Humanities

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 41
  • Item
    Beyond figures of the audience: Towards a cultural understanding of the film music audience
    (2016) Anderson, L.
    Readers of this journal have witnessed the proliferation of work in the field of film music studies over recent years. With this expansion has come a variety of ways of understanding the relationship between music and film, but no similar investigation of the relationship between audiences and soundtracks. Nevertheless, figures of the film music audience frequently emerge in much analysis of the function of popular music in film soundtracks. Jeff Smith’s and Anahid Kassabian’s models of film music perception and comprehension are the two most detailed accounts (1998 and 2001, respectively). Since publication well over a decade ago, their frameworks have been widely cited but rarely interrogated. Both models hinge on the idea that ‘knowing’ music can determine an audience member’s response (to both music and film). This article critiques Smith’s and Kassabian’s theories: my exploratory audience research suggests that audiences’ modes of relating to film soundtracks are much more complex than simply ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ the music (Anderson, 2011; 2012). A fuller understanding of the role of popular music in film for audiences needs to take into account tastes, vernacular categorisations, senses of identity, and memory (both related to the self, and to the text at hand).
  • Item
    The participatory art of Mark Harvey.
    (Index Press, 2016) Diprose, G.
  • Item
    The forms and functions of hybridity in Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-nama.
    (2012) Furness, J.
    The Trotter-nama by Allan Sealy is a novel written in magical realist style that covers the lives of seven generations of Trotters, an Anglo-Indian family whose lineage in India began with Justin Trottoire, a French mercenary, in the 1750’s. This research essay examines how the concept of hybridity in The Trotter-nama serves to break down the hierarchical binary logic of pure/impure, original/copy, authentic/inauthentic, whole/half, real/unreal, true/false notions within the context of the colonial encounter in British India. It examines the forms and functions of hybridity in the novel, interrogating its application within post-colonial theory and selecting textual enactments of racial and cultural hybridity that support the unravelling of such binary oppositions. Sealy’s purpose in destabilising the binary logic of colonialism that still pervades much of Western thought is to create a narrative and mythological space for the racially mixed Anglo-Indians who were written out of any official history of British India. Through the narrative mode of ‘magical realism’, Sealy situates Anglo-Indians at the centre of the colonial encounter, erasing determinate borders between the literal and metaphorical, thereby creating a new discourse that is as legitimate as any existing, authoritative ones. Sealy is not however, suggesting that this is the definitive account of the Anglo-Indian community in India, for there is no such true or original record. There are only multiple stories of multiple identities that shift and change over time.
  • Item
    ‘Symbolism and imagination in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Kahn' and their relationship to the design of an oriental garden - The Prince Regent's Royal Pavilion’.
    (2013) Strongman, L.
    There is a lack of a direct reference to the poem ‘Kubla Kahn’ in Coleridge’s note books and journals in the late 1790s and the disclaimer in the 1816 Preface (the ‘Crewe manuscript’ version) refers to the poem as the product of the poet’s ‘psychological curiosity’ (1993, p. 203). It is already known that the self-conscious and historical fabrication, the imagistic attention to the construct of orientalism, point towards a multiplicity of influences on the poem’s creation including (but not limited to) Southey, Shelley, Marco Polo, Dante Purchas, Vishnu and Banks. This article contends that the iambic dreamwork of Coleridge’s ‘incantatory elevation’ were not only product of the interaction of Coleridge’s hypersensitive imagination with the Devonshire and Lake-district British landscapes of his youth. They were also a product of the socio-political cultural climate of British society in the 1790s and early 1800s, represented symbolically in the architecture of the Prince Regents Royal Pavilion.