Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
134
result(s) for
"Paternity Fiction."
Sort by:
The quiet side of passion
\"Isabel finds herself befriended by Patricia, a single mother whose son, Basil, goes to school with Isabel's son. Isabel discovers that Basil is the product of an affair Patricia had with a well-known Edinburgh organist, also named Basil, who was, rumor has it, initially reluctant to contribute financially to the child's upkeep. Though Isabel doesn't really like Patricia, she tries to be civil and supportive, but when she sees Patricia in the company of an unscrupulous man who peddles fake antiquities, her suspicions are aroused and she begins to investigate the paternity of Basil Jr. When Isabel takes her suspicions to Basil Sr., she finds that, although paying child support is taking a severe financial toll on him, he likes the idea of being the boy's father and, in fact, wishes he could have more of a relationship with Basil Jr. Patricia, however, has no interest in Basil Sr. taking a more hands-on role in Basil Jr.'s parenting, even as she continues to accept his financial support. Should Isabel help someone who doesn't want to be helped? As Isabel navigates this ethically-complex situation, she is also dealing with her niece, Cat, who has taken up with a tattoo artist. Isabel considers herself open-minded, but has Cat pushed it too far this time? As ever, Isabel must use her kindness and keen intelligence to determine the right course of action\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The ethos of the auteur as father of the film craft – on masculinity, creativity and the art of filmmaking
Research of the world of cinema often deals with the manner in which movies replicate the social balance of power, creating a symbolic order based on an essentially masculine world-view that puts the man at its center. The price women pay for this phallocentric approach – their persistent objectification in cinema, and the very small number of female screenwriters and directors – has become a much-discussed topic in contemporary research. However, the question of the price paid in the male artistic creation process has yet to receive the attention it deserves. This qualitative study addresses the lacuna in contemporary research, with reference to three metafictional films that focus on male directors, as an auteur for whom cinema is the pivotal center of their being: the Israeli film Peaches and Cream (2019, directed by Gur Bentwich), the Spanish film Pain and Glory (in Spanish: Dolor y gloria, 2019, directed by Pedro Almodóvar), and American film All That Jazz (1979, directed by Bob Fosse). They all are viewed as having an affinity with the ancient Greek comparison of male creativity with female procreativity, which is still reflected in contemporary studies. The films paint a picture of the male creative process shadowed by a sense of danger and loss of self. All three expose the feelings of anxiety inherent in film directors’ work, and the possible resultant breakdown, not only in an emotional sense but in a real, potentially fatal physical or medical sense as well. In all three movies, the director conceives of his ability to restore his sense of inner wholeness and male identity in a manner that contradicts the conventional balance of power, while customary power-relations are revealed as another road to loss of identity and sense of self. Each of the films ties the director’s ability to renew his sense of personal wholeness to developing a relationship with his surroundings, facilitated by audience appreciation, critical praise, or empathy from those close to him – all of which reinforce his feeling of belonging and significance. Without these aspects, the “absolute artist”, whose life revolves around his art, is shown to be at death’s door, whether symbolically or in reality.
Journal Article
Without a Conceivable Future: Figuring the Mother in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
Alfonso Cuaron repeatedly insists that he did not intend to create a science fiction film when he directed Children of Men (2006); rather, he understands his work as an extrapolation from his post- 9/11 context into the future through his technique of \"referencing\" familiar images, icons, and visual rhetoric. At stake is whether accepting Cuaron's own generic designation obscures some of the critical work that the film does and, conversely, whether perhaps reading Cuaron's film as science fiction could lead to a more nuanced interpretation of his vision. Darko Suvin, a leading scholar in the debates about the nature of science fiction, defines science fiction as \"a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.
Journal Article
The Legal Fiction and Epistolary Form: Frances Burney’s Evelina
This article argues that Frances Burney’s Evelina uses the resources of epistolary form to intervene in eighteenth-century debates concerning the “legal fiction” of paternity. In doing so, Burney makes epistolarity into a technology of subjectivity that refuses the subsumption of the subject into the powerful symbolic discourse of the law, and also refuses her definitive attachment to the materiality of biological paternity. Burney locates the “epistolary fiction” at precisely the point at which the subject is split between materiality and discourse: the letter. By reading the way in which Caroline Belmont is, in a posthumously delivered letter, unable to definitively address Sir John Belmont as husband, lover, or father of her child, this piece argues that it is the question of address, the letter’s material link to the world, that Burney makes crucial to epistolarity. Evelina shows that paternity (like the letter itself) is too sensuous to be a mere fiction of the law (or of literary style). The epistolary mode is not simply a conceit that allows an author to realistically explore the interiority of the subject, but a technology that marks the subject’s “entrance into the world” as irreducibly material.
Journal Article
Nafissatou Dia Diouf's critical look at a \Senegal in the Midst of Transformation\
Nafissatou Dia Diouf is a Senegalese author who has garnered recognition both in her home country and internationally since she began publishing in the 1990s. Her work, including fiction, poetry, children's literature, and philosophical essays, portrays diverse topics as they relate to her country such as education, marriage, polygamy, maternity/paternity, the influence of the West, the roles of business and government, and the power of the media. Diouf provides her reader with a comprehensive yet critical view of Senegal and shows how her homeland is affected by and reacts to the changes it currently faces. In a recent interview, Diouf stated: \"For me, the first role of a citizen, even more when one has the power of influence such as in the case of writers, is to take a critical look (a constructive critique, of course) at one's own country.\" In this article that combines an interview with the author and textual analysis of her work, I explore how Nafissatou Dia Diouf critically examines contemporary Senegalese society and portrays a country in the process of transition and transformation. Through her visionary writing, Diouf works to construct a new type of Senegalese society and identity of which she and her fellow citizens can be proud.
Journal Article
Mothers of Invention: Fictional Alternatives to Procreation
French feminists are sometimes perceived as making slower progress than their European sisters because suffrage was not achieved until well into the twentieth century, but this perception fails to take into account that for French women themselves, the vote was secondary to other, more pressing feminist issues. The right to force men to take responsibility for paternity, for example, was of far more interest in the fin-de-siècle and Belle Epoque periods. Until (and even after) this right was won in the first decade of the twentieth century, women often bore total responsibility for children, which meant that in an era of limited contraception, women ran far greater risks than men if they engaged in sexual activity that could result in conception. This article considers some of the ways women explored alternative forms of sexual expression in the Belle Epoque period, making perhaps a virtue out of necessity, and illustrates the emphasis on non-procreative sexuality through the work of novelist Rachilde (1860-1953), whose fiction enthusiastically offers a veritable catalogue of alternative sexualities.
Journal Article
William Gibson's Paternity Test
Contemporary culture views DNA through a strange temporal logic: on the one hand, technologies of DNA identification and sequencing testify to fundamental transformations in the way we understand biology, anthropology, law, and medicine—we live in \"the DNA age\"; and on the other, these technologies have revealed as much about the past as they have about the present or future, gesturing backwards to scenes of conception, crime, and evolutionary branching. The essay shows how this double temporal logic operates within William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa . It concludes that the poem's stanzas form a metaphorical DNA fingerprint that reveals Gibson's life to be, paradoxically, a novel repetition of his father's and grandfather's lives.
Journal Article