Journal articles: 'Polidori, John William, in fiction' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

Nathaniel Hawthorne's view of his first American ancestors as belonging to a grim and gloomy race, impatient with human weaknesses and merciless towards transgressors, reflects a wide-spread popular attitude towards the Massachusetts Bay colonists. Indeed, Hawthorne's contribution to the construction and perpetuation of this view is not inconsiderable. Hawthorne frankly confesses to his own family descent from one of the “hanging judges” of the Salem witchcraft trials, and he does not spare any instance of persecution, obsession, or cruelty regarding the community led by his paternal ancestors. But Hawthorne does not stop at indicting his own family history; in a famous exchange with the president of Hartford College, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, shortly after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne is accused of blackening the reputation of another of New England's great colonial families. Hawthorne denied any knowledge of a “real” Pynchon family, let alone one with living (and litigious) descendants. He apologized for his mistake and offered to write an explanatory preface (which never appeared) for the second edition. Historical evidence suggests that Hawthorne, in fact, knew the history of the Pyncheon family, in particular William Pyncheon and his son John, of Springfield, who shared political and business connections throughout the mid-seventeenth century with William Hathorne of Salem. William Hathorne was a notorious persecutor of Quakers and his son John was the “hanging judge” of the witchcraft trials; William Pyncheon was a prominent fur-trader and founder of several towns along the Connecticut River who left the colony abruptly in circa 1651 accused of heresy. Given this history, a more likely model for the grim Colonel Pyncheon of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel is rather a composite of John and William Hathorne than William Pynchon. So why should Nathaniel, who had already in his fiction revealed his family skeletons, choose to displace his own family history on to the Pyncheon family, with all the trouble that then ensued?

Abstract:

Bir ütopya yazarı olan William Morris, genel olarak ideal dünya düzenini Ortaçağ döneminde geçen kurgularla yaratmıştır. Yazara göre, Ortaçağ, hiyerarşik yapısından dolayı dönemin örnek teşkil edecek bir topluma ev sahipliği yapmasına engel olan feodalizmin varlığından dolayı nispeten ideal bir toplum düzeni sunmaktadır. Ancak yine de köylülerin yaşamlarındaki uyum ve birlik ile zanaatkârlar ve/veya işçiler arasındaki iş dağılımı Morris'in ütopya algısının temelini oluşturmaktadır. Sonuç olarak feodalizmi yenmek için atılmış başarısız bir adım olsa da Morris 1381 yılında gerçekleştirilen Köylü Ayaklanması'nı dayanışmanın somut bir örneği olarak görmekteydi. Böylece insanların sosyalist ideolojiler çerçevesinde ideal bir toplum düzeni kurabileceğine inanmıştır. A Dream of John Ball (John Ball'un Rüyası) (1886) isimli romanında yazar, kendisini ayaklanmanın olduğu zamanlarda, on dördüncü yüzyılda bulan anlatıcının rüyasını anlatmaktadır. Söz konusu eserinde Morris Viktorya dönemi proletaryasına sanayicilere karşı ayaklanmak için dayanışmanın ne kadar önemli olduğunu göstermektedir. Bu bağlamda bu çalışmada Morris'in Köylü Ayaklanması'nı on dokuzuncu yüzyıl Britanya toplumunun dayanışmayı kuvvetlendirmeleri ve ideal bir dünya kurmalarını teşvik etmek amacıyla sosyalizm propagandası olarak nasıl kullandığı ele alınacaktır.

Abstract:

Our contribution investigates the question of how it is possible to apply multimodal methods of education in teaching ethics with fiction films. From a more sceptical viewpoint, one could argue that this is not possible for several reasons. The article suggests some arguments for the justification of positive answer, describes the resent researches of the problem and presents some results of multimodal teaching experiment of teaching ethics with fiction films. The theoretical basis for these approaches are the pragmatic pedagogy of William James and John Dewey, and close to them – the model of teaching with films developed by William B. Russell, also the Deleuzian theory of cinema.

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Treating science fiction, critics have taught us to understand that the field shrugged itself out of the swamp of its pulp origins in two great evolutionary metamorphoses, each associated with a uniquely visionary magazine editor: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell Jr. Paul Carter, to cite one critic among many, makes a case that Hugo Gernsback's magazines were the first to suggest thatscience fiction was not only legitimate extrapolation… [but] might even become a positive incentive to discovery, inspiring some engineer or inventor to develop in the laboratory an idea he had first read about in one of the stories. (5)Another, critic and author Isaac Asimov, argues that science fiction's fabledGolden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart's desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire. (Before the Golden Age, xii)Critics arrive at such understandings not only by surveying the field but also — perhaps more importantly — by studying, accepting, modifying, or even occasionally rejecting the work of other critics. This indirect and many-voiced conversation is usually seen as a self-correcting process, an informal yet public peer review. Such interested scrutiny has driven science fiction (SF) criticism to evolve from the letters to the editor and editorials and mimeographed essays of the past to the nuanced literary history of today, just as, this literary history states, those firm-minded editors helped SF literature evolve from the primordial fictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs into the sophisticated constructs of William S. Burroughs.

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This essay seeks to extend Faulkner's imaginative writings beyond the temporal, spatial and aesthetic parameters of regionalism and modernism, according to which his work has been widely read. In an exemplary reading of his 1942 novel Go Down, Moses, I recontextualize Faulkner's fiction in a broader literary and discursive tradition of the US frontier narrative. To draw out the frontier meanings and tropes of Go Down, Moses, I examine closely those texts – Faulkner's and others' – that circulate around the major fiction and necessarily exert, I argue, interpretative pressure on it. These more secondary or contiguous texts include Faulkner's screenwriting for two of the great Hollywood Western directors, John Ford and Howard Hawks; his short stories and speeches; James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales; and the political discourse that emerged in response to the democratic crisis of the 1930s. Certain tropes and narratives – to do with colonialism, for example – that have been submerged within the Faulknerian southern narrative of the plantation, begin to surface, to reset the narrative in relation to a national project. Reading Faulkner in this way constructs a critical frame that is both diachronic and transregionalist, and thus contributes to current debates articulated within the revisionary project of new southern studies about the ways in which we think and write anew about the post-South.

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AbstractThis essay considers the life, death, and afterlife of William Cowbridge a religious eccentric executed for heresy in 1538. It explores the significance of his religious beliefs, which became the source of a heated controversy between the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe and the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield. The case casts light on a range of issues, including the dynamic between Protestant and Catholic controversialists, the use of the label of ‘madness’ in argument, and the value of archival documentation alongside the use of oral sources in Reformation-era polemic. It also yields insight into Thomas Cromwell’s authority over the English Church during the late 1530s, and highlights his position among Henrician evangelicals as a source of influence and aid. Finally, it offers a critique about interpretations of early modern belief and the designation of the label ‘Lollard’.

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A swarm of books boasting William Shakespeare as a central character have hit the bookstands in recent years. The question is, why? In some books he is rather insipid, as if his brand is too hot to tamper with, and he is reduced to the status of a sacred cow. In other books he is too busy fighting for truth and justice to be bothered with taking up the quill, while in others, he is an opportunistic “Shake-scene” who has no qualms about “beautifying” himself with his contemporaries’ feathers. I propose to look at such works in the aggregate and determine the basic character traits that modern scribes attribute to our Will. My journey will take me primarily to novels (of the historical fiction school), but I shall be stopping along the way to consider works in other media, including a recent TV series, that also feature the Bard. Among the novelists included in my study are Patricia Finney (The James Enys Mysteries), Rory Clements (The John Shakespeare Mysteries), Benet Brandreth (The William Shakespeare Mysteries), and Leonard Tourney (The Mysteries of Shakespeare).

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Abstract The translation of narrative fiction, unlike that of poetry and drama, has received little critical attention, because it has not been deemed distinctive enough to merit study in its own right. The purpose of the article is to define the literary-critical approach to evaluating translated fiction, first by showing its reverse, the language-oriented approach, and then closely analyzing three instances where it is deployed. Then attention will be focused on one problem area and it is seen that shifts on a micro-structural level can create an effect on macro-structural elements, producing changes significant enough to give rise to alternative interpretations of the text. With specific examples from variant Chinese translations of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, John Fowles' The Collector, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, this article shows how the failure to "translate the narrator" belies in fact a failure to tune in to the literary qualities of a fictional text. To translate a novel adequately, one needs to take into account not just contextual meaning, but also "co-textual" or "inter-textual" meaning, the literary significance generated within the text itself. Résumé Contrairement à la traduction de poèmes et d'oeuvres dramatiques, la traduction des ouvrages de fiction narrative a moins été soumise à l'étude critique, parce qu'elle a toujours été considéréé comme une forme moins distinguée, méritant moins d'être étudiée en tant que telle. Le but du présent article est de définir une approche littéraire et critique permettant d'évaluer la traduction des oeuvres de fiction. L'article analyse en premier lieu une approche orientée vers le langage, et ensuite trois exemples qui concrétisent cette approche. L'attention du lecteur est attirée sur un passage à problèmes et ensuite, il découvrira que des glissem*nts opérés au niveau micro-structurel sont susceptibles de produire un effet sur les éléments macro-structurels et d'entraîner par conséquent des altérations capables de donner lieu à différentes interprétations du texte. A l'aide d'exemples extraites de plusieurs traductions chinoises de A Passage to India (E.M. Forster), Lord of the Flies (William Golding), The Collector (John Fowles) et The Catcher in te Rye (J.D.Salinger), l'article tente de démontrer que l'incapacité du traducteur à "traduire le narrateur" n'est autre que son incapacité à se mettre au diapason des qualités littéraires du texte de fiction. Pour traduire correctement un roman, le traducteur ne peut pas uniquement tenir compte de la signification contextuelle mais aussi de la signification "co-textuelle" ou "inter-textuelle", c'est-à-dire de la signification littéraire engendrée par le texte lui-même.

Abstract:

A swarm of books boasting William Shakespeare as a central character have hit the bookstands in recent years. The question is, why? In some books, he is rather insipid, as if his brand is too hot to tamper with, and he is reduced to the status of a sacred cow. In other books, he is too busy fighting for truth and justice to be bothered with taking up the quill, while in others, he is an opportunistic “Shake-scene” who has no qualms about “beautifying” himself with his contemporaries’ feathers. I propose to look at such works in the aggregate and determine the basic physical and character traits that modern scribes attribute to our Will. My journey will take me primarily to novels (of the historical fiction school), but I shall be stopping along the way to consider works in other media, including a recent TV series, that also features the Bard. Among the novelists included in my study are Patricia Finney (The James Enys Mysteries), Rory Clements (The John Shakespeare Mysteries), Benet Brandreth (The William Shakespeare Mysteries), and Leonard Tourney (The Mysteries of Shakespeare).

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This essay considers time’s relationship with space in the experience of sound, as depicted in a range of texts from 1875-1948. Though some of these texts view time and space as incommensurable―most notably, Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, whose criticism of “spatialised” time is a touchstone throughout the essay―the majority consider the two categories as cognate, and as pragmatically, if not ontologically inseparable. Each of the three objects named in the essay’s title appear as yielding knowledge, though of a kind dependent on what Bergson (in his early work at least) considers, paradoxically, to be founded upon misperception. Aside from Bergson himself, the essay considers fiction by Faulkner, Proust, Patrick Hamilton, and Olaf Stapledon; poetry by Wallace Stevens; the psychology of William James; the physiology of John Hughlings Jackson; and the musical aesthetics of Edmund Gurney and Vernon Lee.

Abstract:

Daniel Clinton, “Line and Lineage: Visual Form in Herman Melville’s Pierre and Timoleon” (pp. 1–29) This essay examines Herman Melville’s reflections on form, line, and perspective in his novel Pierre (1852) and his poems on art and architecture in Timoleon (1891), a late book of verse partly inspired by his tour of the Mediterranean during 1856–57. I argue that Melville arrives at his understanding of literary form through the language of optical perspective, particularly the terms of “foreshortening” and “outline.” I compare Melville’s figurative conception of outline with the artistic theories and practices of William Blake, George Cumberland, John Ruskin, and the artist John Flaxman, whose illustrations of Homer and Dante feature prominently in Pierre. Widely circulated as engravings by Tommaso Piroli and others, Flaxman’s clean-lined drawings fascinate Melville because they emphasize implied narrative rather than optical verisimilitude. Melville responds to a romantic discourse that positions “outline” on the conceptual boundary between sense-perception and free-floating thought, as a mediating term between competing notions of art’s truth. In both his fiction and poetry, Melville’s reflection on the materiality of pictures doubles as a reflection on the materiality of thought. The formal features of visual art suggest the workings of the mind as it flattens unconscious possibilities and disparate truths into a manageable picture of the world.

