Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

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    On Modernizing the Language of Romeo and Juliet for Finnish Teenagers
    (英語學系, 2021-09-??) Nely Keinänen
    This article examines a recent production of Julia and Romeo at the Finnish National Theater (2018) as an example of innovative linguistic adaptation, accomplished through the use of style variations and a touch of rewriting. While most of the FNT Finnish text is based on Marja-Leena Mikkola's poetic translation (WSOY 2006), the dramaturg Anna Viitala, working closely with the director and actors, added a layer of colloquial, teenage language. Features include tiny insertions, such as vou [wow]," okei [OK], and phrases teens use with each other or to annoy their parents. Sometimes a single poetic line is replaced with a shorter and more colloquial speech, framed by much more poetic text. In a larger piece of rewriting, Romeo and Juliet's shared sonnet is turned into a hilarious poem Romeo is writing on love, drawn in part from Troilus and Cressida. For the most part, these juxtapositions of colloquial language added a comic touch, inviting teenage audience members to relate to the characters. But they were also effectively used to heighten tragedy, as for example in the simple repetition of a Finnish word for hello and goodbye, hei, which Romeo and Juliet awkwardly said to each other when they first met, and which was repeated three more times later in the play at key moments. The analysis points to the significant role stylistic variation can have in theatrical translation and adaptation, and suggests translators think beyond a simple continuum between archaizing and modernizing as strategies for translating historical texts.
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    (英語學系, 2016-09-??) Sabrina Vellucci
    The work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo confuses conventional notions that place the verbal and the visual in two independent categories. Such hybridity invites a reading of Kahlo’s life and work through different media, combining written text and image. In this article I examine two major interpretations of the artist’s life: Frida. A Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983) by art critic Hayden Herrera and Frida (2002), a film directed by Julie Taymor, based on Herrera’s canonical biography. Taking into account the specificities of each text and considering film adaptation as both a multilevel relationship and a dialogic process, I look at the ways in which these works elicit empathy in the reader/viewer. In particular, I dwell on the gaze articulated on the screen, as it triangulates with that of Kahlo’s biographer and with the artist’s own version(s) of herself. Diverging from the construction of Kahlo as the archetypal suffering woman artist, the film re-frames Herrera’s biography through a series of devices that disrupt the narrative discourse and foreground the subjectivity inherent in the biopic. Such interruptions, stressing the constructed nature of the film’s interpretation of Frida’s story, deconstruct the processes of history and biography, and foreground the film’s own narrative as an act of revision.
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    Screening the In-Between: Intermediality and Digital Dystopianism in Contemporary Chinese Film and Fiction
    (英語學系, 2017-09-??) Heather Inwood
    This article uses Chinese popular narratives rooted in and circulated via the internet to investigate what effects it might have on texts that move through the internet in the process of adaptation or transformation from one cultural form to another. By juxtaposing the analysis of mainland Chinese films based on writings first published on the web, namely the 2012 films Caught in the Web (搜索 Sousuo), directed by Chen Kaige (陳凱歌), and Mystery (浮城謎事 Fucheng mishi), directed by Lou Ye (婁燁), with online fiction that expands the storyworlds of blockbuster films, such as the 2007 novel Infinite Horror (無限恐怖 Wuxian kongbu) by zhttty, this article focuses on the discursive role intermediality plays in literature-to-film and film-to-literature adaptations. I show how all three works share a preoccupation with the ＂in-between,＂ a term closely related to intermediality. In these texts, the in-between is replete with struggles between different forms of agency facilitated and limited by digital media. The connotations that the internet carries as a form of intermediality are, however, dependent on the creators’ own experiences and beliefs about the impact of digital media on contemporary society. In some cases, their work suggests the normative project of digital dystopianism, a predominantly negative outlook on the dangers digital technologies pose to morality and social institutions. In others, it points to a liberating creative agency that allows cultural producers to use the internet to forge new stories and meanings out of a global archive of popular culture.