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Julian Murphet Julian Murphet i(A148329 works by)
Gender: Male
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1 Projecting the Sixties : Mediation and Characterology in The Catherine Wheel Julian Murphet , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 112-122)
'One of the indelible moving images of the postwar era is Marlon Brando’s screen-andT-shirt-ripping realisation of Stanley Kowalski in the screen version of Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1951. It is worth dwelling for a moment on that date, because there is something extraordinary and almost uncanny about it. This is a film whose visual style (noir-ish chiaroscuro and heavy set design) associates it with the late 1940s, but whose acting style lifts it into the 1950s thanks to Karl Malden and Kim Hunter, both engaged in a new naturalism cribbed from Stella Adler. But then, on top of that palimpsest, another layer is added: for somehow, Brando’s performance belongs neither to the 1940s nor the 1950s, but is projected ahead into the future, and – in its hulking, electric, infantile combustibility – manages to incarnate something essential and true about the 1960s to come. And this is an anomaly that cannot be said to inhere in Tennessee Williams’ play text either, since it only emerged, fully fledged on the New York stage, through Brando’s muscular interpretation of the role, which shocked Williams and turned audiences into unwitting supporters of a character that he had intended mainly as an unsympathetic brute.' (Introduction)
1 y separately published work icon Strong Opinions : J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction Sue Kossew (editor), Julian Murphet (editor), Chris Danta (editor), New York (City) : Continuum , 2011 Z1875977 2011 anthology criticism This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee’s work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzee’s most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzee’s decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzee’s direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzee’s explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life (Publisher website).
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