Anna Kérchy

This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass (1865, 1871), published under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, renewed the genre of children's literature by turning the vocal play of literary nonsense into the organising principle of child-centric, non-didactic, ludic narratives. 1 It shows how his language games strategically undermine tyrannical ideological structures, whether in the form of discursive ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 80), the institution of monarchy, the adult–child hierarchy maintained by a pedagogy of fear, or speciesist supremacy of human over animal.

Intro co-authored by Anna Kérchy and Catriona McAra:
The feminist project has radicalised text/image relationships in myriad ways, disrupting the contours of discipline and medium. The multifaceted recyclings of a transdisciplinary methodology remind us that although in the past decades text/image studies has become an established academic research field in the first decades of the twenty-first century, its subversive potential to challenge cultural hegemonies has not diminished. On the contrary, intermedial fusions remain loaded with political and ethical issues that are in search of sites of resistance for marginalised, othered social subjects and meanings. The introduction explains how this special journal issue emerges from and is addressed to the politically significant network of feminist researchers -- artists, theoreticians, activists -- we believe we share ties with on account of putting the study of intermediality in the service of 'constructing a radically new understanding of our world in all its horror and hope' (Pollock, 1988: 22)

Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Year: 2017
DOI identifier: 10.1080/13825577.2017.1369270

"This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Through a corporeal narratological method—a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body— it deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, ‘cultural’ body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material ‘reality’ (are) (de)compose(d by) the Carterian fiction’s destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres.

Reviews

“Kérchy’s “body-text interpretive model” offers an innovative approach that manages to illustrate how a feminist body-text sounds like and why it sounds the way it does. Certainly, this nexus of phenomena and narrative strategies is the most original aspect of Kérchy’s interpretation of Carter’s trilogy. The connection between the freaks that structure her reading (Eve/lyn, Fevvers, Dora and Nora) and the process of “self-freaking” becomes obvious in the reading chapters. Shedding light on textual ruptures, overwritings, palimpsestic strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres – “counter-performances,” as Kérchy calls them, this study forms an important re-evaluation of Carter’s final trilogy as an empowering feminist revision of “culturally ready-made” myths of femininity – standing within women’s literary tradition whilst subverting it internally and outlining “an alternative body- and identity-politics that starts out on the side of the othered freak.” - Prof. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner Universität Salzburg

“Ms. Kérchy’s monograph also contributes to contemporary critical debates on body and identity in their relation to textuality/sexuality, boundaries, difference and power. The author’s focus upon the (re)embodied identity's discursive (de)construction and corporeal (de)formations, its patriarchal marginalization and subversively gender-bendingfeminist pleasures is particularly challenging.” – Prof. György E. Szönyi, University of Szeged, Hungary

“. . . engages at a high level of sophistication with an interdisciplinary conversation about female embodiment and power relations. . . Her reading of Carter illustrates how power relations are undermined, inverted, mocked and reimagined. She makes this point not through what is becoming, in my opinion, a tired form of analysis of “everyday practices” in feminist studies (very popular in cultural studies and anthropological work on the body). But rather she shows how gender is also subverted and reinvented in powerful ways at the level of the imagination. This manuscript reminds us that being able to imagine and revel in the kind of sensuality provided by the artist (in this case, fictional writer) is a powerful means of re/un/doing gender.” - Prof. Allaine Cerwonka, Central European University
"

Anna Kérchy, in her article “Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal to Visual Nonsense in Tim Burton’s Cinematic Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland,” examines how/whether the intermedial shifts accompanying the transmission of a literary text to a visual medium, – and (progressing from image to moving image to 3D CGI live-action animation) to a predictably unreliable computerized/digitalized visual medium that depicts mimetically ‘what has never been’ – bring about changes in our predominant modalities of experience that affect our perception of reality, as well as our strategies of make-believing, the dynamic interaction of our imaginative willingness and reluctance, and our interactive ways of making sense, and making up nonsense. The focus lies on Tim Burton’s 2010 cinematic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice-tales with the aim to explore the different modes of dis/enchantment that media change – the adaptation’s transition from verbal to visual (means of effecting) nonsense – effectuate.

These essays analyze the intersection of fairy tale, fantasy and reality in postmodern artistic texts. The editor underscores the transformation of both the reader-writer relationship and epistemological and ontological considerations by new technologies and emerging subgenres. This book contains 12 color plates and ten black and white photographs.

