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MELODRAMA
3. session
Whose story?
Whose melodrama? Whose mellowing?
CAMELIA ELIAS
lektor, Roskilde
University
Thursday,
Sept. 20
Time:
14.00-16.00, Room: 2.119 |
Following
Tennesse Williams’s successful play, A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947, Elia Kazan’s filmatization of the story of
the southern belle gone bonkers invites the viewer to
consider on what grounds Williams’s play constitutes itself
as a melodrama. Is this story a story about mental
degradation, beautifully portrayed by Vivien Leigh, or is it
a story about culture clashes embodied by a dashing Marlon
Brando? But this was the question then. My session will
juxtapose the 50s melodrama with a pastiche of the
Streetcar Named Desire and look at how the Simpsons’s
version of the play, A Streetcar named Marge (1992),
tackles the tension between mind and body, past and present,
and man and woman.
Required reading:
John S. Bak
(2004). "Criticism
On A Streetcar Named Desire. A Bibliographic Survey,
1947-2003" Cercles 10.
Optional
reading: A selection of articles in
Issue 10
of Cercles |