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Long before Batman, Flash Gordon, or the Lone Ranger were the stars of their own TV shows, they had dedicated audiences watching their adventures each week. The difference was that this action took place on the big screen, in short adventure serials whose exciting cliffhangers compelled the young audience to return to the theater every seven days.Matinee Melodramais the first book about the adventure serial as a distinct artform, one that uniquely encouraged audience participation and imaginative play. Media scholar Scott Higgins proposes that the serial's incoherent plotting and reliance on formula, far from being faults, should be understood as some of its most appealing attributes, helping to spawn an active fan culture. Further, he suggests these serials laid the groundwork not only for modern-day cinematic blockbusters likeStar WarsandRaiders of the Lost Ark, but also for all kinds of interactive media that combine spectacle, storytelling, and play.As it identifies key elements of the serial form-from stock characters to cliffhangers-Matinee Melodramadelves deeply into questions about the nature of suspense, the aesthetics of action, and the potentials of formulaic narrative. Yet it also provides readers with a loving look at everything fromZorro's Fighting LegiontoDaredevils of the Red Circle, conveying exactly why these films continue to thrill and enthrall their fans.

Things in Homer cannot complain about a lack of attention. Nearly forty years ago, Jasper Griffin, in response to the oralist emphasis on composition and formulaic language, drew our attention to the many significant objects populating the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nestor's cup, for example, is so heavy that other men have difficulties to lift it; the cup illustrates the eminence of its owner who rubbed shoulders with the far greater heroes of the past. As Griffin demonstrated, Homer deftly uses the significance of objects to enrich many scenes of his narrative. While the sceptre, symbol of the king's power, underscores the sorry figure cut by Agamemnon in Iliad Book 2, the washing places that Hector passes when he tries to escape Achilles generate a powerful tragic contrast to the battlefield chase in which he is now involved. Following Griffin's lead, scholars have closely examined things and their role in Homeric epic, notably their commemorative function: weapons and other objects have biographies and are therefore an important means of evoking the past besides song.

This paper presents a methodology for voice quality analysis in dubbing and other audiovisual translation modes that include revoicing. The degree of correspondence between source and target voices, namely character coherence, is of utmost importance in audiovisual translation if we are to deliver a faithful translation and avoid unnecessary stereotypical cliches that could lead the audience to biased narrative. Although a few attempts at analysing voice quality have been done in audiovisual translation (Bosseaux 2015, 2018, Rodríguez Fernández-Peña 2020), we believe the methodologies proposed are incomplete since fundamental elements, such as the phonation types, voice group and the fundamental frequency range are not included. Here, we will present a methodology that complements the ones suggested by the scholarly tradition and which offers a comprehensive analysis of the actors’ voice qualities resorting to the speech analysis software Praat, and which is explained in the analysis of Hollywood voices offered at the end. Voice quality and identity constructions will be considered taking into account disciplines such as psychology, phonetics and phonology, audiology, and musicology. In addition, we will present the different types of phonation according to the most relevant researchers, which, together with other physical elements, are fundamental in order to analyse voice quality and their communicative value.

This article seeks to reassess widespread critical usage of the terms “surface” and “superficial” with regard to Gothic fiction. The first part of the article provides a critical examination of the conventional surface-and-depth model, and proposes, as an alternative, a surficial approach to text which assigns to thresholds a central role. The second part brings these notions to bear upon the formulaic language associated with the word “horror”. This is a key term in Gothic fiction but one which (as opposed to the concept of horror) has never been an object of analysis. Concentrating on one Gothic novel, Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer, the article outlines the formulaic pattern shaped by the fifty-seven tokens of “horror” in the novel, and distils the system of connotations which the pattern attaches to the word. Analysis of formulaic structures reveals two things: first, that formulaicity is a technique for making the “surface” of the text—its language—visible; second, that the connotative system of “horror” in this novel is tied to a conceptualisation of reality for the description of which surface/depth models are inadequate. An alternative analysis is then offered in the light of the concepts of the surficial and the liminal.

