Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

The representation onstage of traumatic historical events is met with various challenges: for example, the conventions of dramaturgy may humanize the perpetrators of wide-scale criminal acts through the requirement for complex characterization; there is a risk of misrepresentation when the fictional content diverges from reality. There is also the problem of archival silence around those who were the victims of atrocities such as the slave trade. Caryl Phillips's adaptation of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings demonstrates the way in which dramaturgical strategies can be deployed to confront some of these challenges by rejecting the concept of authenticity altogether. His play also shows how this dramaturgical intervention can offset the limitations of the archive in order to retrieve the lost voices of the enslaved.

Jo Sung-hee’s directorial debut, A Werewolf Boy (Neukdae Sonyeon: 2012), is a variation on the mythology of the feral child who abandoned by his/her parents is suckled and nurtured and a pack of wolves. The boy in question, Chul-soo (Song Joong-Ki) is taken in by a single mother and her two children when they discover him living in a ramshackle barn on their land when they move to the country because of the older child’s poor health. As Chul-Soo becomes domesticated, a bond forms between the boy and the younger daughter, Soon-yi (Kim Hyang-Gi). However, their romance is threatened when the community become aware that Chul-Soo is not quite the boy that he appears to be and the family are forced to flee their rural retreat leaving Chul-soo once more to fend for himself. Werewolf mythology is not indigenous to Korea (the nearest myth is that of the kumiho, a nine tailed fox, who is usually represented as a monstrous-female male-eating creature), although the mythology could feasibly ha...

This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) to The Stendhal Syndrome' (1996).In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's ...

And What's on the Menu Today? Greed and Gluttony in Sato's Naked Blood Colette Balmain Abstract Taken to its extreme, cannibal cinema can be interpreted as an engagement with excess, the very nature of which transgresses the injunctions against gluttony, lust, and ...

Black Americans who exist outside of the American Dream have historically had a direct relationship with street revolutionaries and ghetto superstars more than the appointed Black leadership. Hence, it continues to be an unfair criticism for any “integrated” Black leader to suggest that another Black leader is not authentic enough to have universal appeal, particularly when there is a noticeable social distance between the majority of Black leaders (past and present) who emerge from the middle class and the Black underclass. The gang has traditionally been a significant socialization agent in gangland areas; thus, Black leadership should access the wisdom of the gang when looking for answers to the tough life course conditions of the urban underclass resident. This article provides a brief history about Black gangs in an attempt to provide some insight relative to just how significant the Black gang has been to the Black experience in America.

In the event of a risk or a health problem, it is vital for the management of the situation, to inform the public. The managers of that situation are public authorities. While they produce their own material, the success (or failure) of their efforts depend also on the media because the latter constitute one of—sometime the—most important information source for the lay public.
Informed by social constructivism, this work adopts the view that journalists create a certain reality by their reporting, and that this reality significantly influences other social actors (for example readers, i.e. the lay public).
Taking an interpretivist stance, a qualitative approach was chosen to analyse how the 2009 influenza pandemic was represented in the German media. Precisely, a framing analysis of articles of “Süddeutsche Zeitung” was carried out in the course of 2009. The established hypotheses, that this newspaper's coverage was very critical towards officials and vaccination, and transported contradictory messages which were likely to have caused confusion and feelings of unsettlement among the public. However, these results can not
explain the low vaccination rate. But, this work represents a starting point for further analysis, such as processes of media production and how audiences process information. Moreover, it is able to make recommendations for public authorities and their communications in the event of a pandemic.

In his writings on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn points out that ‘The myth of Medusa has many a counterpart in Japanese folk-lore’, as in the beautiful young woman whose hair turns into serpents at night or the hair of the wife and the concubine of Kato Sayemon Shigenji which at night turn ‘into vipers, writhing together and hissing and biting.’ (2006: 44). Hair in Japanese religion is ‘at once attractive and frightening, desirable and potentially dangerous’ (Ebersole, 1998: 78). With the potential to be possessed by malevolent kami (spirits), it is little surprise that disorderly and dangerous hair, which possesses the power to attack and kill the living, provides a source of horror in Japanese cinema and is one of its most identifiable tropes. While, until recently, censorship of female pubic hair functioned to ‘construct and circulate […] an ideology of male dominance (Allison, 1998: 214), unbound and embodied female hair subverts such ideology and instead functions as a mark of insurrection against traditional gender categories which construct woman as Other in terms of respectability and filial duty. This paper examines the use of hair symbolism as a mode of feminine/female protest in Japanese horror cinema with reference to three films: Kaidan (Kwaidan, Kobayashi: 1964), Miike’s One Missed Call (Chakushin ari: 2003), and Apartment 1303 (Oikawa: 2007).

