Modern Languages and Literatures

In her study of gender and agency in American film and television, Kathleen Rowe argues that film "melodrama and comedy are linked by common ideologies that limit the plots available for narrative representations of female desire" (1995, 14). In melodrama, Rowe writes, the female protagonist can gain temporary agency only via suffering and self-sacrifice. In romantic comedy, the heroine exercises greater control over the narrative, but is eventually tamed by the male lead. Both classical Hollywood genres reassert patriarchal status quo. In contrast to these genres, the female-centered situation comedy, such as I Love Lucy, is a postmodern open-ended genre that spoofs "the tropes of masculinity and patriotism" and threatens the sanctity of social institutions (Rowe 1995, 53). Following Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Francois Rabelais and carnival in early modern Europe and Natalie Zemon Davis's analysis of popular culture and gender in early modern France, 1 Rowe contends that screen formats privileging the female comedian embody the genre memory of the unruly woman tradition and can be traced back to early modern European culture of carnival. Like the unruly woman of street carnival and Renaissance novel, female comedians disrupt ideological and narrative continuity of genres maintaining the patriarchal status quo. In our chapter we argue that the female comedian emerges in Soviet cinema but becomes a true visual icon in post-Soviet television. In particular, we focus on this character's ability to challenge the patriarchal powers that constrain female characters. We do not aspire to write an exhaustive history of the female comedian in Russian screen genres of laughter. Rather, we set out to investigate the growing role of such a character-whom, following Rowe's definition, we call "the spectacle-making unruly woman" (1995, 4)-in late socialist melodrama and the post-Soviet sitcom. Drawing on the works of Bakhtin and Davis, Rowe contends that "the topos of the unruly woman. .. reverberates whenever women disrupt the norms of femininity and the social hierarchy of male over female through excess and outrageousness" (1995, 31). The unruly "woman on top" creates disorder by attempting to dominate men. Her body is excessive and she refuses to control her physical and sexual appetites; she is loud; jokes; mocks men, and laughs at them. The unruly woman's behavior is often perceived by Un/Taming the Unruly Woman

Social satire and fantasy films were an implicit affront to Soviet convention. Concurrently, these genres have always given more freedom to filmmakers vis-à-vis censorship. In the late sixties, Soviet filmmakers devised a subversive means to reevaluate the social norms of late Soviet culture, particularly during the Stagnation era: they used doubling—the hero–antihero duo—to demonstrate the discrepancy between positive and negative, between the proclaimed norm and its antithesis. This chapter examines Pavel Arsenov’s King Stag (Korol’ olen’ 1969), Nadezhda Kosheverova’s Shadow (Ten’ 1971), Leonid Gaidai’s Ivan Vasil’evich: Back to the Future (Ivan Vasil’evich meniaet professiiu 1973), and Aleksandr Seryi’s Gentlemen of Fortune (Dzhentl’meny udachi 1971) and Quid Pro Quo (Ty – mne, ia – tebe 1976). If earlier films had portrayed characters in a more straightforward manner, with such characters possessing either immutable negative or positive attributes, these later films would center around a hero–antihero pairing, neither of whom were entirely good nor bad. In these films, identity proves capable of change; character is not restricted to a single, constant state.

BACKGROUND By 1996 the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, like many other Slavic departments in the country, had experienced a significant decline in both the number of Russian language majors and overall enrollments in our language classes. On the other hand, in addition to Russian and other Slavic languages, our Department had a long history of teaching Russian literature and Russian culture in English, and these courses had always proven popular among undergraduate students seeking to satisfy one or another of the University's general education requirements. Because we identified general education as a successful but still underutilized area where a Slavic department can play a significant and visible role in a post-cold-war university, one of our faculty proposed that we expand on our generaleducation successes by offering a new course in what for us was a non-traditional area: Russian Fairy Tales. In order to maximize the number and range of students who might enroll, this new course would have no prerequisites and would strive to accommodate even incoming freshmen with no prior training or preparation. Although one principal motivation underlying the development of this course was the expectation that expanding our Department's role in the undergraduate curriculum would serve the important educational mission of making Russian culture more widely available and accessible to the University community in general, two other considerations also influenced our planning. First, we hoped that offering a new and potentially

My dissertation argues that while Thaw cultural producers believed that they had abandoned Stalinist cultural practices, their works continued to generate, in revised form, the major tropes of Stalinist culture: the positive hero, and family and war tropes. Although the cultural Thaw of the 1950s and 60s embraced new values, it merely reworked Stalinist artistic practices. On the basis of literary and cinematic texts, I examine how these two media reinstantiated the fundamental tropes of Russo-Soviet culture.In the first two chapters, I discuss approaches to Thaw literature and film in Western and Soviet scholarship, and my methodology, which is best defined as cultural semiotics. Chapter Three discusses the instantiations of the positive hero in Thaw literature and film. As case studies I adduce Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Grigorii Kozintsev's film adaptation of Hamlet (1964). The fourth chapter examines how Thaw culture redefines the family and war tropes i...

