A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Andrea Fabry discusses in her article, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle," the image of Bluebeard as a metaphor for gender relations. Bela Bartok's opera and its libretto represent a prime example of the metaphor that in turn can be found in a range of text types, from fairy tales through novels to films. In the article, Fabry analyzes Bartok's contribution to the metaphor, namely with his opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle. She relates the opera to the text of the opera's libretto, written by film theoretician Bela Balazs, and places her analysis in the larger historical framework of audience research in modernity. The analysis reveals that in a pronounced misogynistic artistic climate of the time and working from a libretto whose tragic ending denies transcendence to the female character of the opera, Bartok's opera can be understood as the representation of simplistic domesticity where the real story remains un-mediated and unnarrated. Andrea Fabry, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.4 (1999):
Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"
stand in front of ourselves, the way we might have stood somewhere in a prehistoric past, but never before our waking gaze. Yet these images, developed in the darkroom of the lived moment, are the most important we will ever see. One might say that our most profound moments have been equipped -like those cigarette packs -with a little image, a photograph of ourselves. And that "whole life" which, as they say, passes through people's minds when they are dying or in mortal danger is composed of such little images. They flash by in as rapid a sequence as the booklets of our childhood, precursors of the cinema, in which we admired a boxer, a swimmer or a tennis player. ["A Short Speech on Proust," delivered by Benjamin on his fortieth birthday, 1932]
Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
This essay asks what, if any, import the Indian ““Mutiny”” of 1857 had on A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens�s fictionalized account of the French Revolution. Begun shortly after the Indian uprising started, Dickens�s historical novel appears studiously to avoid any mention of events on the Indian subcontinent, even though these events preoccupied and enraged the author. Few scholars have attended to the question of A Tale of Two Cities and the ““Mutiny,”” but when they have, scholars have looked for analogies between India and Dickens�s account of the French Revolution. In this essay, by contrast, I examine A Tale of Two Cities in a larger context——of Britons9 response to the Uprising, of Dickens9s short stories and essays in Household Words in the years before the ““Mutiny”” and immediately after, of Dickens9s disenchantment with aspects of British culture, and of his need to articulate a national identity grounded in action. I argue that the events in India were the match that ignited Dickens9s already established midcentury interests in national identity, nobility, and masculine heroism. I do not wish to suggest that A Tale of Two Cities is an Indian ““Mutiny”” novel, but rather that it is a novel about the ““Making of Britons,”” an important endeavor for an author who was intensely dissatisfied with the Britain that he saw around him.