Radio Preaching in Southern Appalachia by Rebecca Dean

Abstract:

Appalachian inspired Pentecostal radio preaching maintains the Protestant legacy
of that region first settled through the medium of radio. These sermons are characterized by high levels of affect in delivery, and serve to differentiate
“preacher culture” from those denominations that abandoned
their original heritage for admittance into middle class
status. Thus, preacher culture is an ac
t of both religious and class descent because they are “inspired” by the Holy
Spirit (that is, not composed before delivery). Gramscian not
ions of hegemony are used to interpret how “preacher
culture” has maintained itself since the settlement by the northern British and the Scots to Appalachia. The genre of
melodrama and “preacher culture” share significant parallel
s and content, dynamics of presentational styles, and
because of these basic parallels, theories of melodrama of
fer analytical methods for analysis of the content of the
inspired sermons and the way of life they elaborate. Gramscian notions of negotiation and consent are used to
analyze the maintenance of “preacher culture”, which maintains both tradition and cultural specificity that is
characteristic of southern Appalachia.

“Melodrama and Natural Science: Reading the “Greenwich Murder” in the Mid-Century Periodical Press” by Anne Rodrick

Abstract:

The “Greenwich Murder,” an 1846 infanticide and incest case, was covered extensively in the newspaper press. Reporters and editors employed both the language of melodrama and the language of the natural science lecture in order to help their readers understand how the arcane chemical data of the coroner’s inquest could reinforce the familiar tropes of good and evil embedded in domestic melodrama. This case demonstrates the ways in which these two competing frames existed in tension with one another and how journalistic practices began to change in order to accommodate readers’ appetites for complex criminal reporting.

Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl by Claire T. Solomon

Abstract:

In her article “Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (1929-2016)” Claire Solomon analyzes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope as an apparatus of capture (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand). More precisely, her article models how such tropes imply modes of reading anachronistically and metafictionally that decontextualize gestures of resistance and conflate female writers, performers, and characters across time and place. Solomon offers a situated formalist reading of Argentine playwright Salvadora Medina Onrubia’s 1929 drama, Las descentradas, revealing an avant-garde counterpoint of melodrama and metafiction as an ambiguous alternative to capture.

A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama” by Sayandeb Chowdhury

Since the early years of India’s emergence into a ‘post-colony’, the possibilities of the popular in Bengali cinema had to be renegotiated within the complex registers offered by a severely decimated cultural economy of the region. It could be claimed that by early 1950s, Bengali cinema’s negotiation of a linguistic and spatial equivalent of ‘disputed’ and ‘lost’ nation led to it trying to constantly spatialize Calcutta, offering several possibilities to reinterpret the metropolar visuality in and of the postcolonial city. Calcutta provided Bengali cinema a habitation, a metaphor of modernity and a spatial equivalent of a nation. A substantive share of Bengali cinema’s spatial turn was within the formal configurations of melodrama, the talisman of which was the star figure of Uttam Kumar. Kumar’s effortless urbanity stood vanguard to the popular-modern of postcolonial Bengali cinema, while his films also provided a sustained critique of the same. This article interrogates popular cinema from the vantage of the visualized space of the city. Drawing from space theory, melodrama and star studies, it interrogates the nature of the Bengali metropolitan-popular and would hope to provide a new understanding of cinema’s aesthetic institutionalization and narrative function within the scope of melodrama and stardom.

The poetics of Indian cinema: introduction by Sudhir Mahadevan and Anuja Jain