Taken to its extreme, cannibal cinema can be interpreted as an engagement with excess, the very nature of which transgresses the injunctions against gluttony, lust, and greed – three of the original Deadly Sins or Capital Vices. This is clearly shown in films as disparate as Lenzi‟s notorious  Cannibal Ferox (Italy: 1981) and The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (Peter
Greenaway, France/UK, 1989). In  Fincher‟s  Se7en  (USA, 1995), which loosely takes the seven deadly sins as motivation for its serial killer, the gluttonous victim is forced to eat spaghetti until he chokes to death. While much has been written on the figure of the zombie as an embodiment  of consumerism, little has been said about the cannibal. Yet as pure excess and
appetite, the cannibal is capitalism in its most ferocious form. In Sato‟s Naked Blood (Megyaku: Akuma no yorokobi, Japan, 1995), excess is no longer figured as the Other, but  as constitutive as the Self. Here shocking scenes of auto-cannibalism can be interpreted as a critique of capitalism and
consumerism taken to its very extreme. Like the coming into consciousness of Romero‟s zombies in  Land of the Dead, the excessive nature of uncontrolled appetite[s] in Naked Blood, explodes what McRoy calls „social codes that inform its [the body] socially prescribed shape and meaning.‟ (McRoy, 2008:56). Here capitalism is equivalent to the theological concept
of damnation, and as such there is little surprise that the imagery of Naked Blood is reminiscent of the many Japanese cinematic imaginings of Hell, perhaps most ferociously rendered in Nobuo Nakagawa‟s Hell (Jigoki, Japan: 1960).

Whiteness functions as a privileged signifier of difference (Kazami: 1997) not just in Western cultures but also, and more problematically, in East and South East Asian cultures.  The Japanese writer, film critic and poet, Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), not only perceived his own Japaneseness as hideous caught in the reflection of the cinematic screen, but in ‘A Woman’s Face’ (Onna no Kao, 1922), Tanizaki  mediates on the fact that while Western [white] actresses generate a ‘sublime feeling’, and marks that ‘this does not happen with Japanese actresses’.  This act of self-orientalism by Tanizaki through which whiteness functions as signifier of racial differences and desire, has a long tradition in East and South East Asian Cultures and therefore cannot simply be ‘read’ as a response to Westernization (see Robb, 1995). Instead whiteness functions as a signifier of privilege and class before Tanizaki’s imaginary misrecognition of the image on the screen. In their report,  ‘Skin Lightening and Beauty in Four Asian Culture’, Li et al point out that “In Korea, flawless skin like white jade and an absence of freckles and scars have been preferred since the first dynasty in Korean history (the Gojoseon Era, 2333-108 B.C.E.) In contemporary South Korea embedded within the eventual outcome of the drive towards globalisation is the deracialization of the national and culturally situated subject. In contemporary South Korean horror cinema, the “forgetting” of one’s racial identity becomes a source of horror, whether through cosmetic surgery as in Kim ki-duk’s Time (2006) or the abnegation of self as in Bedevilled (Jang Cheol-Su, 2010).

These key questions so eloquently put by Dick also underpin the aims of ‘Evil and Human Wickedness.’ Rob uses similar words in his words on themain aim of the project: “I was - and remain - convinced that the problems of evil are inseparably and intimately tied to the problems of what it is to behuman.” 4 The project had, and still has, three mains aims. Firstly, to start adiscourse on the nature of evil and human wickedness, questions which arerelevant to our very being-in-the world. Secondly in order to do this, it isnecessary to open up a dialogue across disciplines and beyond our own areasof interest and/or specialism in order to bring a wider understanding to suchcrucial issues beyond personal interpretations and pre-existing intellectualinvestment. Lastly, while we may not come up with answers to questionssurrounding the continuing problem of evil and human wickedness in theworld, it is necessary to wrestle with the question of evil in its manifoldforms, as this is not a mere ...