Cada vez que prendemos la televisión para ver nuestra telenovela favorita y así ver a la protagonista llorar por su amor perdido o lamentarse por la amante de su pareja, estamos gozando de un producto del melodrama. Se trata del género característico de las expresiones potenciadas, de las lágrimas y los gritos en su apogeo. A través de los años (largas décadas) los productos melodramáticos han evolucionado y se han adaptado a los nuevos medios, como la Internet y antes, la televisión. El melodrama ha dado un salto grande desde los cuentos (expresión oral) hasta las tecnologías actuales, y por eso ha sabido sobrevivir y recoger fieles espectadores que buscan una película, una novela, una telenovela o una teleserie con la cual identificarse y sentirse acompañados. / Cada vez que prendemos la televisión para ver nuestra telenovela favorita y así ver a la protagonista llorar por su amor perdido o lamentarse por la amante de su pareja, estamos gozando de un producto del melodrama. Se trata del género característico de las expresiones potenciadas, de las lágrimas y los gritos en su apogeo. A través de los años (largas décadas) los productos melodramáticos han evolucionado y se han adaptado a los nuevos medios, como la Internet y antes, la televisión. El melodrama ha dado un salto grande desde los cuentos (expresión oral) hasta las tecnologías actuales, y por eso ha sabido sobrevivir y recoger fieles espectadores que buscan una película, una novela, una telenovela o una teleserie con la cual identificarse y sentirse acompañados. / Cada vez que prendemos la televisión para ver nuestra telenovela favorita y así ver a la protagonista llorar por su amor perdido o lamentarse por la amante de su pareja, estamos gozando de un producto del melodrama. Se trata del género característico de las expresiones potenciadas, de las lágrimas y los gritos en su apogeo. A través de los años (largas décadas) los productos melodramáticos han evolucionado y se han adaptado a los nuevos medios, como la Internet y antes, la televisión. El melodrama ha dado un salto grande desde los cuentos (expresión oral) hasta las tecnologías actuales, y por eso ha sabido sobrevivir y recoger fieles espectadores que buscan una película, una novela, una telenovela o una teleserie con la cual identificarse y sentirse acompañados.

La novela Corazón de Fuego, es una producción realizada ya no con miras de que sea reconocida sólo en el país de origen, sino que está pensada como un producto televisivo apto para la compra y consumo internacional. En palabras de Rodolfo Hoppe, su productor: (Refiriéndose a las actrices protagonistas de sus producciones anteriores) “Eran todas extranjeras, llevadas a otros países ¿Por qué acá no? Ósea, si funciona en el resto del mundo con gran éxito, ¿Por qué no va funcionar en el Perú?” Este producto, por lo tanto, ha sido elaborado bajo estándares internacionales.

This thesis considers the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar as postmodern melodramas. The crux of my argument is that melodrama is known for its expressiveness and its attempt to restore a spiritual element to a post-sacred world, and is used by Almodóvar to make clear the problems and contradictions inherent in the destabilized world of postmodernity. This definition of melodrama draws primarily on the work of Peter Brooks, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams; it is modified to apply to postmodernism as defined by Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson. The conclusion reached is that Almodóvar is deeply ambivalent about postmodernity. Chapter 2 considers the twin issues of representation and sexuality in Almodóvar’s first six films: Pepi, Luci, Born (Pepi, Luci Born y otras chicas del montón, 1980), Labyrinth of Passions (Laberinto de pasiones, 1982), Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas, 1983), What Have I Done To Deserve This? (Qué he hecho yopor merecer esto!, 1984), Matador (1986), and Law ofDesire (Le ley del deseo, 1987); with a special eye to the representation of sexual violence, it establishes how Almodóvar develops his ambivalent melodramatic imagination. Chapter 3 considers fashion as a discourse and argues that Almodóvar’s next four films use clothing to place different versions of femininity in dialogue, and uses this as a springboard to consider Women on the Verge ofa Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (I Atame!, 1990), High Heels (Tacones lejanos, 1991), and Kika (1993) as postmodern “women’s pictures.” Chapter 4 considers the appearance of the explicitly political along with the symbolism of the image of the map in The Flower of My Secret (Laflor de rni secreto, 1995), Live Flesh (Came trémula, 1997), and All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999). Chapter 5 uses the metaphor of ghosts to consider the draw of the past in Talk To Her (Hable con ella, 2002), Bad Education (La mala educación, 2004), and Volver (2006), pointing to both the emptiness of the present and the impossibility of returning to that golden past. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