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In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

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The appearance of the word‘dynamic’ on the first page of George Eliot's novel,Daniel Deronda(1876), to describe Gwendolen's unsettled/unsettling glance famously elicited critique from her publisher John Blackwood as well as from an anonymous reviewer at theExaminer, both of whom challenged Eliot's use of scientific jargon that had not yet entered her audience's everyday vocabulary. In line with this often-cited vignette, critics usually understand Eliot to respond thoughtfully and prophetically to late-nineteenth-century scientific trends. In the words of theExaminerreviewer, Eliot's “culture is scientific” (“New Novel” 125), probably more so than any other Victorian novelist's. Studies investigating the reciprocal relationship between Eliot's fiction, particularlyMiddlemarchandDaniel Deronda, and nineteenth-century scientific writing suggest her familiarity with notable works by Henry Lewes, Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, James Sully, and others. Scholarship of the past three decades has largely focused on Eliot's application of Victorian theories regarding epistemology, evolution, and the relationship between mind and body. However, scholars have not yet fully examined Eliot's utilization of mid-nineteenth-century medical knowledge concerning the female body's proneness to hysteria, a connection that emerges prominently in her final novel.

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This essay, which is informed by the author's own practice as a playwright working in the medium of radio drama, looks at some effects of the enforced merger of radio with TV drama to create a ‘bi-media’ department at the BBC, and considers the evolution of commissioning policy since the imposition of the internal market under the Director Generalship of John Birt (from 1992 to 2000). Considering radio drama, after Adorno, as a producer in the culture industry, he suggests that the neo-conservatism of the 1980s, as described by Habermas, is a significant factor in understanding current commissioning practices and the dramaturgy of new realism in some radio drama. William Stanton is a Lecturer in Drama at Exeter University, where he teaches and researches writing for performance and intercultural performance practice through a research/practice link with the University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil, where he has an AHRB award for a new project in 2004. He is also a writer of fiction and plays for stage and radio. His most recent play for BBC Radio 4 was Dead Line in 2002, and his Route 23 is forthcoming.

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Abstract In her seminal book on metafiction, Patricia Waugh describes this practice as an obliteration of the distinction between “creation” and “criticism.” This article examines the interplay of the “creative” and the “critical” in five American metafictions from the late 1960s, whose authors were both fictional writers and scholars: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants and Ronald Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. The article considers the ways in which the voice of the literary critic is incorporated into each work in the form of a self-reflexive commentary. Although the ostensible principle of metafiction is to merge fiction and criticism, most of the self-conscious texts under discussion are shown to adopt a predominantly negative attitude towards the critical voices they embody – by making them sound pompous, pretentious or banal. The article concludes with a claim that the five works do not advocate a rejection of academic criticism but rather insist on its reform. Their dissatisfaction with the prescriptivism of most contemporary literary criticism is compared to Susan Sontag’s arguments in her essay “Against Interpretation.”

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Meegan Kennedy, “‘A True Prophet’? Speculation in Victorian Sensory Physiology and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’” (pp. 369–403) George Eliot’s novella “The Lifted Veil” (1859) is often considered an outlier in Eliot’s realist corpus, perhaps due to its focus on controversial theories of mind (phrenology, animal magnetism) and physical medicine (blood transfusion, human experiment, reanimation). The story draws on a tradition of Gothic medicine long recognized in the romantic novel but less acknowledged in histories of clinical medicine. As this essay shows, however, mid-Victorian clinicians and researchers accepted speculative cases of hyperaesthesia, prevision, and telepathy as a path for skeptical neurological inquiry. The textbooks of physicians like John Hughes Bennett, William Carpenter, John Elliotson, Henry Holland, and Forbes Winslow codified a range of sensational phenomena, circulating cases like Latimer’s and considering both natural and supernatural explanations for them. The events in “The Lifted Veil” are thus more realistic than they may appear; and the story extends rather than interrupts the trace of science in Eliot’s early fiction. In Latimer’s story, Eliot plays with the boundaries of Victorian physiology, neurology, and cardiology and expands our view of what both Victorian science and realism accommodate. “The Lifted Veil” performs and invites the same dual movement that mid-Victorian scientists were developing, a two-step of speculation and skepticism. As in Eliot’s other work, the analogy with scientific inquiry grounds the story’s moral, aesthetic, and epistemological concerns about human knowledge. Finally, these oddities of Victorian nerve physiology paradoxically allow Eliot to make a familiar realist argument, for this sensational story celebrates ordinary life as rare and valuable.

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William Burroughs described the paranoid man as one ‘who knows a little of what's going on’. In that rare beast, a mainstream Hollywood film that portrays schizophrenia with humanity and without a murder, A Beautiful Mind (2001), John Nash (Russell Crowe) irritates his wife when he says he heard the garbage truck outside at night. He has been hospitalised with psychosis and in that movie convention much imitated in life, anything he says must be taken as fantasy, unless proven otherwise. But the garbage guys are outside and thus begins a process where she (and the audience) begin to trust and identify with Nash again. This is the exception that proves the rule. When a filmic character with mental illness reports the ‘unfortunate event’ on which the film turns, nobody believes him/her: The Couch Trip (1988), Twelve Monkeys (1995), Independence Day (1996), Conspiracy Theory (1997) and K-Pax (2001) all milk this conceit for its full comic potential. Director Alan J. Pakula's paranoid trilogy Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1975) project the angst of the unbelieved onto a battered American audience, reeling from Vietnam and Nixon. A flavour of paranoia excites modern science fiction (Total Recall, 1990 and the Matrix trilogy, 1999–2003), and infuses the contemporary celebrity film, The Truman Show (1998).

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Descendant du chevalier Bayard, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard faisait partie de la compagnie de gentilshommes qui accompagnèrent Marie Stuart en Écosse après la mort de François II. Épris de la reine, il se cacha sous son lit en espérant peut-être séduire sa bien-aimée ; la souveraine lui pardonna cette audace, mais le jeune homme ne put s’empêcher d’oser une seconde tentative. Surpris par une servante de Marie, l’amant éperdu fut livré aux tribunaux et décapité. À partir des récits de John Knox et de Brantôme, je propose d’étudier les enjeux et les modalités de la représentation des passions dans les œuvres que les historiens, les romanciers, et les peintres ont consacrées à la tragique destinée de Chastelard. Métamorphosé en personnage de fiction historique, le gentilhomme amoureux joue un rôle important dans l’intrigue de La Princesse de Clèves ; son histoire fit aussi l’objet d’une étonnante supercherie littéraire : William Henry Ireland publie en 1808 ses Effusions of Love from Chatelar to the queen of Scotland, ensemble de fragments et de poèmes soi-disant composés par le jeune homme peu avant son exécution. Dans les Crimes célèbres d’Alexandre Dumas, puis dans Chastelard: a Tragedy de Charles Swinburne, le chevalier infortuné se métamorphose en personnage Shakespearien atteint d’une mélancolie qui risque de l’entraîner « dans la folie ou dans la tombe ». This paper focuses on the life of Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard, a French gentleman and aspiring poet who was beheaded on the order of Mary Stuart after he entered the queen’s appartments without permission. I have studied various historical accounts (notably those of John Knox and Pierre de Brantôme), that provide very different versions of the events that led to Chastelard’s execution: he is sometimes presented as a spy in the service of the French crown, sometimes as a paramour whose presence at court had become too inconveniencing for the queen of Scots. From these historical accounts, I follow Boscosel’s transformation into a fictional character in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), William Henry Ireland’s forged Effusions of love from Chatelard to Mary, queen of Scots (1808), and Swinburne’s Chastelard, a tragedy (1866). My goal is to unveil and analyze the nationalistic and political motivations that underlie successive historical and fictional accounts of the French court poet’s life and death.

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Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell both question, criticise and reinterpret the concept of ‘truth universally acknowledged’. From the intrinsic relation between the particular and the universal, to the scission between impressions and ideas, Pride and Prejudice concerns some elements of the entire dispute of knowledge. Moreover, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell urges us to reconsider any truth that we recognise as legitimately established, in the attempt to convey that it is our right and duty to determine what we believe – according to our senses, perceptions and feelings. In the eighteenth century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment were indeed disputing the origins of truth and more importantly the ways through which truth is uncovered. In a postmodern world, when, as John D. Caputo remarks, the only universality we acknowledge is diversity, fiction can lead us toward a more profound comprehension of reality – while enriching the flux of our imagination as we perceive the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. This literary approach to the world and its truth prompts us to contemplate existence from a different perspective, to find new meanings presumably hidden beneath the subjectivity of our judgement – to separate specific from universal knowledge. For, even if the prospect of formulating a commonly accepted norm of truth will always endure as humanity’s major interest, the real nature of our beliefs is inseparable from our ability to endlessly create, envision and conceive the unrevealed.

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From the time of its reissue in 1983, Harriet Wilson's 1859 text,Our Nig, has inspired critical discussion, much of which has concerned the matter of genre and related questions of the author's purpose and audience. When Henry Louis Gates first introduced it to contemporary readers, he called it both a “novel” and a “third–person autobiography,” further suggesting that it might be read in the context of sentimental novels, as he analyzed the book's interesting departures from Nina Baym's overplot inWoman's Fiction(“Introduction,” xi, xli–lv). Since then a number of critics have expanded upon and argued with Gates's preliminary assessment of Wilson's work and audience. Hazel Carby argues that Wilson writes to black readers, assuming that many of them would have shared her experience, whereas most other critics, including Claudia Tate and Margaret Lindgren, assume that Wilson is writing to a white audience, and negotiating the sense of difference between reader and writer. Barbara White and Eric Gardner, establishing that the actual “Bellmont” family, the Haywards, had strong abolitionist connections, suggest the complications of audience for Wilson. And Gardner, like Carby, suggests that Wilson would have assumed that her story would have been marketable only to a small group of Northern black readers, many of whom would have had similar experiences. Drawing on William Andrews's work with black autobiography, Beth Maclay Doriani describes how Wilson (and Harriet Jacobs) subvert the traditional genre of black autobiography, at the same time as they adhere to 19th–century conventions for publication and sale to white audiences. John Ernest argues that Wilson would have understood the ways in which her story would have been read and misread by proslavery forces. Drawing on William Andrews's discussion of Henry Bibb's narrative, Ernest argues persuasively for Wilson's extraordinarily complex understanding of her audience, to whom she appeals for an exchange based on a recognition of the essential mistrust of social groups.

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J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy's Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters. By Karin Tybjerg 194Natalia Lozovsky, ‘The Earth is Our Book’: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000. By Evelyn Edson 196David Cantor (ed.), Reinventing Hippocrates. By Daniel Brownstein 197Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. By John Henry 199Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. By John Henry 200Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society. By Christoph Lüthy 201Richard L. Hills, James Watt, Volume 1: His Time in Scotland, 1736–1774. By David Philip Miller 203René Sigrist (ed.), H.-B. de Saussure (1740–1799): Un Regard sur la terre, Albert V. Carozzi and John K. Newman (eds.), Lectures on Physical Geography given in 1775 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure at the Academy of Geneva/Cours de géographie physique donné en 1775 par Horace-Bénédict de Saussure à l'Académie de Genève and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes: Augmentés des Voyages en Valais, au Mont Cervin et autour du Mont Rose. By Martin Rudwick 206Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. By Richard Yeo 208David Boyd Hayco*ck, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England. By Geoffrey Cantor 209Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. By Dorinda Outram 210Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel. By David Knight 211George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. By Michael H. Whitworth 212Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe. By Ursula Klein 214Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940. By Piers J. Hale 215Paola Govoni, Un pubblico per la scienza: La divulgazione scientifica nell'Italia in formazione. By Pietro Corsi 216R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora and J. H. Voigt (eds.), Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller. Volume II: 1860–1875. By Jim Endersby 217Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. With a New Afterword. By Piers J. Hale 219Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century. By Steven French 220Antony Kamm and Malcolm Baird, John Logie Baird: A Life. By Sean Johnston 221Robin L. Chazdon and T. C. Whitmore (eds.), Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology: Classic Papers with Commentaries. By Joel B. Hagen 223Stephen Jay Gould, I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural History. By Peter J. Bowler 223Henry Harris, Things Come to Life: Spontaneous Generation Revisited. By Rainer Brömer 224Hélène Gispert (ed.), ‘Par la Science, pour la patrie’: L'Association française pour l'avancement des sciences (1872–1914), un projet politique pour une société savante. By Cristina Chimisso 225Henry Le Chatelier, Science et industrie: Les Débuts du taylorisme en France. By Robert Fox 227Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich. By Jonathan Harwood 227Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge; The true Story of Soviet Science. By C. A. J. Chilvers 229Guy Hartcup, The Effect of Science on the Second World War. By David Edgerton 230Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, the Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics. By Arne Hessenbruch 230Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, John M. Logsdon (ed.), Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Volume V: Exploring the Cosmos and Douglas J. Mudgway, Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network 1957–1997. By Jon Agar 231Helen Ross and Cornelis Plug, The Mystery of the Moon Illusion: Exploring Size Perception. By Klaus Hentschel 233Matthew R. Edwards (ed.), Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation. By Friedrich Steinle 234Ernest B. Hook (ed.), Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect. By Alex Dolby 235John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery. By Alex Dolby 236Rosalind Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change. By Keith Vernon 237Colin Divall and Andrew Scott, Making Histories in Transport Museums. By Anthony Coulls 238

