Volume 1, Issue 1 — Classics in Contemporary Culture
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Item Open Access 300 AND FELLINI-SATYRICON: FILM THEORY IN THE TERTIARY CLASSROOMTHIN-FILM MATERIALS(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Glass, LeannePedagogical practices in Reception-based courses on ancient Greece and Rome in film often focus on an individual film’s connections to its historical themes and meta-narrative. In contrast, courses based on Film Studies often focus pedagogical discourses on filmic techniques or the filmmaking process per se. Regularly, the two approaches remain discrete and discipline-based. In view of this disjuncture in teaching approaches and foci, the intention of this paper is to explore the benefits of film theory, including its consideration of film technique, within Classical Reception courses. Therefore, the suggestion offered herein is that more emphasis on the pedagogies of Film Studies would provide an enhanced or richer understanding of cinematic interpretations and possibilities for the student of Classical Reception and film. To illustrate this pedagogical suggestion, a discussion of mainstream, Hollywood-style cinema as depicted by Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007), in contrast to the independent auteur-driven film, Federico Fellini’s Fellini-Satyricon (1969), is the focus. These two films provide the tertiary instructor with a variety of theoretical and technical considerations that are important learning components in a course on ancient Greece and Rome in film. Not only do the films enable the instructor to discuss concepts such as the auteur but also to introduce students to topics such as art-house and Hollywood studio filmmaking, which further introduces subjects such as “high” art versus popular culture. Additionally, focusing on two different styles of filmmaking and including an acknowledgment of each filmmaker’s objectives enables the tertiary instructor to explore other fields of inquiry that cover broader cultural issues such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. This, in turn, allows for a more informed interaction on specific cultural themes between the ancient and modern worlds as interpreted by the filmmakers.Item Open Access EXPERIMENTS IN LOVE: LONGUS’ DAPHNIS & CHLOE AND HENRY DE VERE STACPOOLE’S THE BLUE LAGOON(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Day, KirstenDespite a chronological gulf of nearly two thousand years, the second century C.E. Greek romance writer Longus and the early twentieth century Irish novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole were prompted to produce their best works by a similar motive: an urge to explore the world, and particularly the phenomenon of love and desire, from a standpoint of complete innocence. Although the resulting novels, Daphnis & Chloe and The Blue Lagoon respectively, have no evident direct connection, they exhibit surprising similarities not only in plot, setting, and characterization, but also in the values, perspectives, and worldviews they advance. The striking intersections between these two chronologically and geographically diverse works offer us a lens for examining persistent notions of “natural” versus learned masculinity and femininity, for exploring the dynamics behind patriarchal power structures, and for scrutinizing how these issues relate to ideas about the value and merits of civilization. Moreover, analysis of the features common to Longus’ work and the Blue Lagoon narrative, particularly as it is manifested in Randal Kleiser’s 1980 film adaptation of the novel, can serve as a useful pedagogical tool as well. By utilizing an accessible product of popular culture to bring a little-known ancient Greek novel to life, this comparison helps to drive home the persistence of ideologies and power structures that initially seem remote and thus suggests to today’s students the continuing relevance of works from classical antiquity in our modern world in a way that looking at the ancient work in isolation – or even in conjunction with its more direct descendants – cannot.Item Open Access GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW — THE ADVENTURES OF JOHNNY BUNKO: THE LAST CAREER GUIDE YOU’LL EVER NEED(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Weiner, Robert G.In the world of higher education, the last 10 years have seen an explosion in the scholarly study of sequential art, sometimes dubbed comics studies. The present number of courses related to comics is probably triple what it was 20 years ago: courses from the freshman to the graduate level, courses in departments as varied as History, Sociology, Film, Gender and Race Studies, Communication, Art, Electronic Media, and Philosophy. The study of comics is where the study of films was 30 years ago. The rise in scholarly monographs has exploded, and there are numerous academic journals devoted to the subject with more popping up all the time. Comic studies, currently, is a popular topic for academics to discuss, teach, and write about...Item Open Access THE LABYRINTH OF MEMORY: IPHIGENEIA, SIMONIDES, AND CLASSICAL MODELS OF ARCHITECTURE AS MIND IN CHRIS NOLAN’S INCEPTION (2010)(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Haller, BenjaminChris Nolan’s 2010 film Inception uses architecture as a language whereby to comment upon the relationship of the protagonist, Dom Cobb, with his deceased wife, Mal. This paper argues that three classical models – Homer’s tomb of Myrhine described in the Iliad, Iphigeneia’s dream of the collapse of the house of Agamemnon in Euripides’s Iphigeneia Among the Taurians, and Simonides’ Memory Palace mnemonic technique – manifest parallel uses of architecture as a metaphor for mind. The film identifies each of its main characters – Dom, Mal, and Ariadne – with different architectures and with different modes of cognition. The Mal who haunts Dom’s dreams is explicitly identified as a force in his subconscious, and Nolan associates her with amorphous architectures and spaces – foremost with the formless viscosity of water. Dom himself is her antithesis, identified with linear architectures like palaces and straight-line mazes. Ariadne is identified with circular mazes and proves capable of mediating between Dom and his memories of his deceased wife in order to help him successfully to complete his greatest heist. This paper agues that Inception‘s implied tripartite division of the self – with Dom representing the analytical conscious mind, Ariadne the intuitive mind, and Mal the dangerous depths of the subconscious – draws upon pop-Jungian formulations of the relation between conscious and subconscious modes of cognition in order to critique a set of gender norms often associated with male protagonists in the genre of the hard-boiled detective story. Inception is anticipated in subverting a dominant narrative of male heroes rescuing damaged female beloveds by the Classical models listed above; an examination of each of these passages helps to illuminate Nolan’s own interrogation of the “damaged beloved” narrative in ways which can be fruitfully used by secondary and college-level teachers in class discussion and writing assignments to promote empathy and more healthy relationships among their students.Item Open Access O HOMER, WHERE ART THOU?: TEACHING THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY THROUGH POPULAR CULTURE(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Young, MalloryLike so many of my academic colleagues, I spend an inordinate amount of time lamenting our students’ lack of engagement, discipline, and preparation. The problems are naturally exacerbated when the subject is literature and the literature in question is, by its nature, far removed in time and place from students’ daily lives. At the same time, requirements to study literature have become compressed, if not eliminated entirely. Ancient Greek works, in particular, seem to pose special problems for unmotivated or unprepared students. As our students become less likely to have a prior context from which to approach ancient texts, the challenge of introducing those texts in a one or two-semester Western literature course becomes greater. And yet, how can we omit foundational works like the Iliad and the Odyssey from a general education? If we do include them, how do we remain true to the works while spending only two or three weeks considering them? Even after decades of teaching, I have not, I admit, fully managed to answer that question to my satisfaction. But I will share two approaches – one to the Iliad, the other to the Odyssey – that can be used successfully, I believe, in undergraduate survey courses on Western literature and culture. The two interpretive strategies, while different, share two central elements: each is based on a single theoretical framework that is easily accessible to lower-level undergraduate students, and both incorporate popular culture. In the case of the Iliad, I have used the twentieth-century lens of the Vietnam War provided through Jonathan Shay’s study, Achilles in Vietnam. For the Odyssey, I have drawn on two contrasting movies, each focused on an Odysseus-like character placed in a twentieth-century setting: Ulee’s Gold and O Brother, Where Art Thou?Item Open Access THE ODYSSEY AND ITS ODYSSEY IN CONTEMPORARY TEXTS: RE-VISIONS IN STAR TREK, THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, AND THE PENELOPIAD(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Economou Green, MaryHomer’s The Odyssey is the archetypal quest story. The dialogue began with Homer, and contemporary texts and popular culture media have continued the tradition of deconstructing and recreating stories, addressing issues related to the human psyche. As Hardwick and Stray note, the relationship between ancient and modern is “not merely inherited but constantly made and remade,” one that we see in the following varied genres and versions that retell the Odyssean myth, relating re-visions of characters, relationships, structures, and themes. The original Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais” is an allegory of the Odyssean quest for human knowledge, while Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife presents a modern magical story of love, and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a story of “slippery truth,” debunking the heroic and romantic. Beyond instilling aesthetic appreciation in our students, Odyssean stories indeed offer a plethora of rich pedagogical material. A comparative approach to the texts offers our students the ability to further their own analytical and critical insights. As the stories deal with issues of identity, self-knowledge, sense of place in the cosmos, and human relationships and communities, they provide perception of psychological and philosophical insights into both our human-ness and our present preoccupations in our world. Rather than view the Odyssean epic as “exclusive,” a constructive pedagogical approach is to explore the blurred spaces and/or gaps between the past and the present. Thus while texts are set in different and distinct times and spaces with varied purpose, story, and genre, what makes classroom discussions vital and vibrant are the similar issues raised, which explore our constant yearning to discover our human-ness, and following that, examination of the meaning of love, war, fate, meaning of life, and death, quintessential matters that are transcultural, universal, and timeless.Item Open Access OVID AND MEL GIBSON: POWER, VULNERABILITY, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Bakewell, GeoffKnowledge of Ovid is invaluable for analyzing Nancy Meyers’s film What Women Want (2000). Advertising executive Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) is a sexist, chauvinistic ladies’ man who acquires the ability to hear what women are thinking. He is in effect a second Tiresias, and this article examines him in light of the gender-bending seer from the Metamorphoses. Meyers links Nick’s miraculous transformation to his attempt to listen to women