Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Introduction: The “Preposterous Contemporary Jacobean”: Adaptations in Film and Theater, Responses to Pascale Aebischer

Introduction: The “Preposterous Contemporary Jacobean”: Adaptations in Film and Theater,... University of Guam Pascale Aebischer was among the first scholars to address Mike Figgis's adaptation, in the film Hotel, of John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi. Aebischer proposed an understanding of the "presposterous" contemporary Jacobean film or play text, a "countercinematic" Warburgian Nachleben (afterlife) or adaptation as "cultural cannibalism": anachronistic, narratologically disjointed, and irreverent. The early moderns' anxiety over textual legacy and influence, the monuments and architecture of history, was refracted by late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century directors into Aebischer's "preposterous contemporary Jacobean," a series of works like Hotel, Edward II, The Revengers Tragedy, and Coriolanus, that challenge and complicate the reception of Shakespearean or Websterian work. This category of the preposterous stands in contrast to works such as Shakespeare in Love or Anonymous (2011), a Da Vinci Code-style flowering of sentimentalism, conservatism, conspiracy theories, and contempt for scholarly accuracy. But there are other categories besides that binary. Brigitte Maria Mayer's film installation of her late husband Heinrich Muller's play Anatomie Titus: Fall of Rome foregrounds nonviolence, global vision, femininity and the female voice, and restoration of society, recalling Webster and Theobald's interdisciplinary literary studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Interdisciplinary Literary Studies Penn State University Press

Introduction: The “Preposterous Contemporary Jacobean”: Adaptations in Film and Theater, Responses to Pascale Aebischer

Download PDF
7 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/penn-state-university-press/introduction-the-preposterous-contemporary-jacobean-adaptations-in-2G9Uwa6mTK
Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
2161-427X
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

University of Guam Pascale Aebischer was among the first scholars to address Mike Figgis's adaptation, in the film Hotel, of John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi. Aebischer proposed an understanding of the "presposterous" contemporary Jacobean film or play text, a "countercinematic" Warburgian Nachleben (afterlife) or adaptation as "cultural cannibalism": anachronistic, narratologically disjointed, and irreverent. The early moderns' anxiety over textual legacy and influence, the monuments and architecture of history, was refracted by late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century directors into Aebischer's "preposterous contemporary Jacobean," a series of works like Hotel, Edward II, The Revengers Tragedy, and Coriolanus, that challenge and complicate the reception of Shakespearean or Websterian work. This category of the preposterous stands in contrast to works such as Shakespeare in Love or Anonymous (2011), a Da Vinci Code-style flowering of sentimentalism, conservatism, conspiracy theories, and contempt for scholarly accuracy. But there are other categories besides that binary. Brigitte Maria Mayer's film installation of her late husband Heinrich Muller's play Anatomie Titus: Fall of Rome foregrounds nonviolence, global vision, femininity and the female voice, and restoration of society, recalling Webster and Theobald's interdisciplinary literary studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University,

Journal

Interdisciplinary Literary Studies – Penn State University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2015

There are no references for this article.