Abstract:

David Scott; Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Shalina Puri)Rebecca J. Scott; Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha)Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (ed.); Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (Dianne M. Stewart)Londa Schiebinger; Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (J.D. La Fleur)F. Abiola Irele, Simon Gikandi (eds.);The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (A. James Arnold)Sean X. Goudie; Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (J. Bradford Anderson)Doris Garraway; The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Charles Forsdick)Adélékè Adéèkó; The Slave’s Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (Owen Robinson)J. Brooks Bouson; Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert)Gary Wilder; The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Nick Nesbitt)Fernando Picó; History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of its People (Francisco A. Scarano)Peter E. Siegel (ed.); Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico (William F. Keegan) Magali Roy-Féquière; Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico (Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel)Katherine E. Browne; Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag (David Beriss)Louis A. Pérez, Jr; To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Matt D. Childs)John Lawrence Tone; War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (Gillian McGillivray)Frank Argote-Freyre; Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman (Javier Figueroa-De Cárdenas)Juanita de Barros, Audra Diptee, David V. Trotman (eds.); Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History (Bernard Moitt)Matthew Mulcahy; Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Bonham C. Richardson)Michaeline A. Crichlow; Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development (Christine Chivallon)Peta Gay Jensen; The Last Colonials: The Story of Two European Families in Jamaica (Karl Watson)Marc Tardieu; Les Antillais à Paris: D’hier à aujourd’hui (David Beriss)Rhonda D. Frederick; “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Michael L. Conniff)James Robertson; Gone is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534-2000 (Philip D. Morgan)Philippe R. Girard; Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hotspot (Carolle Charles)Michael Deibert; Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Carolle Charles)Ellen de Vries; Suriname na de binnenlandse oorlog (Aspha E. Bijnaar)In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids no. 82 (2008), no: 1-2, Leiden

Abstract:

صورة الإسلام في أوروبا في القرون الوسطى، ريتشارد سوذرن، ترجمة، تحقيق: رضوان السيد، بيروت: دار المدار الإسلامي، 2006، 166 صفحة. الصراع على الإسلام: الأصولية والإصلاح والسياسات الدولية، رضوان السيد، بيروت: دار الكتاب العربي، 2004، 277 صفحة. نحن والعالم.. من أجل تجديد رؤيتنا إلى العالم، زكي الميلاد، الرياض: مؤسسة اليمامة الصحفية، الطبعة الأولى 2005، 196صفحة. بين أخلاقيات العرب وذهنيات الغرب، إبراهيم القادري بوتشيش، القاهرة: رؤية للنشر والتوزيع، 2005، 224 صفحة. خصائص التصور الإسلامي ومقوماته، سيد قطب، القاهرة: دار الشروق، ط9، 2000، 207 صفحة. الفلسفة السياسية، أحمد داود أوغلو، ترجمة: إبراهيم البيومي غانم، القاهرة: مكتبة الشروق الدولية، ط1، 2006، 77 صفحة. الدَّين الخفي للحضارة الإسلامية، صالح الجزائري، لندن: دار الحكمة، ط1، 2006، 526 صفحة. مشروع الوحدة العربية.. ما العمل؟، سعدون حمادي، بيروت: مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية, الطبعة: الأولى، 2006، 171 صفحة. تناقض الرؤى: الجذور الإيديولوجية للصراعات السياسية، توماس سوويل، ترجمة: رنده حسين الحسيني، بيروت: الشركة العالمية للكتاب، ط1، 2006، 331 صفحة. The Truth About Worldviews: A Biblical Understanding Of Worldview Alternatives, James P. Eckman, Crossway Books, 2004, P. 134. Naming the Elephant: Worldview As a Concept, James W. Sire, InterVarsity Press, 2004, P. 172. Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films With Wisdom & Discernment, Brian Godawa, InterVarsity Press, 2002, P. 204. Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, Richard DeWitt, Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated, 2004, P. Worldview: The History of a Concept, David K. Naugle, B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002, P. 384. Worldview Skills: Transforming Conflict from the Inside Out, Jessie Sutherland, Worldview Strategies, 2005, P. 183. Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East), Rasheed El-Enany, Routledge, 2006, P. 255. The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, James W. Sire, InterVarsity Press; 4th edition, 2004, P. 252 A Spectrum of Worldviews: An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion in a Pluralistic World, Hendrik M. Vroom, Editions Rodopi BV, 2006, P. 342 The impact of cross-cultural experience on worldviews (China), Haiwen Yang, PhD (year: 2005), Reno: University of Nevada, 2006, P. 97. War of the World Views, Multiple, Kerby Lisle, New Leaf Press, 2006, P. 176. The Science of Oneness: A Worldview for the Twenty-First Century, Malcolm Hollick, O Books, 2006, P. 447. World's Religions: Worldviews and Contemporary Issues, William A. A. Young, Pearson Education, 2004, P. 432 Existo: Worldview and a Meaningful Existence, Neil Soggie, Hamilton Books, 2005, P. 148. Worldviews: Think for Yourself About How You See God (Think Reference Series), John M. Yeats, John Blase, Mark Tabb (Editor), NavPress Publishing Group, 2006, P. 228 Rebuild Your Worldview to be Healthy, James W. Stark Jr., Trafford Publishing, 2005, P. 310. Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam, and the War of Ideas, Lawrence Pintak, Pluto Press, 2006, P. 392 The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar Straus Giroux; Expanded and updated edition, 2006, P. 593. The Integration Of Faith And Learning: A Worldview Approach , Robert A. Harris, Cascade Books, 2004, P.314. Basic Principles of Islamic Worldview, Sayyid Qutb, Hamid Algar (Preface), Rami David (Translator), Islamic Pubns Intl, 2005, P.255. The Origin of Culture and Civilization: The Cosmological Philosophy of the Ancient Worldview Regarding Myth, Astrology, Science, and Religion, Thomas Dietrich, Turnkey Press, 2005, P. 360. للحصول على كامل المقالة مجانا يرجى النّقر على ملف ال PDF في اعلى يمين الصفحة.

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-Bill Maurer, Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. New York: Routledge, 2003. ix + 252 pp.-Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Richard Price ,The root of roots: Or, how Afro-American anthropology got its start. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago Press, 2003. 91 pp., Sally Price (eds)-Holly Snyder, Paolo Bernardini ,The Jews and the expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. xv + 567 pp., Norman Fiering (eds)-Bridget Brereton, Seymour Drescher, The mighty experiment: Free labor versus slavery in British emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 307 pp.-Jean Besson, Kathleen E.A. Monteith ,Jamaica in slavery and freedom: History, heritage and culture. Kingston; University of the West Indies Press, 2002. xx + 391 pp., Glen Richards (eds)-Michaeline A. Crichlow, Jean Besson, Martha Brae's two histories: European expansion and Caribbean culture-building in Jamaica. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xxxi + 393 pp.-Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Joseph C. Dorsey, Slave traffic in the age of abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815-1859. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xvii + 311 pp.-Arnold R. Highfield, Erik Gobel, A guide to sources for the history of the Danish West Indies (U.S. Virgin Islands), 1671-1917. Denmark: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2002. 350 pp.-Sue Peabody, David Patrick Geggus, Haitian revolutionary studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xii + 334 pp.-Gerdès Fleurant, Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, power, and performance in Haiti and its Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xviii + 259 pp. and CD demo.-Michiel Baud, Ernesto Sagás ,The Dominican people: A documentary history. Princeton NJ: Marcus Wiener, 2003. xiii + 278 pp., Orlando Inoa (eds)-Samuel Martínez, Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo regime, and modernity in Dominican history. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. x + 384 pp.-Eric Paul Roorda, Bernardo Vega, Almoina, Galíndez y otros crímenes de Trujillo en el extranjero. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 2001. 147 pp.''Diario de una misión en Washington. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 2002. 526 pp.-Gerben Nooteboom, Aspha Bijnaar, Kasmoni: Een spaartraditie in Suriname en Nederland. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2002. 378 pp.-Dirk H.A. Kolff, Chan E.S. Choenni ,Hindostanen: Van Brits-Indische emigranten via Suriname tot burgers van Nederland. The Hague: Communicatiebureau Sampreshan, 2003. 224 pp., Kanta Sh. Adhin (eds)-Dirk H.A. Kolff, Sandew Hira, Het dagboek van Munshi Rahman Khan. The Hague: Amrit/Paramaribo: NSHI, 2003. x + 370 pp.-William H. Fisher, Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the poetics of violent death. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 309 pp.-David Scott, A.J. Simoes da Silva, The luxury of nationalist despair: George Lamming's fiction as decolonizing project. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 217 pp.-Lyn Innes, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The flight of the vernacular. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. xvi + 303 pp.-Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Tobias Döring, Caribbean-English passages: Intertextuality in a postcolonial tradition. London: Routledge, 2002. xii + 236 pp.-A. James Arnold, Celia Britton, Race and the unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean thought. Oxford: Legenda, 2002. 115 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Dorothy E. Mosby, Place, language, and identity in Afro-Costa Rican literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xiii + 248 pp.-Stephen Steumpfle, Philip W. Scher, Carnival and the formation of a Caribbean transnation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xvi + 215 pp.-Peter Manuel, Frances R. Aparicho ,Musical migrations: transnationalism and cultural hybridity in Latin/o America, Volume 1. With Maria Elena Cepeda. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 216 pp., Candida F. Jaquez (eds)-Jorge Pérez Rolón, Maya Roy, Cuban Music. London: Latin America Bureau/Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002. ix + 246 pp.-Bettina M. Migge, Gary C. Fouse, The story of Papiamentu: A study in slavery and language. Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2002. x + 261 pp.-John M. McWhorter, Bettina Migge, Creole formation as language contact: the case of the Suriname creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. xii + 151 pp.

Abstract:

