Metacritic Journal


for Comparative Studies and Theory

visual culture
ISSN 2457 – 8827
Mihaela Ursa Mihaela Ursa

Lovers and Tamers: Transmediations of Shakespeare's TAMING OF THE SHREW to Visual Culture


The critical dispute in the interpretive history of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is traditionally polarised between whether Katherina is - at the end of the play - tamed or not. This article examines part of this interpretive history as a barometer of cultural coding of domestic love. Instead of deciding yet again if Katherina is sincere, or just acting obedient, I want to see how different cultural contexts choose their reading of a canonic play in popular culture. The article shows how and where the...   ⇨ Read more
Felix  Nicolau Felix Nicolau

IMAGETEXT AND EKPHRASIS AS CHANCES OF REVIVAL IN TRANSLATION STUDIES


Translation Studies has crossed a tumultuous interval of theorization. But has it passed the linguistic limits instituted by a semiotician like Umberto Eco? Wouldn’t be the time to access more courageously the intersemiotic interregnum with its heterogeneous transfer of signs? As it happens in advertising, concrete poetry, tattoos, and stage or filmed version of famous texts? If we have gradually accepted that in the postcolonial and cross-cultural epoch what matters is not consensus, but negotiation and...   ⇨ Read more
Laura Pavel Laura Pavel

On Diving into Artistic Potentiality – The Infra-Gaze of Interpretation


What does it take for the cultural analyst to actually engage in a hermeneutical dialogue with ekphrastic artworks and to critically echo their mutual exchanges? How should the art critic acknowledge the dialogism that is intrinsic to different artistic media? It may be as if one adopted not only a meta perspective of interpretation, but also an infra view, by delving into the interstices of artistic praxis. This would amount to a methodological leap, from an encompassing, transcending gaze at artworks and...   ⇨ Read more
Călina Părău Călina Părău

Assembling “Bare Life” as National Corporeality in Cinema


The following paper addresses two different ways of constructing social and private visibility by means of cinematic investments of corporeal territoriality. Drawing upon transgender and national identity issues in Breakfast on Pluto (2005) it formulates the sense of belonging in relation to body representation. The other type of bodily material belonging is investigated through the cinema of Kusturica. In these films, images of the private are constructed as impossible self-portraits, generating new politics...   ⇨ Read more