This study develops a theory of melodrama based on Foucaldian concepts of power/resistance relations in discourse. This theoretical framework is tested by means of an analysis of five nineteenth-century English-Canadian texts: Elizabeth Lanesford Cushing's Esther (1840), Charles Heavysege's Saul (1859), Archibald Lampman's "David and Abigail" (1882), Oliver J. Booth's Jael, The Wife of Heber the Kenite (1901), and George Arthur Hammond's The Crowning Test (1901). The central premise posed in the study's Introduction is that melodrama's protestant aesthetic of the feminine deliberately counters the secular aesthetic of tragedy. Chapter One demonstrates that this premise reveals challenges and insights concerning melodrama not previously found in the critical literature. By means of the analysis of the texts given Chapters Two, Three, and Four, the study demonstrates the interpretive strategies made possible by this re-evaluation of the genre and its gender politics. The theoretical framework developed here contributes to an understanding of melodrama both as a trans-national genre and as central feature of nineteenth-century English-Canadian culture. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Nesse estudo, pretenderemos inquirir sobre a construção discursiva literária da peça D. Afonso VI, do escritor português oitocentista, D. João da Câmara. A peça pretende um diálogo intertextual com a historiografia em torno do monarca português seiscentista, herdeiro dEl-Rei Restaurador D. João IV. A ficção joanina colherá na historiografia o paradigma com que dialogará, mas, ao se lançar ao trabalho artístico da palavra literária (metáfora), dessacralizará as verdades historiográficas e proporá uma visão excêntrica do passado. Não obstante, o percurso de dessacralização do passado será permeado pela cosmovisão artística dramática de D. João da Câmara que produzirá, como veremos ao final desse estudo, uma peça híbrida, que oscila entre o drama e o melodrama burgueses. D. João da Câmara, falecido há 103 anos, por sua festejada obra dramática como Os Velhos, A triste Viuvinha, O Beijo do Infante e o revolucionário O Pântano, dentre outras, merece ter seu teatro de modelo historiográfico lembrado pela crítica literária. Tentaremos cumprir, aqui, o débito com a obra do dramaturgo. / In this study, well investigate the discursive construction of the literary work D. Afonso VI, of the eighteenth-century Portuguese writer, D. João da Câmara. The text intends an intertextual dialogue with the historiography around the sixteenth-century Portuguese monarch, heir of the King Restorative D. João IV. The fiction johannine reap in the historiography the paradigm that establish a dialog, but when launching the artwork of the literary word (metaphor), desecrating the historiographical truths and propose an eccentric vision of the past. Nevertheless, the route of desecration of the past will be permeate by the dramatic artistic worldview D. João da Câmara that will produce, as we shall see the end of this study, a hybrid piece, which oscillates between drama and melodrama bourgeois. D. João da Câmara, who died 103 years ago, celebrated for his dramatic work as Os Velhos, A Triste Viuvinha, O Beijo do Infante and the revolutionary O Pântano, among others, deserve to have your theater historiographical model remembered by literary criticism. We will try to accomplish, here, the debt to the work of the playwright.

Nesse estudo, pretenderemos inquirir sobre a construção discursiva literária da peça D. Afonso VI, do escritor português oitocentista, D. João da Câmara. A peça pretende um diálogo intertextual com a historiografia em torno do monarca português seiscentista, herdeiro dEl-Rei Restaurador D. João IV. A ficção joanina colherá na historiografia o paradigma com que dialogará, mas, ao se lançar ao trabalho artístico da palavra literária (metáfora), dessacralizará as verdades historiográficas e proporá uma visão excêntrica do passado. Não obstante, o percurso de dessacralização do passado será permeado pela cosmovisão artística dramática de D. João da Câmara que produzirá, como veremos ao final desse estudo, uma peça híbrida, que oscila entre o drama e o melodrama burgueses. D. João da Câmara, falecido há 103 anos, por sua festejada obra dramática como Os Velhos, A triste Viuvinha, O Beijo do Infante e o revolucionário O Pântano, dentre outras, merece ter seu teatro de modelo historiográfico lembrado pela crítica literária. Tentaremos cumprir, aqui, o débito com a obra do dramaturgo. / In this study, well investigate the discursive construction of the literary work D. Afonso VI, of the eighteenth-century Portuguese writer, D. João da Câmara. The text intends an intertextual dialogue with the historiography around the sixteenth-century Portuguese monarch, heir of the King Restorative D. João IV. The fiction johannine reap in the historiography the paradigm that establish a dialog, but when launching the artwork of the literary word (metaphor), desecrating the historiographical truths and propose an eccentric vision of the past. Nevertheless, the route of desecration of the past will be permeate by the dramatic artistic worldview D. João da Câmara that will produce, as we shall see the end of this study, a hybrid piece, which oscillates between drama and melodrama bourgeois. D. João da Câmara, who died 103 years ago, celebrated for his dramatic work as Os Velhos, A Triste Viuvinha, O Beijo do Infante and the revolutionary O Pântano, among others, deserve to have your theater historiographical model remembered by literary criticism. We will try to accomplish, here, the debt to the work of the playwright.

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No description available.

Melodrama is a popular mode of address that privileges affect at the expense of reflection and critique. Generally held in disrepute, melodrama's simplicity and sensationalism are widely read as a sign of social and psychological alienation. Melodrama responds to its critics, however, with ever-renewed and self-assured appeals to affect itself. Melodrama's irreducible privilege of affect in mind, therefore, the thesis proposes that affect admits description in Levinasian terms as a "radical passivity." The Levinasian proposal on affect, moreover, is extended to a theory of cinema, which, it is shown, is particularly well suited to melodramatic expression. / Affect or "embodied passivity," Levinas explains, is irreducible to phenomenological notions of intentionality, psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic investment or cognitive appraisals of psychic processing. To be a body is to be exposed to wounding but it is also a naIve agreement to the conditions of its sustentation. To be a body, in short, is to be capable of being affected. For Levinas this passive relation to what is other is the condition of an ethical responsibility that is absolute. Levinas's notion of embodied passivity, however, has aesthetic implications about which he was deeply ambiguous. Hence it is in the context of an aesthetics of embodied passivity, largely unexplored by Levinas, that the thesis examines melodrama's focus on affect and the specifically cinematic expressions of embodied passivity. / Melodrama's accessible address, however, reduces the Other, as Levinas would say, to caricatures, mobilizes affect in the direction of a "monopathic" response and disavows, in the process, the encounter with alterity to which it appeals. Nonetheless melodrama "fleshes out the cliche" or exploits the stereotype in the service of having, precisely, some affect. Such is the melodramatic privilege of enlivenment over the circumstances of its orchestration. Hence it is possible to appraise melodrama's heightened orchestrations of style, its recourse to emphasis and its enduring appeals to suffering and happiness, as prevailing testimony to the (unspeakable) nature of the body's irreducible vulnerability. Melodrama's elemental if simplistic vision is that affect matters absolutely.

Univ., Diss.--München, 2003.