<p><strong>List of abstracts and authors:</strong></p><p><strong>1. Antipsychotics in anxiety disorders</strong></p><p>Christer Allgulander</p><p><strong>2. Anxiety in somatic disorders</strong></p><p>Christer Allgulander</p><p><strong>3. Community rehabilitation of the schizophrenic patient</strong></p><p>Orlando Alonso Betancourt, Maricela Morales Herrera</p><p><strong>4. Dual diagnosis: A theory-driven multidisciplinary approach for integrative care</strong></p><p>David Blackbeard</p><p><strong>5. The emotional language of the gut - when 'psyche' meets 'soma'</strong></p><p>Helen Clark</p><p><strong>6. The Psychotherapy of bipolar disorder</strong></p><p>Franco Colin</p><p><strong>7. The Psychotherapy of bipolar disorder</strong></p><p>Franco Colin</p><p><strong>8. Developing and adopting mental health policies and plans in Africa: Lessons from South Africa, Uganda and Zambia</strong></p><p>Sara Cooper, Sharon Kleintjes, Cynthia Isaacs, Fred Kigozi, Sheila Ndyanabangi, Augustus Kapungwe, John Mayeya, Michelle Funk, Natalie Drew, Crick Lund</p><p><strong>9. The importance of relapse prevention in schizophrenia</strong></p><p>Robin Emsley</p><p><strong>10. Mental Health care act: Fact or fiction?</strong></p><p>Helmut Erlacher, M Nagdee</p><p><strong>11. Does a dedicated 72-hour observation facility in a district hospital reduce the need for involuntary admissions to a psychiatric hospital?</strong></p><p>Lennart Eriksson</p><p><strong>12. The incidence and risk factors for dementia in the Ibadan study of ageing</strong></p><p>Oye Gureje, Lola Kola, Adesola Ogunniyi, Taiwo Abiona</p><p><strong>13. Is depression a disease of inflammation?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>Angelos Halaris</p><p><strong>14. Paediatric bipolar disorder: More heat than light?</strong></p><p>Sue Hawkridge</p><p><strong>15. EBM: Anova Conundrum</strong></p><p>Elizabeth L (Hoepie) Howell</p><p><strong>16. Tracking the legal status of a cohort of inpatients on discharge from a 72-hour assessment unit</strong></p><p>Bernard Janse van Rensburg</p><p><strong>17. Dual diagnosis units in psychiatric facilities: Opportunities and challenges</strong></p><p>Yasmien Jeenah</p><p><strong>18. Alcohol-induced psychotic disorder: A comparative study on the clinical characteristics of patients with alcohol dependence and schizophrenia</strong></p><p>Gerhard Jordaan, D G Nel, R Hewlett, R Emsley</p><p><strong>19. Anxiety disorders: the first evidence for a role in preventive psychiatry</strong></p><p>Andre F Joubert</p><p><strong>20. The end of risk assessment and the beginning of start</strong></p><p>Sean Kaliski</p><p><strong>21. Psychiatric disorders abd psychosocial correlates of high HIV risk sexual behaviour in war-effected Eatern Uganda</strong></p><p>E Kinyada, H A Weiss, M Mungherera, P Onyango Mangen, E Ngabirano, R Kajungu, J Kagugube, W Muhwezi, J Muron, V Patel</p><p><strong>22. One year of Forensic Psychiatric assessment in the Northern Cape: A comparison with an established assessment service in the Eastern Cape</strong></p><p>N K Kirimi, C Visser</p><p><strong>23. Mental Health service user priorities for service delivery in South Africa</strong></p><p>Sharon Kleintjes, Crick Lund, Leslie Swartz, Alan Flisher and MHaPP Research Programme Consortium</p><p><strong>24. The nature and extent of over-the-counter and prescription drug abuse in cape town</strong></p><p>Liezl Kramer</p><p><strong>25. Physical health issues in long-term psychiatric inpatients: An audit of nursing statistics and clinical files at Weskoppies Hospital</strong></p><p>Christa Kruger</p><p><strong>26. Suicide risk in Schizophrenia - 20 Years later, a cohort study</strong></p><p>Gian Lippi, Ean Smit, Joyce Jordaan, Louw Roos</p><p><strong>27.Developing mental health information systems in South Africa: Lessons from pilot projects in Northern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal</strong></p><p>Crick Lund, S Skeen, N Mapena, C Isaacs, T Mirozev and the Mental Health and Poverty Research Programme Consortium Institution</p><p><strong>28. Mental health aspects of South African emigration</strong></p><p>Maria Marchetti-Mercer</p><p><strong>29. What services SADAG can offer your patients</strong></p><p>Elizabeth Matare</p><p><strong>30. Culture and language in psychiatry</strong></p><p>Dan Mkize</p><p><strong>31. Latest psychotic episode</strong></p><p>Povl Munk-Jorgensen</p><p><strong>32. The Forensic profile of female offenders</strong></p><p>Mo Nagdee, Helmut Fletcher</p><p><strong>33. The intra-personal emotional impact of practising psychiatry</strong></p><p>Margaret Nair</p><p><strong>34. Highly sensitive persons (HSPs) and implications for treatment</strong></p><p>Margaret Nair</p><p><strong>35. Task shifting in mental health - The Kenyan experience</strong></p><p>David M Ndetei</p><p><strong>36. Bridging the gap between traditional healers and mental health in todya's modern psychiatry</strong></p><p>David M Ndetei</p><p><strong>37. Integrating to achieve modern psychiatry</strong></p><p>David M Ndetei</p><p><strong>38. Non-medical prescribing: Outcomes from a pharmacist-led post-traumatic stress disorder clinic</strong></p><p>A Parkinson</p><p><strong>39. Is there a causal relationship between alcohol and HIV? Implications for policy, practice and future research</strong></p><p>Charles Parry</p><p><strong>40. Global mental health - A new global health discipline comes of age</strong></p><p>Vikram Patel</p><p><strong>41. Integrating mental health into primary health care: Lessons from pilot District demonstration sites in Uganda and South Africa</strong></p><p>Inge Petersen, Arvin Bhana, K Baillie and MhaPP Research Programme Consortium</p><p><strong>42. Personality disorders -The orphan child in axis I - Axis II Dichotomy</strong></p><p><strong></strong>Willie Pienaar</p><p><strong>43. Case Studies in Psychiatric Ethics</strong></p><p>Willie Pienaar</p><p><strong>44. Coronary artery disease and depression: Insights into pathogenesis and clinical implications</strong></p><p>Janus Pretorius</p><p><strong>45. Impact of the Mental Health Care Act No. 17 of 2002 on designated hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal: Triumphs and trials</strong></p><p>Suvira Ramlall, Jennifer Chipps</p><p><strong>46. Biological basis of addication</strong></p><p>Solomon Rataemane</p><p><strong>47. Genetics of Schizophrenia</strong></p><p>Louw Roos</p><p><strong>48. Management of delirium - Recent advances</strong></p><p>Shaquir Salduker</p><p><strong>49. Social neuroscience: Brain research on social issues</strong></p><p>Manfred Spitzer</p><p><strong>50. Experiments on the unconscious</strong></p><p>Manfred Spitzer</p><p><strong>51. The Psychology and neuroscience of music</strong></p><p>Manfred Spitzer</p><p><strong>52. Mental disorders in DSM-V</strong></p><p>Dan Stein</p><p><strong>53. Personality, trauma exposure, PTSD and depression in a cohort of SA Metro policemen: A longitudinal study</strong></p><p>Ugashvaree Subramaney</p><p><strong>54. Eating disorders: An African perspective</strong></p><p>Christopher Szabo</p><p><strong>55. An evaluation of the WHO African Regional strategy for mental health 2001-2010</strong></p><p>Thandi van Heyningen, M Majavu, C Lund</p><p><strong>56. A unitary model for the motor origin of bipolar mood disorders and schizophrenia</strong></p><p>Jacques J M van Hoof</p><p><strong>57. The origin of mentalisation and the treatment of personality disorders</strong></p><p>Jacques J M Hoof</p><p><strong>58. How to account practically for 'The Cause' in psychiatric diagnostic classification</strong></p><p>C W (Werdie) van Staden</p><p><strong>POSTER PRESENTATIONS</strong></p><p><strong>59. Problem drinking and physical and sexual abuse at WSU Faculty of Health Sciences, Mthatha, 2009</strong></p><p>Orlando Alonso Betancourt, Maricela Morales Herrera, E, N Kwizera, J L Bernal Munoz</p><p><strong>60. Prevalence of alcohol drinking problems and other substances at WSU Faculty of Health Sciences, Mthatha, 2009</strong></p><p>Orlando Alonso Betancourt, Maricela Morales Herrera, E, N Kwizera, J L Bernal Munoz</p><p><strong>61. Lessons learnt from a modified assertive community-based treatment programme in a developing country</strong></p><p>Ulla Botha, Liezl Koen, John Joska, Linda Hering, Piet Ooosthuizen</p><p><strong>62. Perceptions of psychologists regarding the use of religion and spirituality in therapy</strong></p><p>Ottilia Brown, Diane Elkonin</p><p><strong>63. Resilience in families where a member is living with schizophreni</strong></p><p>Ottilia Brown, Jason Haddad, Greg Howcroft</p><p><strong>64. Fusion and grandiosity - The mastersonian approach to the narcissistic disorder of the self</strong></p><p>William Griffiths, D Macklin, Loray Daws</p><p><strong>65. Not being allowed to exist - The mastersonian approach to the Schizoid disorder of the self</strong></p><p>William Griffiths, D Macklin, Loray Daws</p><p><strong>66. Risky drug-injecting behaviours in Cape Town and the need for a needle exchange programme</strong></p><p>Volker Hitzeroth</p><p><strong>67. Neuroleptic malignant syndrome in adolescents in the Western Cape: A case series</strong></p><p>Terri Henderson</p><p><strong>68. Experience and view of local academic psychiatrists on the role of spirituality in South African specialist psychiatry, compared with a qualitative analysis of the medical literature</strong></p><p>Bernard Janse van Rensburg</p><p><strong>69. The role of defined spirituality in local specialist psychiatric practice and training: A model and operational guidelines for South African clinical care scenarios</strong></p><p>Bernard Janse van Rensburg</p><p><strong>70. Handedness in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder in an Afrikaner founder population</strong></p><p>Marinda Joubert, J L Roos, J Jordaan</p><p><strong>71. A role for structural equation modelling in subtyping schizophrenia in an African population</strong></p><p>Liezl Koen, Dana Niehaus, Esme Jordaan, Robin Emsley</p><p><strong>72. Caregivers of disabled elderly persons in Nigeria</strong></p><p>Lola Kola, Oye Gureje, Adesola Ogunniyi, Dapo Olley</p><p><strong>73. HIV Seropositivity in recently admitted and long-term psychiatric inpatients: Prevalence and diagnostic profile</strong></p><p>Christina Kruger, M P Henning, L Fletcher</p><p><strong>74. Syphilis seropisitivity in recently admitted longterm psychiatry inpatients: Prevalence and diagnostic profile</strong></p><p>Christina Kruger, M P Henning, L Fletcher</p><p><strong>75. 'The Great Suppression'</strong></p><p>Sarah Lamont, Joel Shapiro, Thandi Groves, Lindsey Bowes</p><p><strong>76. Not being allowed to grow up - The Mastersonian approach to the borderline personality</strong></p><p>Daleen Macklin, W Griffiths</p><p><strong>77. Exploring the internal confirguration of the cycloid personality: A Rorschach comprehensive system study</strong></p><p>Daleen Macklin, Loray Daws, M Aronstam</p><p><strong>78. A survey to determine the level of HIV related knowledge among adult psychiatric patients admitted to Weskoppies Hospital</strong></p><p><strong></strong> T G Magagula, M M Mamabolo, C Kruger, L Fletcher</p><p><strong>79. A survey of risk behaviour for contracting HIV among adult psychiatric patients admitted to Weskoppies Hospital</strong></p><p>M M Mamabolo, T G Magagula, C Kruger, L Fletcher</p><p><strong>80. A retrospective review of state sector outpatients (Tara Hospital) prescribed Olanzapine: Adherence to metabolic and cardiovascular screening and monitoring guidelines</strong></p><p>Carina Marsay, C P Szabo</p><p><strong>81. Reported rapes at a hospital rape centre: Demographic and clinical profiles</strong></p><p>Lindi Martin, Kees Lammers, Donavan Andrews, Soraya Seedat</p><p><strong>82. Exit examination in Final-Year medical students: Measurement validity of oral examinations in psychiatry</strong></p><p>Mpogisheng Mashile, D J H Niehaus, L Koen, E Jordaan</p><p><strong>83. Trends of suicide in the Transkei region of South Africa</strong></p><p>Banwari Meel</p><p><strong>84. Functional neuro-imaging in survivors of torture</strong></p><p>Thriya Ramasar, U Subramaney, M D T H W Vangu, N S Perumal</p><p><strong>85. Newly diagnosed HIV+ in South Africa: Do men and women enroll in care?</strong></p><p>Dinesh Singh, S Hoffman, E A Kelvin, K Blanchard, N Lince, J E Mantell, G Ramjee, T M Exner</p><p><strong>86. Diagnostic utitlity of the International HIC Dementia scale for Asymptomatic HIV-Associated neurocognitive impairment and HIV-Associated neurocognitive disorder in South Africa</strong></p><p>Dinesh Singh, K Goodkin, D J Hardy, E Lopez, G Morales</p><p><strong>87. The Psychological sequelae of first trimester termination of pregnancy (TOP): The impact of resilience</strong></p><p>Ugashvaree Subramaney</p><p><strong>88. Drugs and other therapies under investigation for PTSD: An international database</strong></p><p>Sharain Suliman, Soraya Seedat</p><p><strong>89. Frequency and correlates of HIV Testing in patients with severe mental illness</strong></p><p>Hendrik Temmingh, Leanne Parasram, John Joska, Tania Timmermans, Pete Milligan, Helen van der Plas, Henk Temmingh</p><p><strong>90. A proposed mental health service and personnel organogram for the Elizabeth Donkin psychiatric Hospital</strong></p><p>Stephan van Wyk, Zukiswa Zingela</p><p><strong>91. A brief report on the current state of mental health care services in the Eastern Cape</strong></p><p>Stephan van Wyk, Zukiswa Zingela, Kiran Sukeri, Heloise Uys, Mo Nagdee, Maricela Morales, Helmut Erlacher, Orlando Alonso</p><p><strong>92. An integrated mental health care service model for the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro</strong></p><p>Stephan van Wyk, Zukiswa Zingela, Kiran Sukeri</p><p><strong>93. Traditional and alternative healers: Prevalence of use in psychiatric patients</strong></p><p>Zukiswa Zingela, S van Wyk, W Esterhuysen, E Carr, L Gaauche</p>

Abstract:

John Griffiths, The Third Man - the Life and Times of William Murdoch (1754- 1839) - the Inventor of Gas Lighting . London: André Deutsch, 1992. Pp. 373, £20. ISBN 0233 98778 9 A biography of William Murdoch, the most capable of the many lieutenants in the Boulton and Watt steam enterprise at Birmingham, has long been needed. This attempt celebrates the bicentenary of Murdoch’s ‘invention’ of gas lighting in Cornwall in 1792. It has been handsomely supported by British Gas, who provided financial sponsorship and a full-time research assistant. It represents a first excursion into the history of technology for its author, who has written fiction, ‘on the science of winning squash’ and on Afghanistan.

