Julie & Julia

The Ocular & Spectatorship Vision and the act of looking is an important and recurring theme in many horror films. In early gothic literature, such as in Guy de Maupassant 's Le Horla, the author presents vision as definitive and universal proof and stresses the importance of seeing as well as the act of showing gore. As a society, we are routinely told ‘seeing is believing ' in the wake of any paranormal or supernatural phenomena, placing weight on the tangible. However, as science and technology

The “uncanny”, a Freudian term, is used to describe a situation or feeling that feels familiar and foreign at the same time. Through the writings and ideas of Ernst Jentech, and Sigmund Freud, it is defined. Between them the uncanny is described as "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard

“Perikles and Caracalla: Depicting Personality and Power in Art” In the age of ancient civilizations of the Greeks and Romans, image was everything. Art, especially those on display in the public sphere, was ubiquitously exploited as propaganda by emperors, politicians and individuals of power to underscore their own political agendas, propagating specific, ideal public images within and beyond their ruling realms. In examining the public portraitures of Perikles and Caracalla, clear parallels

Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creeds suggests that the use of such pervasive images of transgressive femininity as well as monstrosities in such horror films brand this genre “works of abjection”. Creeds defends her ideology referring to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror detailing

One fundamental principle in discourse analysis is the concept of intertextuality. Julia Kristeva’s coinage of the term, back in 1986, represents an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics with Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism and his examination of the multiple meanings, or ‘heteroglossia’, the interrelatedness and existence of language and discourses, by which meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by ‘codes’ imparted to

Introduction Research Background Derived from the Latin intertexto, intertextuality is the complex relationship between texts, which accounts for a separate field or location in which the text can act. The term “intertextuality”was acknowledged as Julia Kristeva’s coinage in the late 1960s in the context of structuralist and post-structuralist thoughts going at it hammer and tongs. Translation Studies, an interdisciplinary field, centers on creating a comprehensive solution for complex problems encountered

In his seminal study Gothic, Botting compares Gothic literature in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries with respect to their different ways of addressing terror and horror. He notes that the novel of terror dominated the eighteenth-century gothic writings for its transgressive efficacies. Female Gothic writers examine the terrors of patriarchal oppression while verbalizing the heroine’s anxiety about her entrapment into the confines of domesticity. In other words, the gothic heroine

After reading Nightwood I have been radically altered. Not in the cliché sense where one comes from reading a book and proclaims his or her life different, but altered in the sense where I have been forced to confront the issue of my own identity through the text itself. The idea of the ‘human condition’ which Barnes explores in the novel brings up for me more questions than answers. Do we all suffer cruelly at the hands of this abstract notion of love? Can we reconcile, within ourselves, the

The Threepenny opera has been around for eighty-eight years and still grabbing the attention of musicians and listeners in general. “Pirate Jenny” is a haunting number that sends chills down your spine, but is this due to the lyrics or the way in which it is sung and produced. This opera is based on a prostitute that has to make difficult decisions; it could be a losing game for her in the end. There are many renditions of this song from other artists such as “Nina Simone” “Steelye Span” and “Ute

An Assessment of Organicity in Alien Question: In Alien, is organicity portrayed as beauty or repulsiveness? In Alien, a film directed by Ridley Scott in 1979, a crew boards the Nostromos to explore a distress signal. However, once an alien is brought onboard, the crew struggles for their individual survival. There is a constant juxtaposition between the organic and inorganic, and the organic is often heavily associated with the abject, which entails messiness and even violence. Beauty refers to