while simultaneously cross-dressing. He subsequently becomes an intermediary between the genders, especially on sexual matters. The article further examines the Nick/Tiresias parallel in light of Ovid’s treatment of other Theban myths in Book 3. Like Pentheus, Actaeon, and Narcissus, Nick is a frequent practitioner of the voyeuristic “gaze.” And like them, he is both deeply narcissistic and sorely lacking when it comes to self-knowledge. What Women Want should, however, not be mistaken for a feminist film. For one thing, it does not situate male and female desire with respect to broader issues of power. In Metamorphoses, the figures of Semele and Caenis offer powerful testimony to the susceptibility of women to violence. Ovid emphasizes this in a way that Meyers does not, depicting lustful gods and men with a spry, subversive irony that pops up time and again in his otherwise stately hexameters. And as someone exiled from Rome to a remote town on the Black Sea, he understood better than most what it meant to be exposed and vulnerable to powerful authority. By contrast, Meyers’ film offers little in the way of genuine gender analysis; her forte seems to be decking out essentialized gender stereotypes with consumerist fluff. If we truly wish to determine What Women Want, Ovid’s critique of Tiresias proves a surer guide than Meyers’ embrace of Nick Marshall.Item Open Access THESEUS LOSES HIS WAY: VIKTOR PELEVIN’S HELMET OF HORROR AND THE OLD LABYRINTH FOR THE NEW WORLD(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Traweek, AlisonThis article explores the relationship between the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Viktor Pelevin’s 2006 adaptation of it, The Helmet of Horror, particularly how it can serve as a case study for the nature and significance of adaptation. It examines the idea of memory, a central theme of the novel, and considers how three aspects of the original myth – the Minotaur, Ariadne’s thread, and the labyrinth itself – shape and inform Pelevin’s retelling. Each of these is unique to this myth in antiquity, and together, they structure the story. Each is also fundamentally connected to the idea of memory: the Minotaur is a living reminder of Pasiphae’s transgression, Ariadne’s thread is the mnemonic that allows Theseus to escape, and the labyrinth is a structure whose very nature is designed to challenge memory by creating confusion. In Pelevin’s hands, the Minotaur is no longer a reminder of the union of human and beast but of human and machine; its head is a helmet that runs on reiterations of the past. Ariadne’s thread is re-imagined as a literal thread on an Internet forum where the characters discuss their situation and report their activities as they work towards escape. Finally, Pelevin’s novel multiplies the power of the labyrinth to enforce forgetfulness by structuring the story with a series of recursive metaphorical labyrinths, each of which suppresses memory in a different way. Pelevin’s novel dramatizes how both individuals and cultures use the past to make meaning in the present and thus illustrates the appeal of adaptations. The article closes with some suggestions for inviting students to reflect on the idea of adaptation, such as creating their own retellings, as well as for using the labyrinth as a theme for a larger study module.Item Open Access VIDEO GAME REVIEW — FINAL FANTASY XIV: LEVEL UP FOREVER(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Cowlishaw, BrianAfter a disastrous premature release, a complete design and programming team change, and a sweeping revision of battle and interface systems that continued until the very last minute, Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) is at last online for good now and humming along smoothly. This addition to gaming’s most legendary franchise is rich, beautiful, addictive, and just plain fun. Final Fantasy XIV is so very well put together, such a massive time suck, such a brilliant combination of story, franchise-history, and gameplay elements that upon close inspection its true nature becomes clear: FFXIV is a work of evil calculating corporate genius that will conquer us all. Think I’m exaggerating? Try this, if you’ve ever played a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game): name everything that ever annoyed you in those games – EverQuest, World of Warcraft, FFXI – then see how FFXIV systematically, craftily takes the edge off those irritating elements...Item Open Access WOUNDS THAT WILL NOT HEAL: HEROISM AND INNOCENCE IN SHANE AND THE ILIAD(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2014) Rubino, Carl A.George Stevens’ film Shane, which dates from 1953, remains an especially successful version of the heroic paradigm that is established in Homer’s Iliad. Just as Achilles, the hero of Homer’s poem, considers abandoning the war at Troy in favor of a long and uneventful life at home, the film’s mysterious hero makes a futile attempt to abandon his violent past for a “normal life” as an ordinary farmer in the American west. In the end, however, the threatened status of the domestic world Shane is trying to enter makes it impossible for him to renounce his heroic nature and violent past. Because he wishes to save his newfound friends, Shane, like Achilles, is compelled to become a hero once again. As a result, once Shane succeeds in rescuing his friends from danger, he is compelled to leave the community he yearned to join and for whose sake he risked his life. This paper examines some of the ways in which the film’s portrayal of the hero, Shane, echoes that of the Iliad. In doing so, it attempts to cast light on how the great classical texts continue to exert a powerful influence on modern works of art and on how those modern works both embody the classical heritage and also adapt it to fit the needs of their own times. The paper also devotes some attention to the highly charged issues of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture and to the considerable benefits of using films to bring the classics alive for students of today.