Year VII Volume 10/2020 the Roaring (20)20
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Cultural Intertexts Year VII Volume 10/2020 The Roaring (20)20 Cultural Intertexts Journal of Literature, Cultural Studies and Linguistics published under the aegis of: Faculty of Letters – Department of English Centre for Interface Research of the Original and Translated Text. Cognitive and Communicational Dimensions of the Message Editing Team Editor-in-Chief: Michaela PRAISLER ([email protected]) Executive Editor: Oana-Celia GHEORGHIU ([email protected]) Editorial Secretary: Lidia-Mihaela NECULA ([email protected]) Editorial Assistants: Alexandru PRAISLER ([email protected]) Daniela ȘORCARUȋǤ ̷ǤȌ Monica GEORGESCU ([email protected]) Gabriela DEBITA ([email protected]) ISSN-L 2393-0624/ ISSN 2393-0624/ E-ISSN 2393-1078 Full content available at www.cultural-intertexts.com Abstracting & indexing: ERIH+, CEEOL, DOAJ, EbscoHost, Index Copernicus, ProQuest, MLA © 2020 Casa Cărìii de gtiinìă Cluj- Napoca, B-dul Eroilor 6-8 www.casacartii.ro [email protected] SCIENTIFIC BOARD Nicoleta CINPOEŞ, Professor, University of Worcester, UK Joseph CONTE, Professor, University at Buffalo, NY. USA Gabriela Iuliana COLIPCĂ-CIOBANU, Associate Professor, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania Anca DOBRINESCU, Professor, “Petrol si Gaze” University of Ploiesti, Romania Vladislava GORDIĆ PETKOVIĆ, Professor, University of Novi Sad, Serbia Bohdan KORNELIUK, Associate Professor, Khortytsia National Academy, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine Isabela MERILĂ, Associate Professor, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania Ioana MOHOR-IVAN, Professor “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania Daria MOSKVITINA, Associate Professor, Zaporizhzhia State Medical University, Ukraine Catalina NECULAI, Senior Lecturer, Coventry University, UK Dana PERCEC, Professor, West University of Timisoara, Romania Steluţa STAN, Associate Professor, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania Ying ZHU, Professor, City University of New York, College of Staten Island, USA * The contributors are solely responsible for the scientific accuracy of their articles. The Roaring (20)20s Contents EDITOR’S NOTE 9 THE ROARING 20s Luxurious Cinema Palaces in the Roaring Twenties and the 13 Twenty-First Century: Critical Analyses of Movie Theatres by Siegfried Kracauer and Their Relevance Today Viola E. RÜHSE, Austria Promoting and Containing New Womanhood in the Pages of 31 Photoplay: The Case of “Little Mary” Pickford and Her Mediated Alter Egos on the Cusp of the Roaring Twenties Kylo-Patrick R. HART, USA Disappearance of the Self and Its Constitutive Outside in 46 Kafka and Woody Allen’s Zelig Lukas MOZDEIKA, Norway No More Hugs: Depictions of the Prodigal Son in 1920’s Art 57 and Literature Christian ARFFMANN, Denmark Transfer Points: Artistic Intersections and Cultural Transitions 70 in John Dos Passos’s Fiction of the 1920s Robert MCPARLAND, USA Criticising the Critic: The Greek Modernist Poet G.T. 86 Vafopoulos on Greek Literary Critic Antreas Karantonis Dimitris KOKORIS, Greece 7 …AND THE ROARING 2020s Inter-texting Cultures during Pandemic(s): A Pragmatic 96 Approach and Beyond Daniela gORCARU, Romania The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: Constructing Diasporic Muslim 107 Identities in a Coming-of-Age Narrative Lin LING, China Once Upon a Time: The Author Is Dead! Long Live the All 122 Mighty Quill! Lidia Mihaela NECULA and Oana Celia GHEORGHIU, Romania ‘Only in Dying Life’: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dry Land and Its 134 Cultural Contestations Gabriela DEBITA, Romania Cyber experience as a resource for making alternative worlds: 149 based on the Georgian postmodernist novel Chewing Dawns: Sugar-free Irakli KHVEDELIDZE, Georgia 8 Editor’s Note This anniversary tenth issue of Cultural Intertexts – a Journal of Literature and Cultural Studies – assembles articles on The Roaring (20)20s, covering one hundred years of literary and filmic production, as well as of societal and linguistic change, with emphasis on text, pretext, context and intertext. The contributors – scholars from Austria, China, Denmark, Georgia, Greece, Norway, Romania and the United States of America – tackle a wide range of aspects related to the problematic under focus, supported by relevant case studies. A time of healing the wounds left by the Great War through art, excesses and joie de vivre, an era of artistic innovation and profound transformation at all levels, the 1920s provide rich ground for cultural analysis. Of course, the blooming film industry during that time is one of the focal points of interest for cultural studies. Consequently, Part One, The Roaring 20s, sets out from an investigation of the evolution, impact and revival of luxury movie theatres, the famous extravagant ‘palaces’. The celluloid world of illusion is taken further, from its flamboyant space of consumption to its fabricated ‘characters’, the silent movies stars, through mediated constructions of womanhood in fan magazines like Photoplay. The intrinsic and ever-flowing relation between film and literature is then exploited in a discussion on Woody Allen’s transposition of the Kafkian grotesque in the mockumentary film genre. Similarly, the much older connection between painting and fiction finds a place in our collection with a review of the representations of the prodigal son within the European space, which, once again, features the famous misfit, Franz Kafka, but also the ground- breaking Modernist T. S. Eliot and great representatives of Surrealism and Dada, like Max Ernst and Giorgio di Chirico. As the Roaring 20s would be incomplete without at least one emblematic figure of the Lost Generation, strategies of rewriting the American 1920s are identified in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Finally, as the effervescence of the period was not an exclusive Western European or American affair, a journey to Greece is made, to read a Modernist poet’s reaction to his critic (Vafopoulos v Karantonis on shifting poetic codes). 9 The one-hundred-year bridge is, sadly and unexpectedly, Ǯconsolidated’ by two pandemics: the Spanish Flu (1918-1920) and the current Coronavirus (2019 – ongoing) whose variations in the fabric of speech acts and the shift from cultural intertexts to inter-texting cultures are approached from a pragmatic and cultural perspective in the first article of Part Two, …and the Roaring 2020s. The topical negotiation of identity across cultures is traced in its representation at the level of the literary text signed Mojha Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. Then, a return to the famous flight from reality specific to the early decades of the previous century is made obvious once again in the anti-realism of televised fairt-tales, fantasy series and science fiction novels. The analyses centres on telling the story of the characters’ literary emancipation and of the death of the author in the fantasy drama television series Once Upon a Time, on journeying across a literary heterotopia inspired by classical and modernist sources in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and on defamiliarizing Georgian society in bio-punk fiction: Chewing Dawns: Sugar-free. As always, the editorial team is honoured by the collaboration with the members of the scientific committee, and grateful for the highly professional peer reviews received before publication. Michaela Praisler 10 The Roaring 20s Luxurious Cinema Palaces in the Roaring Twenties and the Twenty-First Century: Critical Analyses of Movie Theatres by Siegfried Kracauer and Their Relevance Today Viola E. RÜHSE Abstract Impressive cinema palaces with exterior façades illuminated appealingly at night were significant for the big city life of the roaring twenties. The film screenings in the prestigious buildings were framed by a diverse supporting programme. Siegfried Kracauer dealt critically with the formative tendency towards theatricality in the new large cinema buildings such as the Gloria-Palast in Berlin in 1926. He also discussed the supporting programme and the aspect of distraction in the context of modern mass and leisure culture in a progressive and extraordinary way. Over the past decade, luxury cinemas have been enjoying a revival. In order to examine today’s high-end boutique movie theatres, Siegfried Kracauerʼs thoughts on large cinemas in the “roaring twenties” in Berlin provide critical impulses. In the first part of my paper, two important texts by Kracauer are analysed. In contrast to previous research, Kracauer’s arguments are also compared in greater detail with those by contemporary progressive critics not only in Germany but also in other countries, such as Joseph Roth, Kurt Pinthus, Fritz Olimsky, Kenneth Macpherson, Harry Alan Potamkin and Philip Morton Shand, among others. This also reveals the special nature, quality, and depth of Kracauer’s essays. An analysis of modern luxury movie theatres inspired by Kracauer’s train of thought follows in the second part of this paper. Keywords: Siegfried Kracauer, history of film, luxury cinemas, film palaces, Weimar Republic The first permanent cinemas at the beginning of the twentieth century were mostly small and plain. However, larger, more elegant film screening venues were already established in the second half of the 1900s in US and soon afterwards in European cities too (Altenloh 1913: 19f.)1. The increasing popularity of film was a major factor in this. In connection with the longer duration and the more sophisticated plots of films, an attachment to high M.A. Research Associate/Deputy Head of Department for Image Science, Danube University Krems, Austria,