Abstract:

It is the same spectacle all over the Western world: whenever delegates gather to discuss the development and consequences of new media technologies, a handful of people among them will stand out from the crowd, and somehow seem not quite to fit in with the remaining assortment of techno-evangelists, Internet ethnographers, multimedia project leaders, and online culture critics. At some point in the proceedings, they'll get to the podium and hold a talk on their ideas for the future of copyright protection and intellectual property (IP) rights in the information age; when they are finished, the reactions of the audience typically range from mild "what was that all about?" amusem*nt to sheer "they haven't got a clue" disbelief. Spare a thought for copyright lawyers; they're valiantly fighting a losing battle. Ever since the digitalisation and networking of our interpersonal and mass media made information transmission and duplication effortless and instantaneous, they've been trying to come up with ways to uphold and enforce concepts of copyright which are fundamentally linked to information as bound to physical objects (artifacts, books, CDs, etc.), as Barlow has demonstrated so clearly in "Selling Wine without Bottles". He writes that "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. ... Books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher's marques, and price tags". If you could control the physical media which were used to transmit information (paper, books, audio and video tapes, as well as radio and TV sets, or access to cable systems), you could control who made copies when and where, and at what price. This only worked as long as the technology to make copies was similarly scarce, though: as soon as most people learnt to write, or as faxes and photocopiers became cheaper, the only real copyright protection books had was the effort that would have to be spent to copy them. With technology continuously advancing (perhaps even at accellerating pace), copyright is soon becoming a legal fiction that is losing its link to reality. Indeed, we are now at a point where we have the opportunity -- the necessity, even -- to shift the fictional paradigm, to replace the industrial-age fiction of protective individual copyright with an information-age fiction of widespread intellectual cooperation. As it becomes ever easier to bypass and ignore copyright rules, and as copyright thus becomes ever more illusionary, this new fiction will correspondingly come ever closer to being realised. To Protect and to ... Lose Today, the lawyers' (and their corporate employers') favourite weapon in their fight against electronic copyright piracy are increasingly elaborate protection mechanisms -- hidden electronic signatures to mark intellectual property, electronic keys to unlock copyrighted products only for legitimate users (and sometimes only for a fixed amount of time or after certain licence payments), encryption of sensitive information, or of entire products to prevent electronic duplication. While the encryption of information exchanges between individuals has been proven to be a useful deterrent against all but the most determined of hackers, it's interesting to note that practically no electronic copyright protection mechanism of mass market products has ever been seen to work. However good and elaborate the protection efforts, it seems that as long as there is a sufficient number of interested consumers unwilling to pay for legitimate access, copy protections will be cracked eventually: the rampant software piracy is the best example. On the other hand, where copy protections become too elaborate and cumbersome, they end up killing the product they are meant to protect: this is currently happening in the case of some of the pay-per-view or limited-plays protection schemes forced upon the U.S. market for Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). The eventual failure of such mechanisms isn't a particularly recent observation, even. When broadcast radio was first introduced in Australia in 1923, it was proposed that programme content should be protected (and stations financed) by fixing radio receivers to a particular station's frequency -- by buying such a 'sealed set' receiver you would in effect subscribe to a station and acquire the right to receive the content it provided. Never known as uninventive, those Australians who this overprotectiveness didn't completely put off buying a receiver (radio was far from being a proven mass medium at the time, after all) did of course soon break the seal, and learnt to adjust the frequency to try out different stations -- or they built their own radios from scratch. The 'sealed set' scheme was abandoned after only nine months. Even with the development of copy protection schemes since the 1920s, a full (or at least sufficiently comprehensive) protection of intellectual property seems as unattainable a fiction as it was then. Protection and copying technology are never far apart in development anyway, but even more fundamentally, the protected products are eventually meant to be used, after all. No matter how elaborately protected a CD, a video, or a computer programme is, it will still have to be converted into sound waves, image information, or executable code, and at that level copying will still remain possible. In the absence of workable copy protection, however, copies will be made in large amounts -- even more so since information is now being spread and multiplied around the globe virtually at the speed of light. Against this tide of copies, any attempts to use legislation to at least force the payment of royalties from illegitimate users are also becoming increasingly futile. While there may be a few highly publicised court cases, the multitude of small transgressions will remain unanswered. This in turn undermines the equality before the law that is a basic human right: increasingly, the few that are punished will be able to argue that, if "everybody does it", to single them out is highly unfair. At the same time, corporate efforts to uphold the law may be counterproductive: as Barlow writes, "against the swift tide of custom, the Software Publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law". Quite simply, their legal costs may not be justified by the results anymore. Abandoning Copyright Law If copyright has become a fiction, however -- one that is still, despite all evidence, posited as reality by the legal system --, and if the makeup of today's electronic media, particularly the Internet, allow that fiction to be widely ignored and circumvented in daily practice -- despite all corporate legal efforts --, how is this disparity between law and reality to be solved? Barlow offers a clear answer: "whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts". He goes on to state that it may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place. But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights. When William Gibson invented the term 'cyberspace', he described it as a "consensual hallucination" (67). As the removal of copyright to the realm of the fictional has been driven largely by the Internet and its 'freedom of information' ethics, perhaps it is apt to speak of a new approach to intellectual property (or, with Barlow, to 'creative rights') as one of consensual, collaborative use of such property. This approach is far from being fully realised yet, and must so for now remain fiction, too, but it is no mere utopian vision -- in various places, attempts are made to put into place consensual schemes of dealing with intellectual property. They also represent a move from IP hoarding to IP use. Raymond speaks of the schemes competing here as the 'cathedral' and the 'bazaar' system. In the cathedral system, knowledge is tightly controlled, and only the finished product, "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation" (1), is ever released. This corresponds to traditional copyright approaches, where company secrets are hoarded and locked away (sometimes only in order to keep competitors from using them), and breaches punished severely. The bazaar system, on the other hand, includes the entire community of producers and users early on in the creative process, up to the point of removing the producer/user dichotomy altogether: "no quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, ... a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches ... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles", as Raymond admits (1). The Linux 'Miracle' Raymond writes about one such bazaar-system project which provides impressive proof that the approach can work, however: the highly acclaimed Unix-based operating system Linux. Instigated and organised by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, this enthusiast-driven, Internet-based development project has achieved more in less than a decade than what many corporate developers (Microsoft being the obvious example) can do in thrice that time, and with little financial incentive or institutional support at that. As Raymond describes, "the Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximise utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could achieve" (10). Thus, while there is no doubt that individual participants will eventually always also be driven by selfish reasons, there is collaboration towards the achievement of communal goals, and a consensus about what those goals are: "while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people" (Raymond 10). It is obvious that such collaborative projects need a structure that allows for the immediate participation of a large community, and so in the same way that the Internet has been instrumental in dismantling traditional copyright systems, it is also a driving factor in making these new approaches possible: "Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible" (Raymond 10). While some previous collaborative efforts exist (such as shareware schemes, which have existed ever since the advent of programmable home computers), their comparatively limited successes underline the importance of a suitable communication medium. The success of Linux has now begun to affect corporate structures, too: informational material for the Mozilla project, in fact, makes direct reference to the Linux experience. On the Net, Mozilla is as big as it gets -- instituted to continue development of Netscape Communicator-based Web browsers following Netscape's publication of the Communicator source code, it poses a serious threat to Microsoft's push (the legality of which is currently under investigation in the U.S.) to increase marketshare for its Internet Explorer browser. Much like Linux, Mozilla will be a collaborative effort: "we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number" ("Who Is Mozilla.org?"), with the Netscape corporation only one among that number, and a contributor amongst many. Netscape itself intends to release browsers based on the Mozilla source code, with some individual proprietary additions and the benefits corporate structures allow (printed manuals, helplines, and the like), but -- so it seems -- it is giving up its unlimited hold over the course of development of the browser. Such actions afford an almost prophetic quality to Barlow's observation that "familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away". The use of examples from the computer world should not be seen to mean that the consensual, collaborative use of intellectual property suggested here is limited only to software -- it is, however, no surprise that a computer-based medium would first be put to use to support computer-based development projects. Producers and artists from other fields can profit from networking with their peers and clients just as much: artists can stay in touch with their audience and one another, working on collaborative projects such as the brilliant Djam Karet CD Collaborator (see Taylor's review in Gibraltar), professional interest groups can exchange information about the latest developments in their field as well as link with the users of their products to find out about their needs or problems, and the use of the Net as a medium of communication for academic researchers was one of its first applications, of course. In many such cases, consensual collaboration would even speed up the development process and help iron out remaining glitches, beating the efforts of traditional institutions with their severely guarded intellectual property rights. As Raymond sees it, for example, "no commercial developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem", and so "perhaps in the end the free-software culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software 'hoarding' is morally wrong ... , but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with free-software communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem" (10). Realising the Fiction There remains the problem that even the members of such development communities must make a living somehow -- a need to which their efforts in the community not only don't contribute, but the pursuit of which even limits the time available for the community efforts. The apparent impossibility of reconciling these two goals has made the consensual collaborative approach appear little more than a utopian fiction so far, individual successes like Linux or (potentially) Mozilla notwithstanding. However, there are ways of making money from the communal work even if due to the abolition of copyright laws mere royalty payments are impossible -- as the example of Netscape's relation to the Mozilla project shows, the added benefits that corporate support can bring will still seem worth paying for, for many users. Similarly, while music and artwork may be freely available on the Net, many music fans will still prefer to get the entire CD package from a store rather than having to burn the CD and print the booklet themselves. The changes to producer/user relations suggested here do have severe implications for corporate and legal structures, however, and that is the central reason why particularly the major corporate intellectual property holders (or, hoarders) and their armies of lawyers are engaged in such a fierce defensive battle. Needless to say, the changeover from the still-powerful fiction of enforcible intellectual property copyrights to the new vision of open, consensual collaboration that gives credit for individual contributions, but has no concept of an exclusive ownership of ideas, will not take place overnight. Intellectual property will continue to be guarded, trade secrets will keep being kept, for some time yet, but -- just as is the case with the established practice of patenting particular ideas just so competitors can't use them, but without ever putting them to use in one's own work -- eventually such efforts will prove to be self-defeating. Shutting one's creative talents off in a quiet cathedral will come to be seen as less productive than engaging in the creative cooperation occuring in the global bazaar, and solitary directives of central executives will be replaced by consensual decisions of the community of producers and users. As Raymond points out, "this is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, ... the cutting edge ... will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest" (10). Such communal approaches may to some seem much like communism, but this, too, is a misconception. In fact, in this new system there is much more exchange, much more give and take going on than in the traditional process of an exchange of money for product between user and producer -- only the currency has changed. "This explains much of the collective 'volunteer' work which fills the archives, newsgroups, and databases of the Internet. Its denizens are not working for 'nothing,' as is widely believed. Rather they are getting paid in something besides money. It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information" (Barlow). And with the removal of the many barriers to the free flow of information and obstacles to scientific and artistic development that traditional copyright has created, the progress of human endeavour itself is likely to be sped up. In the end, then, it all comes down to what fictions we choose to believe or reject. In the light of recent developments, and considering the evidence that suggests the viability, even superiority of alternative approaches, it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that traditional copyright can, and much less, should be sustained. Other than the few major copyright holders, few stand to gain from upholding these rights. On the other hand, were we to lift copyright restrictions and use the ideas and information thus made available freely in a cooperative, consensual, and most of all productive way, we all might profit. As various projects have shown, that fiction is already in the process of being realised. References Barlow, John Perry. "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net." 1993. 26 Jan. 1999 <www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/idea_economy_article.php>. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1984. Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.php>. Taylor, Mike. "Djam Karet, Jeff Greinke, Tim Song Jones, Nick Peck, Kit Watkins." Gibraltar 5.12 (22 Apr. 1995). 10 Feb. 1999 <http://www.progrock.net/gibraltar/issues/Vol5.Iss12.htm>. "Who Is Mozilla.org?" Mozilla.org Website. 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.mozilla.org/about.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1999) The fiction of copyright: towards a consensual use of intellectual property. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

