Pygmalion

Pygmalion's sculpture, which the gods endowed with life, marks, according to this book, perhaps the first instance in Western art of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something else. Stoichita delivers this image and its avatars from the shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality.

Discusses the ethics of writing and reading fiction, the creation and action of characters, and works by Henry James, Melville, Heinrich von Kleist, and Maurice Blanchot

Pygmalion' is a play by George Bernard Shaw. It is named after a Greek mythological figure. In this play, Professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.

The Pygmalion Effect takes place in the year 2104 CE when genetically-enhanced intelligence has split the world into two classes, the rich and the poor. The young protagonist, Corbin, lives on the burned out streets of Boston, barely scraping by for food and shelter. Through manipulation, infiltration, and pure genius, he must fight back against the system and try to dismantle a massive plot aimed at killing his people in an attempt to cleanse the world of all non-enhanced beings.

This title was published in 2001. Pygmalion and Galatea presents an account of the development of the Pygmalion story from its origins in early Greek myth until the twentieth century. It focuses on the use of the story in nineteenth-century British literature, exploring gender issues, the nature of artistic creativity and the morality of Greek art.

A success on the stage, a popular film, and a musical hit (My Fair Lady), this brilliantly written play, with its irresistible theme of the emerging butterfly, is one of the most acclaimed comedies in the English language.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Trier, course: Introduction to Drama Analysis, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Bei dieser Arbeit handelt es sich um die Rolle, welche die Exposition in Pygmalion hat. Dies wird, nach einem generellen Eindruck, am Beispiel der einzelnen, wichtigsten, Charactere deutlich gemacht. Diese Carakterer waren: Higgins, Pickering und naturlich Eliza. Am Ende der Arbeit werden die einzelnen Charactere, beziehungsweise ihre Exposition, miteinander verglichen und gezeigt, wie sie sich ineinander verflechten."

Nature imitates art—not a paradox from Oscar Wilde's pen, but instead the bold formulation of the Latin poet Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE), marking a radical turning point in ancient aesthetics, founded on the principle of mimesis. For Ovid, art is independent of reality, not its mirror: by enhancing phantasia, the artist's creative imagination and the simulacrum's primacy over reality, Ovid opens up unexplored perspectives for future European literature and art. Through an examination of Narcissus and Pygmalion, figures of illusion and desire, who are the protagonists of two major episodes of the Metamorphoses, Rosati sheds light on some crucial junctures in the history of reception and aesthetics. Narcissus and Pygmalion has, since its first publication in Italian, contributed to the poet's critical fortunes over the past few decades through its combination of sophisticated literary critical thinking and patient argument applied to the poetics of self-reflexivity and, in particular, to the fundamental interface between the verbal and the visual in the Metamorphoses. A substantial introduction accompanies this new translation into English, positioning Rosati's work anew in the forefront of current discussions of Ovidian aesthetics and intermediality, in the wake of the postmodern culture of the simulacrum.

Пигмалион – одно из величайших произведений Джорджа Бернарда Шоу. Это история простой цветочницы Элизы Дулиттл, которая решила стать настоящей леди, обратившись за помощью к вздорному и высокомерному профессору лингвистики. Тот берётся научить Элизу правильному произношению и избавиться от её кокни-акцента. Остроумная комедия показывает искусственность различия социальных классов и обнаруживает, что говорить, как леди – не то же самое, что быть ею. Читайте зарубежную литературу в оригинале!

Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm: Fashioning the Feminine in I nostri antenati and Gli amori difficili is the first book-length analysis of the representation of the feminine in Calvino’s fiction. Using the structural umbrella of the Pygmalion paradigm and using feminist interpretative techniques, this book offers interesting alternative readings of two of Calvino’s important early narrative collections. The Pygmalion paradigm concerns the creation by a male ‘artist’ of a feminine ideal and highlights the artificiality and narcissistic desire associated with the creation process. This book discusses Calvino’s active and deliberate work of self-creation, accomplished through extensive self-commentaries and exposes both the lack of importance Calvino placed on the feminine in his narratives and the relative absence of critical attention focused on this area. Relying on the analogy between Pygmalion’s pieces of ivory and Barthes’ ‘seme’ and drawing upon the ideas underlying Kristevan intertextuality, the book demonstrates that, despite Calvino’s professed lack of interest in character development, his female characters are carefully and purposefully constructed. A close reading of Calvino’s narratives, engaging directly with Freud, Lacan and the feminist psychoanalytical thinking of Kofmann, Kristeva, Kaplan and others, demonstrates how Calvino uses his female characters as foils for the existential reflections of his typically maladjusted and narcissistic male characters.

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Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough,” by Tracy M. Hallstead, examines the enduring critical presence in contemporary Western culture that scrutinizes, critiques, and sizes women down in their daily lives, despite rights gained through the centuries. Pygmalion was the ancient mythical sculptor who believed that all women were essentially flawed. He therefore endeavored to chisel to perfection a statue of a woman he called “Galatea.” Like the perpetually carved and perfected Galatea, women labor under Western culture’s a priori assumption that they are flawed, yet they are often unable to account for the self-criticism and self-doubt that result from this premise. As Hallstead analyzes the culture’s requirements for the perfect woman, she traces how cultural forces permeate women’s personal lives. In calling for solutions, she resurfaces the thinking of historical women who responded, rather than reacted, to the patriarchal culture that devalued them. In engaging these women of the past, whose struggles were eerily similar to our own, Hallstead encourages a responsive feminism that becomes the clear path leading outside Pygmalion’s chamber door.

The Pygmalion myth, most famously told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, has always fascinated artists. This fascination, due to the erotic potential of the story, resulted in an abundance of patriarchal re-narrations from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century. With the turn of the 20th century, however, the Pygmalion stories gradually changed under the influence of feminist thought and emancipation. The woman created by Pygmalion no longer remained a passive creature but began to resist her master and his male fantasies, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes in open rebellion. The study at hand focuses on the development of the tale in the Anglo-Saxon literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The author will analyze some of these modern Pygmalion versions, written by George Bernard Shaw, Carol Ann Duffy and Neil LaBute amongst other significant author

Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre. Pygmalion (1912) was a world-wide smash hit from the time of its première in Vienna 1913 and it has remained popular to this day. Shaw was awarded an Academy Award in 1938 for his screenplay of the film adaptation. It was, of course, later made into the much-loved musical My Fair Lady. Heartbreak House (1917), which was finally performed in 1920 and published in 1921, bares the hallmarks of European modernism and a formal break from Shaw's previous work. A meditation on the war and the resultant decline in European aristocratic culture, it was perhaps staged too soon after the conflict; indeed, it did not have the success of his earlier works, which was likely due to his experimental aesthetics combined with a war-weary audience that sought lighter fare. However, while this contemporary reception was muted, it is now recognised as a modernist masterpiece. Saint Joan (1923) marked Shaw's resurrection and apotheosis. The first major work written of Joan of Arc after her canonization (1920), the play interrogates the origins of European nationalism in the post-war era. Like Pygmalion, it was an immediate world-wide hit and secured Shaw the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Drawing upon the transcripts of Joan's trial, Shaw blended his trademark wit to produce a hybrid genre of comedy and history play. Despite the historical setting, Saint Joan is highly accessible and continues to delight audiences.

In Pygmalion, Shaw presents the classical story of a professor who transforms a girl of the lower class into an elegant creature, who then falls in love with him—unfortunately in love, that is. Set in Bulgaria, Arms and the Man satirizes romantic attitudes about love and war. Raina, the heroine, falls in love with a cowardly, chocolate-loving enemy soldier during an unnamed war. After the war, her fiance challenges her new admirer to a duel, loses heart, and proposes to the maid instead.