my speech in class

Tags

Digital Culture, Digital Media, Remix, research, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, She's the man, Stephen Greenblatt, Twelfth Night

“In September 1580, as he passed through a small French town on his way to Switzerland and Italy, Montaigne was told an unusual story that he duly recorded in his travel journal. It seems that seven or eight girls from a place called Chaumont-en-Bassigni plotted together “to dress up as males and thus continue their life in the world.” One of them set up as a weaver, “a well-disposed young man who made friends with everybody”, and moved to a village called Montier-en-Der. There the weaver fell in love with a woman, courted her, and married. The couple lived together for four or five months, to the wife’s satisfaction, “so they say.” But then, Montaigne reports, the transvestite was recognized by someone from Chaumont; “the matter was brought to justice, and she was condemned to be hanged, which she said she would rather undergo than return to a girl’s status; and she was hanged for using illicit devices to supply her defect in sex.” The execution, Montaigne was told, had taken place only a few days before.”[1]

You might wonder what this story has to do with Shakespeare or Shakespeare’s sources or Shakespearean teen films. I have cited it from Stephen Greenblatt, a scholar writing heaps about Shakespeare, so it must have a connection, you might think. And of course it does. It’s one of those “shadow stories” as Greenblatt calls them, which interest me. ” Shadow story” meaning that this story never surfaces in the play, its climax the uncovering of the truth is present all the time, hidden in the shadow, a danger waiting to trap the story to lead to a bitter ending, which does not occur.

It is easy to find out that Twelfth Night was most likely based on the story Apollonius and Silla in Barnabe Riche’s Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581).

But something that also interests me is the circumstances, the time, topics much talked of, stories like the one just told and how they might have influenced Shakespeare in his writing.

Looking at the plot from Twelfth Night you can’t deny that there is a connection. Viola a girl, being washed up on a beach dresses up as boy, falls in love with the duke of Illyria, who himself is in love with Lady Olivia, who in her turn falls in love with Viola dressed in boys-cloths. But opposed to the tragic end in Montaignes story the nearly catastrophe of discovery can be prevented in Twelfth Night and when Viola finally tells them who she really is, there is her twin brother Sebastian to make up for her “defect in sex” and thus everybody is happy.

As the makers of She’s the man use exactly this main plot, girl dressing up as boy and the resulting love triangle, you can’t stop wonder what would happen to a girl in our western world, today, if she was discovered to have disguised herself as boy. She wouldn’t be hanged for sure, but how would the deceived ones react? What would they think? And so this “shadow story” works in She’s the man as well. There are many moments in the film, where Viola is nearly discovered and each time you wonder what would happen “if”.

Remixing Twelfth Night in the way the makers of She’s the man have done it, brings this “shadow story” even closer to the surface and gives it and the film another dimension and more room for speculations.

And this is kind of what I want to do, look at what happens when I pair Shakespere or She’s the man with Greenblatt’s theory. What does it make with the story itself, what happens to Shakespeare’s authorship? What happens with She’s the man’s remix?

Talking about authorship also involves asking what would happen if Shakespeare as author was declared dead, as in the theory of Roland Barthes. On the one hand, nothing would happen, because the work is still there and the words don’t change at all and as we can’t even be sure whether the man we presume has written all those plays has really written them. On the other hand, as Foucault says, we need an author, and especially in the case of Shakespeare it is very important, because people associate so many things alone with the name Shakespeare that something would be destroyed, would Shakespeare vanish.

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[1] Greenblatt, Stephen: Fiction and Friction, In: Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley 1888. S. 66

new idea

Tags

research, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt

While talking to a friend about my research topic, she had this very good idea of literature I could use: Stephen Greenblatt (new historizism), who writes about the time Shakespeare lived in and how it might have affected his writing! I really need find some literature of him and already have something in mind: Ficton and Friction. His theories fit in between Roland Barthes and Shakespeare’s sources…

literature review

Tags

Andy Fickman, research, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies, She's the man, The death of the author, Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s sources and Shakespearean teen films

My research topic evolves around two central points. One is Shakespeare’s authorship, thus the question of Shakespeare’s inspiration and sources is crucial. As I will try to find out where Shakespeare got his ideas from, it is very interesting to think more about the myth of the ‘genius Shakespeare’. The other topic involves having a closer look at remixing Shakespeare in Hollywood for the making of teen films.