As the science fictional years come upon us -- 1999, 2000, 2001 -- there is a sense that this is the future, and nothing much has changed. Indeed, the future has turned out to be pretty much like the past, but with Tamagotchis and Karaoke. Beyond Darko Suvin's adoption of the term "novum" and the souls sold to the demons of postmodernism, the criticism of science fiction remains more or less the same as it did thirty years ago, except that it is now often written by people who have only read Neuromancer. It is high time that this critical apparatus was shaken up. The various techniques and devices in the arsenal of the contemporary science-fiction writer need to be explored anew. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Clute and Grant introduced a series of terms, such as "polder" and "instauration", which they made use of in their analyses of the fantastic mode1. It is hoped that the terms I introduce gain similar currency. In the limited space I have available, I can only explore the terminology of plot. The key to the popular fictional genres, both visual and literary, is that they are defined by a certain sense of familiarity with the material, a familiar engendered by repetition with difference. Even within this overall scheme of generic recognition, there is a stage further when a plot is borrowed entire from another work. It is clearly easy for a writer to borrow a plot from someone else, as it is known that it already works, has already pleased readers and rations out the degree of originality in a genre which depends upon originality. For example, Dan Simmons's Hyperion has a series of characters telling each other stories to pass the time on a journey: obviously this is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. But in addition to that it is a gathering together of disparate characters, who are going to go and visit this wonderful, strange being, to ask for their deepest desires. As I read this, I began to wonder whether one of them wanted a brain and one of them wanted a heart and one of them wanted courage and one of them wanted to go back to Kansas. This is of course the structure of The Wizard of Oz. Hyperion is thus Canterbury Tales meets Wizard of Oz sung to the tune of Keats, and is therefore hailed as being startlingly original. At the end of Hyperion, as the characters go off to see the Wizard, one character bursts into song: 'What's that song you're singing to Rachel?' The scholar forced a grin and scratched his short beard. 'It's from an ancient flat film...' 'But who is the wizard?' asked Colonel Kassad... 'And what is Oz?' asked Lamia. 'And just who is off to see this wizard?' (Hyperion 500-1) In order to avoid charges of plagiarism, Simmons reveals his sources, or, to be more charitable, acknowledges the intertextual borrowing which he has been engaged in. Another plot which gets used again and again is in cyberpunk, where the non-spatial realm of cyberspace stands in for the realm of the dead, the Underworld, and an analogue for Orpheus is sent to rescue a version of Eurydice: a female is kidnapped by a god of the Underworld, and a male hero has to rescue her, only to be trapped behind himself. This is the plot which underlies Vurt, Snow Crash, and one of the less obvious cyberpunk classics, Mythago Wood. The titular wood is a realm whose interior dimensions do not match the exterior's, rather like cyberspace. The main character's entry into the wood to rescue his brother and mother / sister-in-law / lover strikes a suitable note of incest, and the beings encountered there are mythic archetypes. As Pollen was to make clear, the Underworld is the realm of the collective unconscious, the realm of Story, Myth and Archetype2. The great trilogy of the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, borrows the structure of The Lord of the Rings. In Fellowship of the Ring a group of disparate characters come together and set off on a mission, there's a great calamity following a betrayal and they are all scattered. In the next volume, The Two Towers, the scattered characters wander around aimlessly, not really achieving anything, and there's a couple of battles or revolutions. Finally in The Return of the King there are last climatic battles, councils of peace, characters die of old age and there's a sense of loss, that the world has been changed, but for the next generation. Compare this to the structure of Robinson's epic: in Red Mars a group of disparate characters (the First Hundred) come together and set off on a mission to Mars, there's a great calamity following a betrayal and they are all scattered. In Green Mars the scattered characters wander around aimlessly, not really achieving anything, and there's a couple of battles or revolutions. Blue Mars depicts a final climatic battle, councils of peace, characters die of old age -- as does the reader -- and there's a sense of loss, that the world has been changed, but for the next generation. (Curiously Kim Stanley Robinson next work, Antarctica, was a reworking of Blue Mars, but without the Mars, a feature it also shares with Lord of the Rings.) Repetition in narratives happens with entire works, but also within narratives. These are known as Cookie Dough Plots. Home-made cookies are made by using cutters which produce the same shape again and again from dough. In the same way, narratives can be constructed from a series of broadly similar events which are repeated ad infinitum. A recent example of this is Dan Simmons's Endymion (1996), where the entire plot is organised around the two poles of: 'We're being chased' and 'Phew, we've escaped'. This fills up over four hundred pages. The Ping Pong Plot is one where two plotlines interconnect and are told alternatively: two sets of characters are involved in two separate storylines, where the action is occurring simultaneously and the author cuts between the two. William Gibson does this a lot in his fiction, with increasing numbers of character sets. Strangely enough, great science fiction of twenty or thirty years ago was around two hundred pages in length, and great science fiction of today is around the four hundred page mark. It's twice the size of an old novel. Most of these novels use the Ping Pong Plot, with events alternating between two sets of characters who usually, but not always, meet up by page four hundred. They might as well be in separate novels. In fact what we appear to have in today's great science fiction, is two novels. As no-one would pay $50 for a two hundred page novel, they get two for the price of one, shuffled in accordance to the rules of Ping Pong. In Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, there are two sets of characters: the first plot is an angel looking for her mortal beloved soul mate or perfect man and the second is a man wandering around. And reading it, the reader thinks, 'Ooh, I wonder who her perfect man is going to be? Ooh, there's another 390 pages to find out.' The novel is an example of the Ping Pong Cookie Dough Plot variant, where the chase-escape-chase format is enlivened by switching -- Ping-Ponging -- between the chaser and the chased. In Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, there are two sets of characters: the first plot is an angel looking for her mortal beloved soul mate or perfect man and the second is a man wandering around. And reading it, the reader thinks, 'Ooh, I wonder who her perfect man is going to be? Ooh, there's another 390 pages to find out.' The novel is an example of the Ping Pong Cookie Dough Plot variant, where the chase-escape-chase format is enlivened by switching -- Ping-Ponging -- between the chaser and the chased. Perhaps the most significant example of this Timeslip Ping Pong in recent years is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996), where the action alternates between the account of the preparation for the voyage and the voyage itself and the account of the aftermath of the voyage. There's the before of events and the after of events, moving towards the discovery of the dark secret at the heart of the tale. It doesn't quite keep up the Ping Pong, as some chapters slip into the past or the future, and the Pings are not sufficiently distinguishable from the Pongs. In the past, series of novellas or novels used a variation on the Timeslip Ping Pong Plot, where the events and resolution of one story sets up the problem for the next. Rather than a series of sequels, what often happened was a number of sequels and prequels, until the final, ultimate and closing Prelude. (In a sense this is what Jack Womack is doing in his Dryco sequence). One variation on this should be known -- after E.E. 'Doc' Smith's novels -- as the My-Ultimate-Weapon-Is-More-Ultimate-Than-Yours-Is Sequence. In every Lensman novel there is an Ultimate Weapon, a weapon too dreadful to use, which they use after all, since they have it around, cluttering up the place. Fortunately for the sequence, the UW can be countered by the Ultimate Strategic Defense Initiative (or USDI) which is much more ultimate, and an even more UW. By the time you get to the eighth novel in the sequence, the UW of the first book ought to be renamed the Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Penultimate Ultimate Weapon. The preceding terminology covers the major versions of narratives used within contemporary science fiction, narratives which it seems likely will dominate the next century of science fiction. Similarly the same sorts of settings, which I hope to explore elsewhere, will dominate: in particular the rainy city, post-holocaust and the next five minutes (although the pre-millennial tension setting is clearly now obsolete). Footnotes A "polder" is a realm which is deliberately maintained as separate and distinct from the outside world (Clute 772-3). "Instauration fantasies" are those where "the real world is transformed" (Clute 501). For cyberpunk and the underworld narrative see Joan Gordon, "Yin and Yang Duke It Out", in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Postmodern Science Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1991). For a longer exploration of Mythago Wood see my article in Vector 192 (March/April 1997): 4, and my "Journeys beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavoured Novels of Jeff Noon", Novel Turns: The Novel in Europe Now, ed. by John Gatt-Rutter (forthcoming). The term "cyberpunk-flavoured" is one I coined for a discussion of the works of Jeff Noon: the novels share a number of characteristics of cyberpunk, whilst not necessarily being unproblematically cyberpunk. A tradition of works which have a realm analogous to cyberspace, or a realm which serves a comparative narrative need, could be identified; Borges's use of the term "precursor" might be useful here to characterise such a tradition, although as Mythago Wood is more or less contemporary with Neuromancer it cannot properly be a precursor. The cyberspatial realm of the Vurt feather is something between an interior mental landscape and a computer game; the wood realm of Mythago Wood is somewhere between an interior mental landscape which can be simulated / created / entered with the use of electrical stimulation on the brain and a secondary world. References Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit: 1997 Citation reference for this article MLA style: Andrew M. Butler. "Towards a Language for Science Fiction Studies: Narratives." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/sf.php>. Chicago style: Andrew M. Butler, "Towards a Language for Science Fiction Studies: Narratives," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/sf.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Andrew M. Butler. (2000) Towards a language for science fiction studies: narratives. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/sf.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Historical fiction, a widely-read genre, continues to engender contradiction and controversy within the fields of literature and historiography. This paper begins with a discussion of the differences and similarities between historical writing and the historical novel, focusing on the way these forms interpret and represent the past. It then examines the dilemma facing historians as they try to come to terms with the modern era and the growing competition from other modes of presenting history. Finally, it considers claims by Australian historians that so-called “fictive history” has been bestowed with historical authority to the detriment of traditional historiography. The Fact/Fiction Dichotomy Hayden White, a leading critic in the field of historiography, claims that the surge in popularity of historical fiction and the novel form in the nineteenth century caused historians to seek recognition of their field as a serious “science” (149). Historians believed that, to be scientific, historical studies had to cut ties with any form of artistic writing or imaginative literature, especially the romantic novel. German historian Leopold von Ranke “anathematized” the historical novel virtually from its first appearance in Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Hayden White argues that Ranke and others after him wrote history as narrative while eschewing the use of imagination and invention that were “exiled into the domain of ‘fiction’ ” (149-150). Early critics in the nineteenth century questioned the value of historical fiction. Famous Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia believed that history was opposite and superior to fiction; he accused the historical novel of degrading history to the level of fiction which, he argued, is lies (cited in de Piérola 152). Alessandro Manzoni, though partially agreeing with Heredia, argued that fiction had value in its “poetic truth” as opposed to the “positive truth” of history (153). He eventually decided that the historical novel fails through the mixing of the incompatible elements of history and fiction, which can lead to deception (ibid). More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did. In contrast to these early critics, historian and author of three books on history and three novels, Richard Slotkin, argues that the historical novel can recount the past as accurately as history, because it should involve similar research methods and critical interpretation of the data (225). Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk go even further, suggesting that “historical fiction may offer a more plausible representation of the past than those sources typically accepted as more factual” (144). In its search for “poetic truth,” the novel tries to create a sense of what the past was, without necessarily adhering to all the factual details and by eliminating facts not essential to the story (Slotkin 225). For Hayden White, the difference between factual and fictional discourse, is that one is occupied by what is “true” and the other by what is “real” (147). Historical documents may provide a basis for a “true account of the world” in a certain time and place, but they are limited in their capacity to act as a foundation for the exploration of all aspects of “reality.” In White’s words: The rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. (ibid) White’s main point is that both history and fiction are interpretative by nature. Historians, for their part, interpret given evidence from a subjective viewpoint; this means that it cannot be unbiased. In the words of Beverley Southgate, “factual history is revealed as subjectively chosen, subjectively interpreted, subjectively constructed and incorporated within a narrative” (45). Both fiction and history are narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is fictionalising,” according to Keith Jenkins (cited in Southgate 32). The novelist and historian find meaning through their own interpretation of the known record (Brown) to produce stories that are entertaining and structured. Moreover, historians often reach conflicting conclusions in their translations of the same archival documents, which, in the extreme, can spark a wider dispute such as the so-called history wars, the debate about the representation of the Indigenous peoples in Australian history that has polarised both historians and politicians. The historian’s purpose differs from that of the novelist. Historians examine the historical record in fine detail in an attempt to understand its complexities, and then use digressions and footnotes to explain and lend authority to their findings. The novelist on the other hand, uses their imagination to create personalities and plot and can leave out important details; the novelist achieves authenticity through detailed description of setting, customs, culture, buildings and so on (Brown). Nevertheless, the main task of both history and historical fiction is to represent the past to a reader in the present; this “shared concern with the construction of meaning through narrative” is a major component in the long-lasting, close relationship between fiction and history (Southgate 19). However, unlike history, the historical novel mixes fiction and fact, and is therefore “a hybrid of two genres” (de Piérola 152); this mixture of supposed opposites of fact and fiction creates a dilemma for the theorist, because historical fiction cannot necessarily be read as belonging to either category. Attitudes towards the line drawn between fiction and history are changing as more and more critics and theorists explore the area where the two genres intersect. Historian John Demos argues that with the passing of time, this distinction “seems less a boundary than a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” (329). While some historians are now willing to investigate the wide area where the two genres overlap, this approach remains a concern for traditionalists. History’s Dilemma Historians face a crisis as they try to come to terms with the postmodern era which has seen unprecedented questioning of the validity of history’s claim to accuracy in recounting the past. In the words of Jenkins et al., “ ‘history’ per se wobbles” as it experiences a period of uncertainty and challenge; the field is “much changed and deeply contested,” as historians seek to understand the meaning of history itself (6). But is postmodernism the cause of the problem? Writing in 1986 Linda Hutcheon, well known for her work on postmodernism, attempted to clarify the term as it is applied in modern times in reference to fiction, where, she states, it is usually taken to mean “metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way self-referential and auto-representational” (301). To eliminate any confusion with regard to concept or terminology, Hutcheon coined the phrase “historiographic metafiction," which includes “the presence of the past” in “historical, social, and ideological” form (302). As examples, she cites contemporary novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The White Hotel, Midnight’s Children and Famous Last Words. Hutcheon explains that all these works “self-consciously focus on the processes of producing and receiving paradoxically fictive historical writing” (ibid). In the Australian context, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish could be added to the list. Like the others, they question how historical sources maintain their status as authentic historical documents in the context of a fictional work (302). However, White argues that the crisis in historical studies is not due to postmodernism but has materialised because historians have failed to live up to their nineteenth century expectations of history being recognised as a science (149). Postmodernists are not against history, White avows; what they do not accept “is a professional historiography” that serves self-seeking governing bodies with its outdated and severely limited approach to objectivity (152). This kind of historiography has denied itself access to aesthetic writing and the imaginary, while it has also cut any links it had “to what was most creative in the real sciences it sought half-heartedly to emulate” (ibid). Furthering White’s argument, historian Robert Rosenstone states that past certitude in the claims of historians to be the sole guardians of historical truth now seem outdated in the light of our accumulated knowledge. The once impregnable position of the historian is no longer tenable because: We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page. (Rosenstone 12) While the archive confers credibility on history, it does not confer the right to historians to claim it as the truth (Southgate 6); there are many possible versions of the past, which can be presented to us in any number of ways as history (Jenkins et al. 1). And this is a major challenge for historians as other modes of representing the past cater to public demand in place of traditional approaches. Public interest in history has grown over the last 20 years (Harlan 109). Historical novels fill the shelves of bookstores and libraries, while films, television series and documentaries about the past attract large audiences. In the words of Rosenstone, “people are hungry for the past, as various studies tell us and the responses to certain films, TV series and museums indicate” (17). Rosenstone laments the fact that historians, despite this attraction to the past, have failed to stir public interest in their own writings. While works of history have their strengths, they target a specific, extremely limited audience in an outdated format (17). They have forgotten the fact that, in the words of White, “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (149). This may be true of some historians, but there are many writers of non-fiction, including historians, who use the narrative voice and other fictional techniques in their writings (Ricketson). Matthew Ricketson accuses White of confusing “fiction with literariness,” while other scholars take fiction and narrative to be the same thing. He argues that “the use of a wide range of modes of writing usually associated with fiction are not the sole province of fiction” and that narrative theorists have concentrated their attention on fictional narrative, thereby excluding factual forms of writing (ibid). One of the defining elements of creative non-fiction is its use of literary techniques in writing about factual events and people. At the same time, this does not make it fiction, which by definition, relies on invention (ibid). However, those historians who do write outside the limits of traditional history can attract criticism. Historian Richard Current argues that if writers of history and biography try to be more effective through literary considerations, they sometimes lose their objectivity and authenticity. While it is acceptable to seek to write with clarity and force, it is out of the question to present “occasional scenes in lifelike detail” in the manner of a novelist. Current contends that if only one source is used, this violates “the historiographical requirement of two or more independent and competent witnesses.” This requirement is important because it explains why much of the writing by academic historians is perceived as “dry-as-dust” (Current 87). Modern-day historians are contesting this viewpoint as they analyse the nature and role of their writings, with some turning to historical fiction as an alternative mode of expression. Perhaps one of the more well-known cases in recent times was that of historian Simon Schama, who, in writing Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), was criticised for creating dramatic scenes based on dubious historical sources without informing the reader of his fabrications (Nelson). In this work, Schama questions notions of factual history and the limitations of historians. The title is suggestive in itself, while the afterword to the book is explicit, as “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot” (320). Another example is Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, which was considered to be “postmodern” and not acceptable to publishers and agents as the correct way to present history, despite the author’s reassurance that nothing was invented, “it just tells the story a different way” ("Space for the Birds to Fly" 16). Schama is not the only author to draw fire from critics for neglecting to inform the reader of the veracity or not of their writing. Richard Current accused Gore Vidal of getting his facts wrong and of inaccurately portraying Lincoln in his work, Lincoln: A Novel (81). Despite the title, which is a form of disclaimer itself, Current argued that Vidal could have avoided criticism if he had not asserted that his work was authentic history, or had used a disclaimer in a preface to deny any connection between the novel’s characters and known persons (82). Current is concerned about this form of writing, known as “fictional history," which, unlike historical fiction, “pretends to deal with real persons and events but actually reshapes them—and thus rewrites the past” (77). This concern is shared by historians in Australia. Fictive History Historian Mark McKenna, in his essay, Writing the Past, argues that “fictive history” has become a new trend in Australia; he is unhappy with the historical authority bestowed on this form of writing and would like to see history restored to its rightful place. He argues that with the decline of academic history, novelists have taken over the historian’s role and fiction has become history (3). In sympathy with McKenna, author, historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen claims that “novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track” (16). McKenna accuses writers W.G. Sebald and David Malouf of supporting “the core myth of historical fiction: the belief that being there is what makes historical understanding possible.” Malouf argues, in a conversation with Helen Daniel in 1996, that: Our only way of grasping our history—and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now—the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people's entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction. Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it's mostly going to be fiction. It's when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. (3) From this point of view, the historical novel plays an important role in our culture because it allows people to interact with the past in a meaningful way, something factual writing struggles to do. McKenna recognises that history is present in fiction and that history can contain fiction, but they should not be confused. Writers and critics have a responsibility towards their readers and must be clear that fiction is not history and should not be presented as such (10). He takes writer Kate Grenville to task for not respecting this difference. McKenna argues that Grenville has asserted in public that her historical novel The Secret River is history: “If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville” (5). The Secret River tells the story of early settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Grenville’s inspiration for the story emanated from her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life. The main protagonist, William Thornhill (loosely based on Wiseman), is convicted of theft in 1806 and transported to Australia. The novel depicts the poverty and despair in England at the time, and describes life in the new colony where Grenville explores the collision between the colonists and the Aborigines. McKenna knows that Grenville insists elsewhere that her book is not history, but he argues that this conflicts with what she said in interviews and he worries that “with such comments, it is little wonder that many people might begin to read fiction as history” (5). In an article on her website, Grenville refutes McKenna’s arguments, and those of Clendinnen: “Here it is in plain words: I don’t think The Secret River is history…Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history.” Furthermore, the acknowledgements in the back of the book state clearly that it is a work of fiction. She accuses the two above-mentioned historians of using quotes that “have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated” ("History and Fiction"). McKenna then goes on to say how shocked he was on hearing Grenville, in an interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National, make her now infamous comments about standing on a stepladder looking down at the history wars, and that he “felt like ringing the ABC and leaping to the defence of historians.” He accuses Grenville of elevating fiction above history as an “interpretive power” (6). Koval asked Grenville where her book stood in regard to the history wars; she answered: Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. . . I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. ("Interview") Grenville claims that she did not use the stepladder image to imply that her work was superior to history, but rather to convey a sense of being outside the battle raging between historians as an uninvolved observer, “an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.” She goes on to argue that McKenna’s only sources in his essay, Writing the Past, are interviews and newspaper articles, which in themselves are fine, but she disagrees with how they have been used “uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence” ("History and Fiction"), much in contrast to the historian’s desire for authenticity in all sources. It appears that the troubles between history and fiction will continue for some time yet as traditional historians are bent on keeping faith with the tenets of their nineteenth century predecessors by defending history from the insurgence of fiction at all costs. While history and historical fiction share a common purpose in presenting the past, the novel deals with what is “real” and can tell the past as accurately or even in a more plausible way than history, which deals with what is “true”. However, the “dry-as-dust” historical approach to writing, and postmodernism’s questioning of historiography’s role in presenting the past, has contributed to a reassessment of the nature of history. Many historians recognise the need for change in the way they present their work, but as they have often doubted the worth of historical fiction, they are wary of the genre and the narrative techniques it employs. Those historians who do make an attempt to write differently have often been criticised by traditionalists. In Australia, historians such as McKenna and Clendinnen are worried by the incursion of historical fiction into their territory and are highly critical of novelists who claim their works are history. The overall picture that emerges is of two fields that are still struggling to clarify a number of core issues concerning the nature of both the historical novel and historiographical writing, and the role they play in portraying the past. References Brown, Joanne. "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." ALAN Review 26.1 (1998). 1 March 2010 ‹http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html›. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 2000. Clendinnen, Inga. "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1-72. Current, Richard. "Fiction as History: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 52.1 (1986): 77-90. De Piérola, José. "At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America." Romance Studies 26.2 (2008): 151-62. Demos, John. "Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 329-35. Den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-Fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones between Then and Now." Educational Theory 57.2 (2007): 141-57. Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Sydney: Picador, 2002. Grenville, Kate. “History and Fiction.” 2007. 19 July 2010 ‹http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_History%20and%20Fiction›. ———. “Interview with Ramona Koval.” 17 July 2005. 26 July 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm›. ———. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. Harlan, David. “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History.” Manifestos for History. Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jenkins, Keith, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow. Manifestos for History. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Malouf, David. "Interview with Helen Daniel." Australian Humanities Review (Sep. 1996). McKenna, Mark. “Writing the Past: History, Literature & the Public Sphere in Australia.” Australian Financial Review (2005). 13 May 2010 ‹http://www.afraccess.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/search›. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (2007). 5 June 2010 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au›. Ricketson, Matthew. “Not Muddying, Clarifying: Towards Understanding the Boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 14.2 (2010). 6 June 2011 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct10/ricketson.htm›. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. 11-18. ———. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations). 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 221-36. Southgate, Beverley C. History Meets Fiction. New York: Longman, Harlow, England, 2009. White, Hayden. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147-57.

