BROWN FACES GO WHITE - Alger, Horatio

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Résumé :
Even though films in India occupy a special place evoking scholarly attention, their place in Tamil society is unique and has been fairly documented. The main purpose of this book is to analyse and understand the shift that is perceptible in the way personhood in Tamil films has been conceptualised. This book thus tries to account for the dramatic movement away from the way the concept of person was shown in Tamil films till recently to a surprisingly new way of deploying the concept of person as observable in the new spate of Tamil movies that have come out during the last decade of the 20th Century. While the old concept of person as seen through Tamil films, strictly adhered to the idioms and codes generated by Dravidian movement, the post 1990s Tamil Film heroes, break and violates these idioms and codes, and unveil a completely new person, whose significance, especially in the context of socio-economic-political changes of the globalisation phase, is the focus of this book.

Sommaire:
Horatio Alger, an American novelist who lived from January 13, 1832, to July 18, 1899, authored books for young adults about poor lads who, through their good deeds, climb from impoverished roots to lives of stability and comfort in the middle class. His works are known for their rags-to-riches narrative, which had a formative influence on the Gilded Age United States. All of Alger's young adult books revolve around the idea that a young man can change his situation for the better by acting morally. The Horatio Alger myth holds that the young man achieves success via toil, however, this is untrue. The youngster behaves according to classic characteristics like honesty, generosity, and altruism in the actual stories, and success is invariably the result of an accident that works to the boy's advantage. The youngster might recover a sizable sum of money that was misplaced or save a passenger from a derailed carriage. A wealthy person notices the youngster and his predicament as a result of this. For instance, in one tale, a little child narrowly avoids being hit by a streetcar before being snatched away to safety by a homeless orphan youth....