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica there is a guide to Shakespeare offering the reader an insight into Shakespeare’s sources. About Twelfth Night or What you will for example it says: “The original source appears to have been the story Apollonius and Silla in Barnabe Riche’s Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581) […]”[1] Already in this short paragraph it becomes clear, that Shakespeare seemed to have other sources than only his own imagination. How much those sources were used and what else might have influenced him, will be something I will try to find out. The question of Shakespeare’s authorship and genius will be further explored with the theory of Roland Barthes about “the death of the author” from 1967.

Barthes starts his article by asking the question of “who is speaking” in a text. Is it the author, the hero, a truth generally acknowledged? His answer is, that “[…] it is the language which speaks, not the author.”[2] He replaces the author by the language, saying that the hand of the author is “[…] detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself […]”[3]. So the author is no longer a genius producing something that has never been there, but uses a readymade dictionary of words which come from thousands of sources of culture. Applying this theory to Shakespeare would mean reducing him to what Barthes calls a “modern scripteur”, who only exists while he is writing and has no life before the work or after the work, but is born again together with every new text. As Shakespeare’s heritage is so huge and people all over the world still find inspiration in his work, it’s doubtable that you can really go as far as this, but to think of Shakespeare as a person who assembled words from different cultural contexts and meanings together in a new and poetical way might be fruitful.

In “Reviving Viola: Comic and Tragic Teen Film Adaptations of Twelfth Night” by Elizabeth Klett, Klett analyses the two movies She’s the man by Andy Fickman (2006) and Lost and Delirious by Léa Pool (2001). For my research her exploration of Andy Fickman’s She’s the man will be the more important part as it is a movie which declares very openly that it has been inspired by Shakespeare. Elizabeth Klett takes a deeper look at each movie through trying to find out in what way Shakespeare has actually been the source of inspiration and how it correlates with the original play. She says that using Shakespeare to make a teen film has three main reasons: “First, the market for films more generally has become skewed toward teenage audiences. […] Second, Shakespeare teenpics exploit certain intersections between the traditional teen film genre and the Shakespearean canon. Just as teen films nearly always emphasize romance and heterosexual coupling, many of Shakespeare’s comedies focus on love and usually end with at least one wedding. […] Third, crediting Shakespeare as a source can add legitimacy to a teen film.”[4]

Laurie E. Osborne wants to unravel in her essay “Twelfth Night’s Cinematic Adolescents: One Play, One Plot, One Setting, and Three Teen Films”, “[…] what a teen film based loosely on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, yet marketed vigorously as a Shakespearean adaptation, brings to the study of Shakespeare on film and in popular culture.”[5] She also has a look at Fickman’s She’s the man next to two other movies. Her approach on the subject is different from the one from Elizabeth Klett and therefore will be worth having a closer look at as well in my research and discussing what they have in common and where they come to different conclusions.

In my research I will write about the above sketched more deeply and detailed using Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What you will and Romeo and Juliet as historic examples and the teen films She’s the man (Andy Fickman, 2006) and Romeo+Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996).

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[1] Enclopaedia Britannica [2009]: Twelfth Night. URL: http://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/article-9000132 (Stand: 17.10.2009)

[2] Aspen no 5 +6 [2009]: Three essays. URL: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes (Stand: 23.09.2009)

[3] Cf. Ibid.

[4] Project Muse [2008]: Shakespeare Bulletin. URL:  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v026/26.2.klett.html (Stand: 17.09.2009)

[5] Project Muse [2008]: Shakespeare Bulletin. URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v026/26.2.osborne.html (Stand: 17.09.2009)

reflection post nr. 4

Tags

reflection post, research, Roland Barthes, The death of the author, the-original-never-been-thing

Roland Barthes: The death of the author (1967)

In The death of the author Roland Barthes critiques that “[…] the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions […]”. He tries to contradict this general belief by reducing the author to someone who writes and nothing else: “[…] just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a “subject,” not a “person”[…]”.