Two lines from Chaucer's Book of the Duchess describe Alcyone's fruitless search for Ceyx: Anon she sent bothe eest and west / To seke him, but they founde nought.There is nothing particularly remarkable about these lines: no neologisms or technical vocabulary, no crude speech or high style. Indeed, a similar line about searching everywhere appears in the earlier English romance Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild: 'Horn lete sende est & west / His folk to batayle bede'.2 Both employ the idea of looking 'east and west'. Connections such as this one have elicited comparisons between Chaucer and writers of Middle English romance, for he employs many of the same formulaic expressions, verbal tags, and repeated elements - generally designated as 'line fillers' - that are so abundant in the romances.3 Most often, surveys of these features suggest sources or identify shared characteristics. Perhaps the least studied of these elements are those binomial expressions that link opposites - such as 'east and west', 'up and doun', 'to and fro', and 'night and day' - that I call universalizing doublets, in keeping with scholarly terminology.4 While some scholars have described Chaucer's use of universalizing doublets as a romance trait, no one has undertaken a comparative analysis of the frequency of these syntactical units in Chaucer's verse and contemporaneous Middle English romances. The question remains whether Chaucer truly adopted some language directly from earlier tales. Although universalizing doublets appear in contemporaneous works and throughout Chaucer's verse in analogous ways, evidence from non-romance texts shows that Chaucer's deployment of these phrases represents not an imitation of romance, but rather a continuation of typical English usage. With this new perspective, it is possible to understand better the extent to which Chaucer not only employs these 'line fillers' in the same artless manner as his predecessors, but also exploits them in creative ways. Analysis of Chaucer's use of doublets across his poetic corpus reveals the different ways in which he deploys everyday language, from straightforward adoption to linguistic play, from complete elision to thematic emphasis.

What can oral poetic traditions teach us about language and the human mind? Oral Poetics has produced insights relevant not only for the study of traditional poetry, but also for our general understanding of language and cognition: formulaic style as a product of rehearsed improvisation, the thematic structuring of traditional narratives, or the poetic use of features from everyday speech, among many others. The cognitive sciences have developed frameworks that are crucial for research on oral poetics, such as construction grammar or conversation analysis. The key for connecting the two disciplines is their common focus on usage and performance. This collection of papers explores how some of the latest research on language and cognition can contribute to advances in oral studies. At the same time, it shows how research on verbal art in its natural, oral medium can lead to new insights in semantics, pragmatics, or multimodal communication. The ultimate goal is to pave the way towards a Cognitive Oral Poetics, a new interdisciplinary field for the study or oral poetry as a window to the mind.

This response to Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm piece “The Ready-Made Pleasures of déjà vu ” turns on the example of the classic Bollywood song ‘Baar baar dekho’ (“Watch it again and again,” Chinatown , 1962), to elaborate on the pleasures of cinematic repetition captured by Appadurai’s interest in “repeat viewing,” or “watching as if for the second time.” By proffering the template of “call and response,” which derives from Africanist kinesthetic principles, in dialogue with Appadurai’s appeal to an Indic investment in “re-call and re-turn,” I examine how the protocols and structures of “spontaneous” improvisation constitute a shared yet divergent basis for a global, modern politics of pleasure. Through this strategy of placing in percussive play two cultural systems of rhythmic repetition, I posit the redemptive potential of repetition as difference as an answer to political mobilizations of repetition against difference.

Halfway between orality and writing, the statement of the women accused by the Inquisition of practicing sorcery raises interpretive difficulties that are hard to resolve. The analysis of the confession made by Vicenta Graçia Almenar before the Inquisition of Valencia (1623) will allow us to detect some of the factors that mediate between the discourse of the woman and the text produced by the Inquisition: aspects such as the transcription process (for example, the presence of errors and spelling slips introduced by the notary), the context of emission (which determines the use of a characteristic formulaic language) or the discursive typology (the narration of experiences and magical practices), among others, will shed new light on the construction of the defendant’s speech and on its transformation into a judicial text.

The Homeric poems were not intended for readers but for a listening audience. The stories, traditional in their basic elements, were learned by oral poets from earlier poets and re-created at every performance. Individual nuances, tailored to the audience and its particular preferences, could creep into the stories of the Greek heroes on each and every occasion when a bard recited the epics. For a particular audience at a particular moment, \"tradition\" is what it believes it has inherited from the past (and its traditions may not be particularly old). The boundaries between the traditional and the innovative may become blurry and indistinct. By rethinking tradition, we can see Homer's methods and concerns in a new light. The Homeric poet is not naive. He must convince his audience that the story is true—he must therefore seem disinterested, unconcerned with promoting anyone's interests. The poet speaks as if everything he says is merely the repetition of old tales; yet he carefully ensures that even someone who knows only a minimal amount about the ancient heroes can follow and enjoy the performance, while someone who knows many stories will not remember inappropriate ones. Pretending that every detail is already familiar, the poet heightens suspense and implies that ordinary people are the real judges of great heroes.