WHY ARE FAGGOTS SO AFRAID OF FAGGOTS? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform [Paperback] ISBN-10: 1-84935-088-4; ISBN-13: 978-1-84935-088-4 (232 pages); © 2012 AK Press | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED | 674A 23RD ST OAKLAND CA 94162 USA | +1.510.208.1700 | akpress.org.

An Anthology of Critical & Creative Essays on Queer Counterculture Reform, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (cf. http://mattildabernsteinsycamore.com/ ; etc.) and feat. "IT GETS BETTER?" (Sycamore 115-122, 207) : a creative personal history essay, by Matthew D. Blanchard (cf. http://gplus.to/matthewblanchard ; etc.).

'Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention!'

— Product Description. 'Amazon.com: Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (9781849350884): Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: Books,' Amazon.com. Amazon.com, Inc. 2011; http://amzn.to/FaggotsAfraid (accessed: 01 Oct. 2011).

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s allegoric representation of the nihilistic religiosity of the anti-heroic actions and character of the eponymous protagonist in Accattone (1961) fully distinguishes this particular filmmaker’s literary style from the more objective sociocultural lens of the neorealismo genre and brings the film to a poetic level far superior to that of its predecessors. While Pasolini has chosen, with Accattone, to focus on subject matter typical of the Neorealist tradition in cinema, the manner in which the filmmaker incorporates the strikingly allegoric religiosity of his poetic style into a socio-cinematic analysis of the urban marginalization and disenfranchisement of his characters allows Pasolini to push well beyond the socio-historical boundaries of the neorealist gaze and to begin to interpret more fully the spiritual nature of Man.

ORIGINAL DRAFT : Written by Matthew D. Blanchard, on 20 DEC 2002. FINAL REVISED-DRAFT : Copy-Edited for Publication by Author, on 21 NOV. 2013.

To cite this article: Jorge Terukina-Yamauchi (2017) Entre los 'hierros del culteranismo' y unos 'poetas satíricos populares y democráticos': Ricardo Palma, Juan del Valle Caviedes y la invención de la nación peruana, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 94:2, 285-319,

Honorable Mention, Premio Roggiano de la Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, June 2018.
Awarded by the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana (IILI) to an outstanding scholarly monograph on Latin American Literature & Culture published in Spanish or Portuguese during 2016 and 2017.

Aunque la imagen del Paraíso terrenal en la Sumaria relación (c. 1604) del criollo Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza ha sido valorada como un esfuerzo por dotar la naturaleza novohispana de un aspecto “maravilloso” que promovería la creación artística y literaria, estas líneas analizan el Edén como elemento esencial en la validación de las aspiraciones socio-económicas de los criollos. Utilizando el „pensamiento económico‟ aristotélico que circula en las universidades del Atlántico hispánico de la temprana modernidad, estas líneas proponen que Dorantes de Carranza presenta el virreinato novohispano como un Edén pre-lapsario en el que, como se indica en el Génesis, la naturaleza es espontáneamente hiperproductiva y generosa, por lo que el trabajo manual, el comercio y el dinero son innecesarios. Como consecuencia de ello, Dorantes de Carranza valida las expectativas de unos criollos hidalgos que, reñidos con la labor manual, aspiran a recibir estas tierras edénicas como recompensa por los servicios militares de sus antepasados. Al mismo tiempo, esta equivalencia con el Edén le permite a Dorantes de Carranza impugnar la acumulación de dinero por parte de unos falsos y moralmente ímprobos “reciénvenidos” (recientes inmigrantes peninsulares) dedicados al comercio y a oficios “bajos”. Como corolario, la representación del virreinato como Paraíso terrenal apoya también las aspiraciones de los criollos a encomiendas perpetuas que, de ser concedidas, no generarían la excesiva labor sobre la población indígena que denunciara Bartolomé de Las Casas en el XVI.

por su generoso apoyo y sus sugerencias en la etapa inicial de este proyecto, y al equipo de evaluadores del Bulletin of Spanish Studies, y a Lesley Wylie, Assistant Editor, por sus agudas y generosas sugerencias en la etapa final. Huelga recordar que las carencias de este trabajo son exclusiva responsabilidad mía. 1 Antonio Cornejo Polar, 'Ajenidad y apropiación nacional de las letras coloniales: reflexiones sobre el caso peruano', en Crítica y descolonización: el sujeto colonial en la cultura latinoamericana, ed. Beatriz González Stephan & Lúcia Helena Costigan (Caracas: Univ. Simón Bolívar/Ohio State Univ., 1992), 597-606 (p. 602).

El Libro de ajedrez alfonsí forma parte del códice Libro de los juegos de ajedrez, dados y tablas, 1 custodiado en la Biblioteca de El Escorial. El códice está completo, terminado en 1283, y contiene además del Libro de ajedrez, dos tratados, uno dedicado a los dados, y el otro, a las tablas. El Libro de ajedrez incluye unas 103 de las 150 miniaturas que se encuentran en el códice. La mayoría de estas imágenes se encuentran en la parte superior del folio, salvo algunas más centradas e incluso otras que ocupan toda una página.