fidelity and Affect in Todd Haynes's Far From H... more CHAPTER FOUR Affecting Fidelity: Adaptation, Fidelity and Affect in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven RACHEL CARROLL Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been widely construed as a contemporary auteur's tribute to Douglas Sirk's 1955 'women's picture'All That ...
Released in a period in which the rights and representation of transgender people were attaining ... more Released in a period in which the rights and representation of transgender people were attaining an unprecedented visibility in the mainstream media and popular culture, the film adaptations examined in this chapter offer sympathetic portraits of their subjects but demonstrate an uneven engagement with contemporary understandings of transgender identity. The significant expansion of Hubert Page’s character in the 2011 adaptation of George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918), achieved through the vehicle of marriage, implicitly validates his masculinity. By contrast, the protracted demise of the marriage between Einar Wegener and Gerda Gottlieb occupies the dramatic centre of the 2016 adaptation of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl (2000), rather than Lili Elbe’s premature death. The prominence of marriage within these film adaptations of twentieth-century texts will be considered in the context of contemporary debates about LGBT activism and neoliberal politics.
A range of pedagogic, disciplinary and institutional factors can be inform the construction of a ... more A range of pedagogic, disciplinary and institutional factors can be inform the construction of a curriculum for a course on film and television adaptations; among these factors, the availability of published scholarship on the set texts (whether literary, film or television) may be a key concern for tutors, students and validating committees alike. These pressures might mean that in some circumstances those adaptations which have attracted significant academic interest are more likely to be adopted than those which have been overlooked, and in this way emerging canons can become self-perpetuating. Of course, the very notion of the canon has been critically contested and its potential complicity in hierarchies of cultural power and value interrogated, especially in relation to gender, class and race. However, questions of canon persist, and perhaps especially so when a field of study is relatively new and where the existence of a demonstrable canon might be seen as a necessary condition for disciplinary credibility. In this context it may seem perverse to focus on adaptations which, by definition, offer no supporting critical apparatus. This chapter seeks to explore the value and benefits of teaching contemporaneous adaptations, by which I mean film or television adaptations whose release or broadcast is concurrent with the delivery of the teaching programme; it will do so through a focus on a specific case study in pedagogic practice -an active learning strategy presented under the title of 'Adaptation Watch'. i Students participating in the Adaptation Watch exercise are asked to monitor the discourses of publicity and reception which precede and follow a film or television adaptation whose broadcast or release is concurrent with the course of the module. Working independently, both as individuals and in small groups, students gather and collate evidence from a range of sourceswhether print, broadcast or online -including previews, reviews, interviews, trailers, posters, prizes, awards and merchandising; this material then forms the basis of group discussion. Significantly, for this task students are not required or expected to read the source text, as is standard pedagogic practice where adaptations are concerned; here the emphasis is placed on the televisual, cinematic and critical contexts in which film and television adaptations are produced and consumed. This task has been employed in two contexts, both taking the form of final year option modules offered within an English Honours programme at a UK University. ii The first context is a module dedicated to the study of film and television adaptations which aims to explore the key critical, contextual and historical contexts in which adaptation as a cultural practice can be understood. In this context the Adaptation Watch task is an integral part of a teaching programme which also incorporates the close comparative analysis of a selection of film and television adaptations and their source texts. The second context is a module on twenty first century literary culture which aims to examine the changing conditions of literary production, consumption and reception and their impact on books as a cultural form, authorship as a conceptual category and reading as a collective experience; in this context film and television adaptations are studied alongside topics including literary prize culture, book clubs and reading groups, public reading events, celebrity authorship and literary biopics.
'After years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the m... more 'After years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the move.' 1 So writes Thomas Leitch in a review article in the first issue of the new journal Adaptation. And since, as Leitch argues, 'adaptation study has stood apart from the main ...
... DeLillo's White Noise and Todd Haynes's Safe Rachel Carroll Lawren... more ... DeLillo's White Noise and Todd Haynes's Safe Rachel Carroll Lawrence Buell has noted the emergence of toxicity as a widely shared paradigm of cultural self-identification and of toxic discourse as a commensurately influential ...
Three words. Three difficulties." In this way Christine Brooke-Rose reflected on the condition of... more Three words. Three difficulties." In this way Christine Brooke-Rose reflected on the condition of being an 'experimental woman writer' in her essay "Illiterations", published in Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs's landmark collection, Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction (1989). To these three 'difficulties' we may now add a fourth: the contemporary. What is 'the contemporary'? Where does it begin and when will it end? What is the value of the contemporary as a historicising concept? What are the uses of the contemporary as a marketing category? What are the implications of the contemporary for the visibility -or otherwise -of experimental writing by women authors? This article will seek to provide some frameworks for thinking critically about the construction of contemporary literary fiction. With a focus on the emerging profile of Chris Kraus, an American writer, film-maker and academic whose non-fiction novels combine life writing, art theory and critical reflections on neo-liberal economics and post 9/11 politics, it will examine the convergence of some distinctive enabling conditions for contemporary experimental women's writing: a mutually supporting proximity between academia and experimental writing; a relatively autonomous network of production and reception; and an understanding of writing as an art practice rather than a branch of literary production. The article will suggest that the 'contemporary' should be understood as more than a mere marker of the present; it will argue that the 'difficulties' prompted by the contemporary as a category of literary analysis can be seen as productive for reflecting on the history and future of women's writing.
In Julian Barnes's 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, the discovery of ... more In Julian Barnes's 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, the discovery of a forgotten letter prompts the narrator, Tony Webster, to reconsider the suicide of a brilliant school friend, Adrian Finn. The dramatic revelation of the existence of Finn's adult son (also called Adrian), borne of an extra-marital affair with his girlfriend's mother, is presented as offering a possible answer to the mystery of Finn's death. In this context, this article seeks to examine the representation of Finn's adult son as a person with a learning disability. In their book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse , David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder critically examine the uses to which disability is put in narrative; this article will focus on the ways in which cognitive impairment is constructed in this novel. Depictions of disability in The Sense of an Ending will be situated within the context of representations of heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female sexuality; employing critical frameworks informed by both feminist and disability studies, this article will investigate the relationship between disability, maternal sexual transgression and discourses of normativity as represented in Barnes's novel.
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