Editorial [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina, Irene Scicluna: University of Malta
‘Long live theory’: An Interview with Derek Attridge [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina, Irene Scicluna: University of Malta
Remembering Hamlet: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and the tragic value of Hamlet [PDF]
Elsa Fiott: University of Malta
The canonical importance of Hamlet is indisputable, but the nature of its cultural value needs to be reconsidered in relation to our contemporary understanding of tragedy and death. Though the play has clearly stood the test of time, the shadow that Hamlet casts over literature and beyond has led to many reinterpretations, keeping the play’s cultural meaning in constant flux. Consequently, I would suggest that Hamlet’s original tragic value has in fact diminished and cannot be quite fully restored. I will argue that Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead holds a significant position in this history of Hamlet reworkings precisely because it captures the discontent and disillusionment that a contemporary audience might have with regards to the grandeur of Hamlet as a tragedy and its questionable treatment of death. Stoppard’s displacement of the iconic Hamlet gives us access to the play’s underbelly, which Stoppard attacks by questioning the credibility and relevance of the concept of agency in post-Beckettian theatre. As Hamlet, agency, and heroism are decentred, the tragedy of the unheroic non-agent becomes all the more palpable, thereby resuscitating the poignancy of Hamlet without evoking its now inapt grandeur.
Playground of Gender: Cross-Dressing and Self-Mutilation as Negation of Gender Identity in Tanja Dückers’s Spielzone (1999) [PDF]
Katrin Dautel: University of Malta
Although it is an outstanding example of writing life as negotiation of gender roles as well as exploration of the body as site of identity constructs, Tanja Dückers’s novel Spielzone, published in 1999, has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. The novel displays an interesting aesthetic technique of representing the milieu of two Berlin districts and their inhabitants, whose identity conflicts can be shown to reflect the state of construction of the urban space before its homogenization through gentrification. Especially with regard to gender identities, Dückers portrays the search for a different lifestyle, which is expressed through a striking focus on aesthetic differentiation and cross-dressing. The protagonists stage masculinity and femininity through a theatrical masquerade, which reveals the construct of gender identities and advocates a postmodern transgender existence. The negotiation of a new identity without binary gender attributions ranges from the negation of traditional role assignments to self-mutilation. In the following article, Dückers’s text will be analysed as uncanny playground of gender between masquerade and brutal gender embodiment, which nevertheless, with all its negations of conventional values, eventually moves near to a return to traditional patterns.
Faithful and Disappointing: Reflections on the Idea of Idola [PDF]
James Corby: University of Malta
In this brief article, reviewing Dustin Cauchi’s photomontage Idola, photography is seen as a medium caught in the short interspaces between life and art. Prompted by Larkin’s poetic distillation of photography as ‘faithful and disappointing’, the nature of these idola’s (non)faithfulness to life are examined with thoughts of performative elements and deception, and the nature of these fidelities is explored. The idola are further considered as eide, ‘the presentation to itself of being or the thing’, or, as with Hegel’s definition of art, as a sensuous manifestation of an idea. It is in this disappointment that they are faithful, and the realisation of the problematic nature of the illusion of proximity/immediacy that lies underneath the surface of such photographic instances is given its due consideration.
Games and Literary Theory Conference, 2013 – Conference Review [PDF]
James Farrugia, Jeffrey Micallef: University of Malta
Insularity: Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds, 2013 – Conference Review [PDF]
James Farrugia, Elsa Fiott: University of Malta