Barthes starts his article by asking the question of “who is speaking” in a text. Is it the author, the hero, a truth generally acknowledged? His answer is, that “[…] it is the language which speaks, not the author.” He replaces the author by the language, saying that the hand of the author is “[…] detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself […]”. So the author is no longer a genius producing something that has never been there, but uses a readymade dictionary of words which come from thousands sources of culture. This fact has a huge impact on the interpretation of a text. One can no longer ask: “What does the author wants to say?” – as the author is not there anymore. He is replaced by a modern scripteur, who has no life before the text and no life after the text, but only lives as long as he is writing. This limitation of time is very interesting in terms of the author not being able to think about the text before he starts writing, as he is not existent yet. That is why the author can’t put a meaning other than language and the assembling of words from different backgrounds into the text.

Barthes points out that “[…] a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader […]”. So the reader, as a general person not an individual, is now the instance of creating a meaning to the text.

I find Barthes thoughts very interesting. They are very radical as he doesn’t allow the text to have anything from the author in it, which I personally think is not possible. As the author can only use a context and culture of words he knows. But I like his questioning the genius of the author. I like how the language itself is the most important thing for him. Considering my research topic Shakespeare, I start wondering what it is that people really like about his work. Is it the fact that they have been written by a man called Shakespeare? I don’t think so, because it is not even sure whether the man we think has written all those plays, has actually really written them. I think what really is interesting, is the things Shakespeare wrote about and especially how he wrote about them. He assembled language together in a very fascinating way, playing with double meanings, being very poetical. I think it is rather that what people like about those plays. But it doesn’t really matter whether a man born in Stratford-upon-Avon made this word puzzle or whether it was someone else. So this text is really interesting for my research question and I will definitely come back to it again later.

250 word project description

Tags

Genius, Remix, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies

Shakespeare is considered a genius having created some of the most famous plays in history. And even though his time is long gone, people still find his work very amusing, interesting, touching and inspiring. Many people can still relate to what Shakespeare has written about, as  his topics such as Love, Hate, Friendship, Jealousy and Deceit are still up to date.  The plots of his plays have been used for many movies, sometimes only modernizing the setting (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, 1996), sometimes only using the main plot (e.g. She’s the man, 2006) and creating something new around that. What is it that people find interesting in his stories? Why do they decide to use him as a source of inspiration, as a base for their work? And why does it work, even though his plays are hundreds of years old?

Looking at Shakespeare closer also involves having a look at where he got his ideas from. Who and what influenced him? People and stories around him, topics much talked of, plays he saw or read? Or was he not only a genius in assembling words in a certain way, but instead a genius who used his imagination without being influenced by others? It will certainly be interesting to pair Shakespeare with Roland Barthes, to have a look at what Barthes has to say about genius and thus about Shakespeare’s writing and his inspiration and sources.

I will try to find out why remixing Shakespeare is so popular and whether he himself already remixed.

Shakespeare Remix – but how?

Tags

Remix, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies, The death of the author, the-original-never-been-thing

I’ve decided to have a closer look at movies based on Shakespearean plays and to see what parts they have used in order to tell the story and which parts have been newly added to create something new out of it. But what also interests me is that Shakespeare himself got inspired by other people, by other stories, by accounts, by things that were relevant in his time and by topics much talked of. I am not interested in a historical account of Remix but rather wanting to ask the question whether there does exist something like “the-original-never-been-thing”.  I have to think of Roland Barthes at this point, who wrote an article The death of the author in which he claims, that an author doesn’t create a new story, but that he only uses a huge background of words to arrange them in a new way. So he puts in question the genius of the author, by reducing the author to some kind of person who just writes. But I’m not quite sure yet how I can transfer that question to Shakespeare and to modern movies which use Shakespeare as a base. And besides that Barthes is only one part of the whole, but I am still uncertain what the other parts can be and how I can get all that together into one topic.