Considering the overwhelming amount of media products that we are subjected to in the 21stcentury and the way in which those inevitably influence our perception of reality, this research pays specific attention to the role of the media in the construction and enhancement of stereotypes in everyday life, via the language or, more specifically, specialized languages. In particular, this paper aims to investigate an American legal TV series in order to analyze the way in which legal English is used in (...) dialogues. The major research questions are: to what extent such a kind of specialized discourse may be really understood by the greater audience? How does legal drama participate in the shaping of stereotypes relating to the legal environment in the country where it is produced, and cross-culturally, bearing in mind the prominence of “made in the USA” products in the television programming across the world? Ultimately, in the light of the previous questions, should the growing field of research in audiovisual translation extend its investigation into the area of legal English? Taking into consideration the seminal work of Pedersen and Diaz Cintas in the field of Audiovisual Translation, the study will examine the subtitling techniques employed for this atypical genre. Through the analysis of a corpus comprising several dialogues from a collection of episodes of the legal show Reckless, the paper will mostly focus on gender representations and their most common linguistically enhanced stereotypes. (shrink)

In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, (...) an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845. (shrink)

Professor Webster's attempt to prove that south Italian vases of the middle of the fourth century can be used as evidence of Athenian theatrical arrangements of half or three-quarters of a century earlier leaves me unconvinced. It, is true that, as he says, ‘the plays’ which the vases illustrate ‘come from Athens'— at least, most of them probably did: but a number of scenes on the vases are not scenes presented in the plays at all, but are scenes suggested to (...) the painter by descriptions in messengers’ speeches, or, quite possibly, by the story dramatized in the plays, but not by the Athenian poet's particular treatment of the story; the plays —and the stories made popular by them—had been the common property of the Greek world for more than half a century, and there is no reason why Italian producers should have gone back to the original production in Athens, still less why Italian painters should have done so, even if they knew what the original production was like. (shrink)

Hamilton explains why "drama" is a category of literature rather than of theater, even though it is appropriate to describe many theatrical performances as "dramatic." Consideration of the possibilities of theatrical performance are especially important to this category of literature, but need not be (and often are not) decisive in constraining interpretations of dramatic works.

Plato’s Charmides suggests that there are really four notions that are deeply connected with one another, and in order to understand sôphrosunê we need to get a proper hold on them and their relation: these four notions are Knowledge of Ignorance, Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of the Good, and Knowledge of the Whole. My aim is to explore these four notions in two stages. First, I will try to explain Socrates’s notion of knowledge of ignorance, so that the nature and coherence of (...) this Socratic idea will come into focus, and shed some light on its connection to self-knowledge and knowledge of the good. Second, I will turn to explain what I call the origin (archê) or even “truth” of Socrates’s conception of sôphrosunê by examining the idea of the physician of the soul in Plato’s Charmides and Plato’s use of the dialogue form, and thereby make a connection to knowledge of the whole. I will show that seeing sôphrosunê as “whole-mindedness,” connects to Socrates’s description of our in-between state as human beings, and that the study of this “in-between-ness,” is the supremely insightful glimpse into Socrates and his philosophical activity (perhaps the very definition of it). (shrink)

Plato’s Charmides suggests that there are really four notions that are deeply connected with one another, and in order to understand sôphrosunê we need to get a proper hold on them and their relation: these four notions are Knowledge of Ignorance, Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of the Good, and Knowledge of the Whole. My aim is to explore these four notions in two stages. First, I will try to explain Socrates’s notion of knowledge of ignorance, so that the nature and coherence of (...) this Socratic idea will come into focus, and shed some light on its connection to self-knowledge and knowledge of the good. Second, I will turn to explain what I call the origin (archê) or even “truth” of Socrates’s conception of sôphrosunê by examining the idea of the physician of the soul in Plato’s Charmides and Plato’s use of the dialogue form, and thereby make a connection to knowledge of the whole. I will show that seeing sôphrosunê as “whole-mindedness,” connects to Socrates’s description of our in-between state as human beings, and that the study of this “in-between-ness,” is the supremely insightful glimpse into Socrates and his philosophical activity (perhaps the very definition of it). (shrink)

Drama and Feeling makes a case for placing educational drama firmly within the curriculum and provides drama educators with new insight into the dramatic art form and process.

Toward the middle of her evocative, deeply personal new book, Ellen Handler-Spitz reflects, “What is the purpose of keeping secrets from children? What are the effects?” Parents, she continues, often seek to protect children from challenging pasts or fearful presents. We often, too, seek to shield children from our own mistakes. “Doubtless,” she avers, “we have performed acts of which we cannot feel proud.” Keeping silent is no good. But how, she asks again, “should we talk about the past?” Professor (...) Handler-Spitz’s provocations raise important, larger questions about how we rear our children. But this is not a handbook of upbringing. It is, instead, something of a guide to the imagination. In this .. (shrink)

Although it can hardly be denied that BT is—as its first paragraph declares—centrally concerned to advance the science of aesthetics by coming to grips with the essence of Attic tragedy, it should not be forgotten that its author also characterizes the book (in its foreword) as being in constant conversation with Richard Wagner, and hence as a continuation of their joint struggle properly to grasp the true purpose and full value of Wagnerian opera, understood as aspiring to the status of (...) a Gesamtkunstwerk. One might say that BT is an attempt to make sense of the Wagner circle’s habit of referring to their leader as Aeschylus—to ground Nietzsche’s intuition that the work of both men embodies an enigmatic sublimity .. (shrink)

In his new concluding chapter, Peter Kivy advances his argument on behalf of a distinctive intellectual and musical character of opera before Mozart. He proposes that happy endings were a musical--as opposed to a dramatic--necessity for opera during this period and that Mozart's Idomeneo is properly enjoyed and judged only when listeners are attuned to its seventeenth and eighteenth-century forebears.