This study uses frameworks transposed from Japanese comics studies to examine the transformation of the eponymous protagonist of Happy Hooligan, an early American newspaper comic. The essay pays particular attention to issues of character design and highlights problems and possibilities arising from the treatment of stereotypical characters in Japanese writing on comics. Previous research on Happy Hooligan (1900-1932) has focused on how the protagonist of this series has been depicted as a stereotypical poor Irish immigrant. Ōtsuka Eiji and Miyamoto Hirohito, for example, argue that stereotypes in comics are depicted via the predictable and unchanging design of characters. In this case, largely due to the name “Happy Hooligan,” the alliteration of the name, combined with its suggestion of carefree simplicity, draws on ethnic stereotype to characterize the main character. Going against the grain of this research, this essay focuses on overlooked early episodes of the comic (1900-1901) to suggest a substantially different representation of the main character and explains a transformation in “Happy’s” characterization from a morally problematic character in early episodes to a sympathetic character in the episodes that follow.

抄録全体を表示

This essay explores how Rohmer used the off- screen voice recorded directly as something that “has a sense of presence” in relation to character dynamics in the diegetic world of film. Specifically, it aims to shed new light on one end of the usage of dialogue voices in Rohmer’s films. Rohmer began to adopt direct sound recording in earnest with his 1969 film My Night at Maud’s. Directly recorded off-screen voices that characterize the dialogue scenes of the film use echoes and noises to create the sense that the dialogue is taking place right then and there. In subsequent films throughout the 1970s and 80s, off-screen voices continue to be used in Rohmer’s dialogue scenes, functioning as a device to convey this sense of the “realistic” present. However, in the latter half of the 1980s, in The Green Ray and Boyfriends and Girlfriends, off-screen voices shift from this role of ambient reality-through-fidelity and operate differently in decisive scenes of accidental meeting. In both films, a heroine who suffers from loneliness happens to reconnect with a female friend who gives her the opportunity to get a boyfriend. All of the accidental meeting scenes that turn the heroine’s fate around are introduced by overlaying the shots of the heroine with the off-screen voices of her female friends calling out her name. This mise-en-scène creates the impression that the heroine is now being “called” by her anonymous “voice being (acousmêtre),” resulting in an audiovisual agency that shapes the turning points of the narrative.

抄録全体を表示

Since the advent of Structuralism in the 1960s, particularly in the modern Anglophone and Francophone world, scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rita Felski have pointed to the historical limits of “critique” and have called for a revision of the epistemological framework that supports the very idea of critique. Such proponents of “postcritique” condemn the tradition of skepticism that has been the norm in the art of criticism. They call, rather, for a shift to a form of critique that does not distance itself from the text but rather actively immerses itself in it. At the same time, immersion in the text runs the risk of reducing the work of criticism to the level of impressions. This paper first presents a conceptual inventory of attempts to transcend the limitations of traditional modes of film criticism, then offers an epistemological model that facilitates new forms of criticism. Such a model would allow for the viewer’s engagement by challenging the excessive power of recognition that leads them to consider texts that are actually discrete in nature as coherent representations.

抄録全体を表示