Reviews

“…the volume includes essays that present exploratory discussions of modern-day reinventions of the fairy tale and fantasy from a variety of perspectives that draw on emergent critical discourses…” - Prof. Dr. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère

“The editor’s organization of the volume exhibit a strong grasp of how important it is to relate generic, technological, political, and narrative dynamics with one another…”-Prof. Dr. Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawaii

“…this range of objects and of topics makes the volume genuinely timely, genuinely impressive and genuinely worthwhile.”-Prof. Dr. Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia

"As it stands, Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales is an uncompromisingly comprehensive and offers (perhaps too broad) an overview of the field and its potentials, its charming princes and clammy frogs." -- Dr. Karin Kukkonen, St. John's College, Oxford (Review in Marvels & Tales)

"Divided into six sections, the volume includes essays that explore the dynamics of interaction between contemporary reinventions of the fairy tale and fantasy and a wide range of current literary- and cultural theoretical trends, the list of which alone could spin the readers’ mind like the cyclone swooping Dorothy Gale into the magical Land of Oz." Dr. Larisa Kocic-Zámbó, University of Szeged, Hungary (Review in Americana)

"The authors discuss the often multiple rewritings of classic fairy tales, anti-fairy tales, and various master myths of literature, showing that these subvert the genre by imagining the lost voices of fairy-tale tellers, by making central a formerly marginalized character, or by using experimental postmodernist strategies (like permutation and disruption)." Prof. Dr. Enikő Bollobás, ELTE University, Budapest (Americana Review)



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Prof. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère

Preface by Anna Kérchy

SECTION 1: NEW MEDIA LITERACY
Hyperread, New Literacy, E-text
Cyber-Salons, Participatory Culture
Production Design
Critical Dance Studies

SECTION 2: EMERGING GENRES
Urban Fantasy
Steampunk
Forensic Crime Fantasy
Intermedial Text/Image. Graphic Narrative
Guro-Kawaii (Grotesque-Cute) Manga/Art

SECTION 3: REWRITING MYTH
The Interaction of Literature and Criticism. Feminist Imagination, Challenging the Canon
Anti-Fairy Tale, Revisiting Blue Beard
Critical Musicology. Revisiting Beauty and the Beast
Cult Fairy-Tale Romance. Revisiting the Animal-Groom Tale
Metamorphic Pornographic Fantasy. Revisiting Shakespeare

SECTION 4: RE-IMAGINING THE BODY
Body-Theatrical Performance
Feminist Body-Studies
Cyborg Body
Re-fashioning Embodiments

SECTION 5: CREATING FICTIONAL REALITIES
Ludic Simulations in the Virtual Reality of Computer Games
Virtual FairyLands in Trans/Post-humanist Science Fiction
Inventing a Fictitious Fairy Tale
Between Psychopathology and Fantasy

SECTION 6: NARRATOLOGICAL NOVELTIES
Transmedial Narratology, Representations of Race and Gender
Neo-Surrealism, Feminist Stylistics
Affective Narratology and the Emotional Politics of Reading
Corporeal Narratology

""THE FANTASY OF „MANLY” DISABILITY. ATYPICAL EMBODIMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE. This essay explores representations of the disabled male body in today’s
popular visual media. Its focus is on whether and how the”potently vulnerable” embodiments cherished by normative fan communities’ fantasies can personify alternative masculinities that reject hegemonic gender hierarchies. The ultimate concern is to see if they allow for a greater degree
of imaginative, erotic agency for female spectators. These masculinites are specific in that they let male viewers intimately relate to a non-domineering,imperfectly re-embodied, demythologized mode of manliness.The complexnegotiation of naturalized interconnections of engendered and dis/abled
bodily identities along with daring associations of virility with weakness and vulnerability coincides with an attempt to undo oppressive patriarchal power relations. However, the examples--primarily taken from the popular television series House M.D., The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones and the related fan(fictional) reactions to each of these programs– also demonstrate that the deviation from the normative bodily ideal is only possible within the relative frames of the ideological regime of ableism.""

This collection offers cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and freak shows, examining the social construction and spectacular display of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness in the formerly relatively neglected region of Continental Europe. Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities, medical specimen, and philosophical fantasies presenting the anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus acts. The essays explore the locally specific dimensions of the exhibition of extraordinary bodies within their particular historical, cultural and political context. Thus the impact of the Nazi eugenics programs, state Socialism, or the Chernobyl catastrophe is observed closely and yet the transnational dimensions of enfreakment are made obvious through topics ranging from Jesuit missionaries’ diabolization of American Indians, to translations of Continental European teratology in British medical journals, and the Hollywood silver screen’s colonization of European fantasies about deformity. Although Continental European freaks are introduced as products of ideologically-infiltrated representations, they also emerge as embodied subjects endowed with their own voice, view, and subversive agency.

The paper proposes to examine how internationally-acclaimed, contemporary Hungarian, postmodernist (post/concept) woman-artist Drozdik Orshi balances between intermedial representational means, Eastern cultural burdens and Western egalitarian promises, as well as feminism, postfeminism, and woman-centredness, while experimenting with the gendered body’s dislocations within physical, psychic, artistic, discursive/performative spaces with the aim to provoke and record the ‘queering of the gaze’ (ie. the contained subversion of the male, the medical and the museal gaze’s disciplinary powers alike), and to question the self-disintegrating authorial-spectatorial post-identity’s interpretive agency.

