Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Writing In The Language Of Reality: Interwar Experiments In Language, Robin Fuller

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English, Otto Neurath’s Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy’s typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in language reform, graphic design and photography — were all born from a dissatisfaction with the imprecise, arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of established languages and semiotic systems. A non-arbitrary mode of communication was sought, one that represented reality directly without translation through a cultural code.

Patricide Or Mourning The Nation-State In Francis Leclerc’S Looking For Alexander, Sophie Boyer

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article examines two closely connected dimensions of Francis Leclerc’s 2004 film, Looking for Alexander: a psychoanalytical dimension and a political one. Freud’s theories on the murder of the primal violent father in his essay Totem and Taboo provide the framework for a psychoanalytical interpretation of the protagonist’s fate: Alexandre Tourneur, a veterinarian struck by amnesia, embarks on a quest for his lost identity. Facilitated by the totemic figure of the deer, the act of remembering gradually leads to a conscious awakening to the events of an abusive childhood and the crime of patricide he committed as a boy …

Cinomade And The Fight Against Hiv/Aids Pandemic In Burkina Faso, Vincent Bouchard

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article is questioning the validity of educational screenings in a West African context, based on the detail study of Cinomade’s activities to raise awareness of the HIV/Aids pandemic in Burkina Faso. While traditional educational films are characterised by a general discourse prepared for a heterogeneous cultural area and try to convince the participants by imposing an outsider’s opinion, in that case, Cinomade’s team creates a specific video for each projection based on interviews made the same day in the village, in order not to expose the spectator to the point of view of foreigners (governmental employees or …

A Revolt Of The Masses: Culture And Modernity In Early 20th Century Spain: From Bullfights To Football Games, Katrine Helene Andersen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article discusses the consolidation of mass culture in early 20^th century Spain and analyses the discrepancy between the intellectual debate about Spanish culture and public behaviour. Bullfighting has throughout history been a much debated theme amongst intellectuals, and it has been banned by kings and the Church on several occasions. Nevertheless, there has always been an audience. In early 20^th century, football entered the scene of popular culture in Spain and gained very quickly in popularity. The article discusses the presence of the two and analyses the contribution of bullfighting and football to the process of modernisation …

Kunst Fürs Volk: Genre Painting As Mass Culture In Nineteenth-Century Germany, Colleen Becker

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Kunst fürs Volk repositions genre painting in nineteenth-century Germany as a form of mass culture, rather than high art, to achieve new insight into the form and function of a rather tired pictorial format. Genre paintings were as commonplace at galleries and large-scale art exhibitions as they were in commercial art, and they were used to illustrate all manner of objects and ephemera. The reiteration of forms within genre paintings had become, in a sense, a ‘massification’ of artistic technique and expression, just as the images and figurative elements themselves were repeated endlessly within different media formats. To the extent …

Projecting Le Temps Des Loisirs: Cycling And Working-Class Identity In French Cinema Of The 1930s, Barry Nevin

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article interprets images of bicycles in two films – Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936) and Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) – whose directors each turned their cameras to the competing ideologies that fractured France over the course of the 1930s. Locating the practice of cycling within its contemporary economic, political and sociological contexts, this analysis proposes that Renoir and Carné’s respective portrayals of cycling chart evolutions in French national identity and express French society’s expectations of the future during the rise and precipitous fall of the Front populaire in the turbulent years preceding the outbreak …

Nikolai Shpanov And The Evolution Of The Soviet Spy Thriller, Duccio Colombo

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

It is a common opinion that Stalinist literature knew no explicitly popular genres, and that, consequently, its whole body can be regarded as popular culture. The case of Nikolai Shpanov is one of the most evident arguments against such an interpretation.

From the late Thirties to the early Fifties, Shpanov's works, centered around the fight with fiendish spies, had huge print runs and conspicuous success among the readers; yet, Soviet critics nearly ignored them. The publishing channels were not those of the officially endorsed "classics" of Socialist Realism, but rather what can be regarded as a Soviet equivalent of a …

When Popular Cultures Are Not So Popular: The Case Of Comics In France, Sylvain Aquatias

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Studies about comics in France have often focused on the process of cultural legitimation. This process is made complex by the composition of the French readership of comics, which consists largely of children, and by the transmedia circulation and expansion of comics, including cartoons and videogames. These factors, and the role of peers’ prescription reduce the impact of cultural legitimacy. By contrast, when adults are concerned, a correlation between education and tastes in comic art can be clearly identified, as evidenced in the preference shown by adult readers with higher instruction level for graphic novels.

Comic art is characterised by …

Queer, Gender And Crime Fiction In French Studies: A Hazardous Scientific Endeavour, Andrea Hynynen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article focuses on the multifaceted challenge faced by academics doing queer and gender studies of French crime fiction. It argues that the French literary arena still entertains a sharp divide between literature and commercialist mass fiction, which hinders the establishment of popular fiction studies. It further discusses the reasons for and the effect of queer theory’s late arrival to France, arguing that France’s strong republican ideal entails a fear of ghettoization that has undermined the development of gender and queer analysis, especially of literature. These phenomena, in combination with France’s centralized, traditionalist academic institutions and linguistic franco-centrism, contribute to …

The Way We Read Now: Middlebrow Fiction In Twenty-First Century Europe, Diana Holmes

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

The allocation of a novel to the category ‘middlebrow’ is partly a matter of marketing and shifting attitudes to literary value, but this article argues that it also designates certain stylistic and narrative qualities that are little esteemed by ‘serious’ critics, but appeal consistently to a wider reading public. The article focuses on one sub-category of contemporary middlebrow fiction, feminine crime, through a comparative analysis of novels by Fred Vargas (French) and Kate Atkinson (British). The argument addresses the relationship between popular and middlebrow within the genre of crime writing, and the ways in which a female perspective inflects generic …

Preface, Dominique Jeannerod, Federico Pagello, Michael Pierse

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This second issue of CALL Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language makes available a group of papers selected from the considerably larger body of work that was presented at The Cultures of Popular Culture conference, promoted by the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee for Modern Languages, Literary and Cultural Studies and held at Queen’s University Belfast on 13 and 14 December, 2013. The conference was the first one entirely devoted by the RIA to a subject that has become increasingly central in the field of Modern Languages as well in numerous other disciplines. If compared to the countless academic …