... I also learned a great deal from the partici-pants in a Guthrie Workshop on early French and Italian tales at Dartmouth in March 1995—as well as from comments about talks I've given at the MIA, at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, and at Smith. ...

The paper argues for the incessant continuity, modification, and rejuvenation of the Gothic genre while tentatively locating contemporary children’s and teenage Gothic novels within the larger context of Gothic, and more specifically the female Gothic tradition. Our analysis of the feminist potentials of these two recent modes of writing tackles the fictional challenge of the heteronormative family romance plot in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and traces the canonical devaluation of feminine readerly practices and tactics of resistant readership in connection with the Twilight-phenomenon

The aim of my paper is reveal that The Passion of New Eve is a painfully passionate text fuelled by the grotesquely nervous feminine body marked by pain. As the novel unveils the grotesque agony of “becoming woman,” the transitional polyphonic text is cruelly torn apart, painfully shattered into pieces by contradictory yet fatally-embracing narrative voices: male impersonator, feminist, feminine, feminized transvestite, transsexual autobiographical, or transgender voices “become legion” so as to enact the confusion of the effeminate psychosomatic symptoms of body dysmorphia and to model the painful yet revelatory passion of the decomposing feminine body-text.

Corporeal Configurations. Towards a Definition of Body Studies
The study provides a brief overview of body studies, concentrating on its major sources of inspiration, interconnections, branches, and the prominent cultural representations thematizing its crucial problematics. The discipline shall be circumscribed as an interdisciplinary research field analyzing the body in terms of its social interactions, power positionings, representational strategies, as well as its psychic relations, lived experience and narrative/performative identity-constructions - all considered in their micro- and macro-dynamic complexities. The paper explores 'symptomatic' contemporary artwork to reveal the dilemmas of the corporeal turn, and instead of drawing a final conclusion, attempts to outline the potentials of a corporeal narratology, with the aim to highlight the significance of learning to 'read/write bodi

What keeps the spirit of Alice alive after all these years? And what makes us so spontaneously turn into armchair travelers ready to unconditionally follow a little girl on her fantastic journeys down a rabbit hole into topsy-turvy worlds? Alice's unfailing ability to amaze is due to her characteristic ambiguity that entails a plethora of interpretive possibilities and hence a rewarding adaptability to multiple mixed media forms which stimulate senses beyond the verbal games establishing the trademark charm of the original children's classic. Popular postmodern post/millenial re-configurations of Victorian fantasy, in particular late 20 st century and especially early 21 st century adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales , reveal how intermedial transitions elicit different modes of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment which both shape and reflect contemporary fantasists' strategies of make-believing, and circumscribe a metafantasy commenting on limits and potentials of the fantasy genre as well as the dys/functioning of imagination. Adventures get curiouser and curiouser once Alice ventures into Transmedia Wonderland, transgressing the confines of the written text towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic and digital new media regimes of representation. Contemporary adaptations dynamically interact with their Victorian source texts as well as one another to enhance the immersion into an elaborate fictional universe and maximalize audience engagement, while retelling a story that remains recognizably the same, yet turns radically different with each new retelling. The journey to Wonderland today signifies a metafantasmagoric, metamedial mission urging all to interactively explore the cultural critical and ethical stakes of our embodied imaginative experience of making sense of nonsense.

What keeps the spirit of Alice alive after all these years? And what makes us so spontaneously turn into armchair travelers ready to unconditionally follow a little girl on her fantastic journeys down a rabbit hole into topsy-turvy worlds? Alice's unfailing ability to amaze is due to her characteristic ambiguity that entails a plethora of interpretive possibilities and hence a rewarding adaptability to multiple mixed media forms which stimulate senses beyond the verbal games establishing the trademark charm of the original children's classic. Popular postmodern post/millenial re-configurations of Victorian fantasy, in particular late 20 st century and especially early 21 st century adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales , reveal how intermedial transitions elicit different modes of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment which both shape and reflect contemporary fantasists' strategies of make-believing, and circumscribe a metafantasy commenting on limits and potentials of the fantasy genre as well as the dys/functioning of imagination. Adventures get curiouser and curiouser once Alice ventures into Transmedia Wonderland, transgressing the confines of the written text towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic and digital new media regimes of representation. Contemporary adaptations dynamically interact with their Victorian source texts as well as one another to enhance the immersion into an elaborate fictional universe and maximalize audience engagement, while retelling a story that remains recognizably the same, yet turns radically different with each new retelling. The journey to Wonderland today signifies a metafantasmagoric, metamedial mission urging all to interactively explore the cultural critical and ethical stakes of our embodied imaginative experience of making sense of nonsense.