Abstract:

The traditional German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin inhabits an ambiguous narrative borderland, a liminal space between fact and fiction, fantasy and horror, concrete details and elusive mystery. In his study of the Pied Piper in Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature, Wolfgang Mieder describes how manuscripts and other evidence appear to confirm the historical base of the story. Precise details from a fifteenth-century manuscript, based on earlier sources, specify that in 1284 on the 26th of June, the feast-day of Saints John and Paul, 130 children from Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colours to the Koppen Hill, and there vanished (Mieder 48). Later manuscripts add details familiar today, such as a plague of rats and a broken bargain with burghers as a motive for the Piper’s actions, while in the seventeenth century the first English-language version advances what might also be the first attempt at a “rational” explanation for the children’s disappearance, claiming that they were taken to Transylvania. The uncommon pairing of such precise factual detail with enigmatic mystery has encouraged many theories. These have ranged from references to the Children’s Crusade, or other religious fervours, to the devastation caused by the Black Death, from the colonisation of Romania by young German migrants to a murderous rampage by a paedophile. Fictional interpretations of the story have multiplied, with the classic versions of the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning being most widely known, but with contemporary creators exploring the theme too. This includes interpretations in Hamelin itself. On 26 June 2015, in Hamelin Museum, I watched a wordless five-minute play, entirely performed not by humans but by animatronic stylised figures built out of scrap iron, against a montage of multilingual, confused voices and eerie music, with the vanished children represented by a long line of small empty shirts floating by. The uncanny, liminal nature of the story was perfectly captured. Australia is a world away from German fairy tale mysteries, historically, geographically, and culturally. Yet, as Lisa M. Fiander has persuasively argued, contemporary Australian fiction has been more influenced by fairy tales than might be assumed, and in this essay it is proposed that major motifs from the Pied Piper appear in several Australian novels, transformed not only by distance of setting and time from that of the original narrative, but also by elements specific to the Australian imaginative space. These motifs are lost children, the enigmatic figure of the Piper himself, and the power of a very particular place (as Hamelin and its Koppen Hill are particularised in the original tale). Three major Australian novels will be examined in this essay: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Christopher Koch’s The Doubleman (1985), and Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011). Dubosarsky’s novel was written for children; both Koch’s and Lindsay’s novels were published as adult fiction. In each of these works of fiction, the original tale’s motifs have been developed and transformed to express unique evocations of the Pied Piper theme. As noted by Fiander, fiction writers are “most likely to draw upon fairy tales when they are framing, in writing, a subject that generates anxiety in their culture” (158). Her analysis is about anxieties of place within Australian fiction, but this insight could be usefully extended to the motifs which I have identified as inherent in the Pied Piper story. Prominent among these is the lost children motif, whose importance in the Australian imagination has been well-established by scholars such as Peter Pierce. Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety explores this preoccupation from the earliest beginnings of European settlement, through analysis of fiction, newspaper reports, paintings, and films. As Pierce observed in a later interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (Knox), over time the focus changed from rural children and the nineteenth-century fear of the vast impersonal nature of the bush, where children of colonists could easily get lost, to urban children and the contemporary fear of human predators.In each of the three novels under examination in this essay, lost children—whether literal or metaphorical—feature prominently. Writer Carmel Bird, whose fiction has also frequently centred on the theme of the lost child, observes in “Dreaming the Place” that the lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes, there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are mirror images of each other. (7) The motif of lost children—and of children in danger—is not unique to the Pied Piper. Other fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, contain it, and it is those antecedents which Bird cites in her essay. But within the Pied Piper story it has three features which distinguish it from other traditional tales. First, unlike in the classic versions of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, the children do not return. Neither are there bodies to find. The children have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Second, it is not only parents who have lost them, but an entire community whose future has been snatched away: a community once safe, ordered, even complacent, traumatised by loss. The lack of hope, of a happy ending for anyone, is striking. And thirdly, the children are not lost or abandoned or even, strictly speaking, stolen: they are lured away, semi-willingly, by the central yet curiously marginal figure of the Piper himself. In the original story there is no mention of motive and no indication of malice on the part of the Piper. There is only his inexplicable presence, a figure out of fairy folklore appearing in the midst of concrete historical dates and numbers. Clearly, he links to the liminal, complex world of the fairies, found in folklore around the world—beings from a world close to the human one, yet alien. Whimsical and unpredictable by human standards, such beings are nevertheless bound by mysteriously arbitrary rules and taboos, and haunt the borders of the human world, disturbing its rational edges and transforming lives forever. It is this sense of disturbance, that enchanting yet frightening sudden shifting of the border of reality and of the comforting order of things, the essence of transformation itself, which can also be seen at the core of the three novels under examination in this essay, with the Piper represented in each of them but in different ways. The third motif within the Pied Piper is a focus on place as a source of uncanny power, a theme which particularly resonates within an Australian context. Fiander argues that if contemporary British fiction writers use fairy tale to explore questions of community and alienation, and Canadian fiction writers use it to explore questions of identity, then Australian writers use it to explore the unease of place. She writes of the enduring legacy of Australia’s history “as a settler colony which invests the landscape with strangeness for many protagonists” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that “when Australian fiction writers, using fairy tales, describe the landscape as divorced from reality, they might be signalling anxiety about their own connection with the land which had already seen tens of thousands of years of occupation when Captain James Cook ‘found’ it in 1770” (160). I would argue, however, that in the case of the Pied Piper motifs, it is less clear that it is solely settler anxieties which are driving the depiction of the power of place in these three novels. There is no divorce from reality here, but rather an eruption of the metaphysical potency of place within the usual, “normal” order of reality. This follows the pattern of the original tale, where the Piper and all the children, except for one or two stragglers, disappear at Koppen Hill, vanishing literally into the hill itself. In traditional European folklore, hollow hills are associated with fairies and their uncanny power, but other places, especially those of water—springs, streams, even the sea—may also be associated with their liminal world (in the original tale, the River Weser is another important locus for power). In Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is another outcrop in the landscape which holds that power and claims the “lost children.” Inspired partly by a painting by nineteenth-century Australian artist William Ford, titled At the Hanging Rock (1875), depicting a group of elegant people picnicking in the bush, this influential novel, which inspired an equally successful film adaptation, revolves around an incident in 1900 when four girls from Appleyard College, an exclusive school in Victoria, disappear with one of their teachers whilst climbing Hanging Rock, where they have gone for a picnic. Only one of their number, a girl called Irma, is ever found, and she has no memory of how and why she found herself on the Rock, and what has happened to the others. This inexplicable event is the precursor to a string of tragedies which leads to the violent deaths of several people, and which transforms the sleepy and apparently content little community around Appleyard College into a centre of loss, horror, and scandal.Told in a way which makes it appear that the novelist is merely recounting a true story—Lindsay even tells readers in an author’s note that they must decide for themselves if it is fact or fiction—Picnic at Hanging Rock shares the disturbingly liminal fact-fiction territory of the Piper tale. Many readers did in fact believe that the novel was based on historical events and combed newspaper files, attempting to propound ingenious “rational” explanations for what happened on the Rock. Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the subject of many studies, with the novel being analysed through various prisms, including the Gothic, the pastoral, historiography, and philosophy. In “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush,” Kathleen Steele has depicted Picnic at Hanging Rock as embodying the idea that “Ordered ‘civilisation’ cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations: landscapes where time and people disappear” (44). She proposes that Lindsay intimates that the landscape swallows the “lost children” of the novel because there is a great absence in that place: that of Aboriginal people. In this reading of the novel, it is that absence which becomes, in a sense, a malevolent presence that will reach out beyond the initial disappearance of the three people on the Rock to destroy the bonds that held the settler community together. It is a powerfully-made argument, which has been taken up by other scholars and writers, including studies which link the theme of the novel with real-life lost-children cases such as that of Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared near another “Rock” of great Indigenous metaphysical potency—Uluru, or Ayers Rock. However, to date there has been little exploration of the fairy tale quality of the novel, and none at all of the striking ways in which it evokes Pied Piper motifs, whilst transforming them to suit the exigencies of its particular narrative world. The motif of lost children disappearing from an ordered, safe, even complacent community into a place of mysterious power is extended into an exploration of the continued effects of those disappearances, depicting the disastrous impact on those left behind and the wider community in a way that the original tale does not. There is no literal Pied Piper figure in this novel, though various theories are evoked by characters as to who might have lured the girls and their teacher, and who might be responsible for the disappearances. Instead, there is a powerful atmosphere of inevitability and enchantment within the landscape itself which both illustrates the potency of place, and exemplifies the Piper’s hold on his followers. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, place and Piper are synonymous: the Piper has been transformed into the land itself. Yet this is not the “vast impersonal bush,” nor is it malevolent or vengeful. It is a living, seductive metaphysical presence: “Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete . . .” (Lindsay 35). Just as in the original tale, the lost children follow the “Piper” willingly, without regret. Their disappearance is a happiness to them, in that moment, as it is for the lost children of Hamelin, and quite unlike how it must be for those torn apart by that loss—the community around Appleyard, the townspeople of Hamelin. Music, long associated with fairy “takings,” is also a subtle feature of the story. In the novel, just before the luring, Irma hears a sound like the beating of far-off drums. In the film, which more overtly evokes fairy tale elements than does the novel, it is noteworthy that the music at that point is based on traditional tunes for Pan-pipes, played by the great Romanian piper Gheorge Zamfir. The ending of the novel, with questions left unanswered, and lives blighted by the forever-inexplicable, may be seen as also following the trajectory of the original tale. Readers as much as the fictional characters are left with an enigma that continues to perplex and inspire. Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the inspirations for another significant Australian fiction, this time a contemporary novel for children. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011) is an elegant and subtle short novel, set in Sydney at an exclusive girls’ school, in 1967. Like the earlier novel, The Golden Day is also partly inspired by visual art, in this case the Schoolgirl series of paintings by Charles Blackman. Combining a fairy tale atmosphere with historical details—the Vietnam War, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Harold Holt—the story is told through the eyes of several girls, especially one, known as Cubby. The Golden Day echoes the core narrative patterns of the earlier novel, but intriguingly transformed: a group of young girls goes with their teacher on an outing to a mysterious place (in this case, a cave on the beach—note the potent elements of rock and water, combined), and something inexplicable happens which results in a disappearance. Only this time, the girls are much younger than the characters of Lindsay’s novel, pre-pubertal in fact at eleven years old, and it is their teacher, a young, idealistic woman known only as Miss Renshaw, who disappears, apparently into thin air, with only an amber bead from her necklace ever found. But it is not only Miss Renshaw who vanishes: the other is a poet and gardener named Morgan who is also Miss Renshaw’s secret lover. Later, with the revelation of a dark past, he is suspected in absentia of being responsible for Miss Renshaw’s vanishment, with implications of rape and murder, though her body is never found. Morgan, who could partly figure as the Piper, is described early on in the novel as having “beautiful eyes, soft, brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy” (Dubosarsky 11). This disarming image may seem a world away from the ambiguously disturbing figure of the legendary Piper, yet not only does it fit with the children’s naïve perception of the world, it also echoes the fact that the children in the original story were not afraid of the Piper, but followed him willingly. However, that is complicated by the fact that Morgan does not lure the children; it is Miss Renshaw who follows him—and the children follow her, who could be seen as the other half of the Piper. The Golden Day similarly transforms the other Piper motifs in its own original way. The children are only literally lost for a short time, when their teacher vanishes and they are left to make their own way back from the cave; yet it could be argued that metaphorically, the girls are “lost” to childhood from that moment, in terms of never being able to go back to the state of innocence in which they were before that day. Their safe, ordered school community will never be the same again, haunted by the inexplicability of the events of that day. Meanwhile, the exploration of Australian place—the depiction of the Memorial Gardens where Miss Renshaw enjoins them to write poetry, the uncomfortable descent over rocks to the beach, and the fateful cave—is made through the eyes of children, not the adolescents and adults of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls are not yet in that liminal space which is adolescence and so their impressions of what the places represent are immediate, instinctive, yet confused. They don’t like the cave and can’t wait to get out of it, whereas the beach inspires them with a sense of freedom and the gardens with a sense of enchantment. But in each place, those feelings are mixed both with ordinary concerns and with seemingly random associations that are nevertheless potently evocative. For example, in the cave, Cubby senses a threateningly weightless atmosphere, a feeling of reality shifting, which she associates, apparently confusedly, with the hanging of Ronald Ryan, reported that very day. In this way, Dubosarsky subtly gestures towards the sinister inevitability of the following events, and creates a growing tension that will eventually fade but never fully dissipate. At the end, the novel takes an unexpected turn which is as destabilising as the ending of the Pied Piper story, and as open-ended in its transformative effects as the original tale: “And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, though she scarcely understood what it was” (Dubosarsky 148). The eruption of the uncanny into ordinary life will never leave her now, as it will never leave the other girls who followed Miss Renshaw and Morgan into the literally hollow hill of the cave and emerged alone into a transformed world. It isn’t just childhood that Cubby has lost but also any possibility of a comforting sense of the firm borders of reality. As in the Pied Piper, ambiguity and loss combine to create questions which cannot be logically answered, only dimly apprehended.Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, also explores the power of place and the motif of lost children, but unlike the other two novels examined in this essay depicts an actual “incarnated” Piper motif in the mysteriously powerful figure of Clive Broderick, brilliant guitarist and charismatic teacher/guru, whose office, significantly, is situated in a subterranean space of knowledge—a basem*nt room beneath a bookshop. Both central yet peripheral to the main action of the novel, touched with hints of the supernatural which never veer into overt fantasy, Broderick remains an enigma to the end. Set, like The Golden Day, in the 1960s, The Doubleman is narrated in the first person by Richard Miller, in adulthood a producer of a successful folk-rock group, the Rymers, but in childhood an imaginative, troubled polio survivor, with a crutch and a limp. It is noteworthy here that in the Grimms’ version of the Pied Piper, two children are left behind, despite following the Piper: one is blind, one is lame. And it is the lame boy who tells the townspeople what he glimpsed at Koppen Hill. In creating the character of Broderick, the author blends the traditional tropes of the Piper figure with Mephistophelian overtones and a strong influence from fairy lore, specifically the idea of the “doubleman,” here drawn from the writings of seventeenth-century Scottish pastor, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle. Kirk’s 1691 book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is the earliest known serious attempt at objective description of the fairy beliefs of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. His own precisely dated life-story and ambiguous end—it is said he did not die but is forever a prisoner of the fairies—has eerie parallels to the Piper story. “And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still” (Masson).Both in his creative and his non-fiction work Koch frequently evoked what he called “the Otherland,” which he depicted as a liminal, ambiguous, destabilising but nevertheless very real and potent presence only thinly veiled by the everyday world. This Otherland is not the same in all his fictions, but is always part of an actual place, whether that be Java in The Year of Living Dangerously, Hobart and Sydney in The Doubleman, Tasmania, Vietnam and Cambodia in Highways to a War, and Ireland and Tasmania in Out of Ireland. It is this sense of the “Otherland” below the surface, a fairy tale, mythical realm beyond logic or explanation, which gives his work its distinctive and particular power. And in The Doubleman, this motif, set within a vividly evoked real world, complete with precise period detail, transforms the Piper figure into one which could easily appear in a Hobart lane, yet which loses none of its uncanny potency. As Noel Henricksen writes in his study of Koch’s work, Island and Otherland, “Behind the membrane of Hobart is Otherland, its manifestations a spectrum stretched between the mystical and the spiritually perverted” (213).This is Broderick’s first appearance, described through twelve-year-old Richard Miller’s eyes: Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious . . . The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed to be no explanation . . . I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. (Koch, Doubleman 3)That first encounter is followed by another, more disturbing still, when Broderick speaks to the boy, eyes fixed on him: “. . . hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy, yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent” (5).The sense of danger that Broderick evokes in the boy could be explained by a sinister hint of paedophilia. But though Broderick is a predator of sorts on young people, nothing is what it seems; no rational explanation encompasses the strange effect of his presence. It is not until Richard is a young man, in the company of his musical friend Brian Brady, that he comes across Broderick again. The two young men are looking in the window of a music shop, when Broderick appears beside them, and as Richard observes, just as in a fairy tale, “He didn’t seem to have changed or aged . . .” (44). But the shock of his sudden re-appearance is mixed with something else now, as Broderick engages Brady in conversation, ignoring Richard, “. . . as though I had failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me” (45).What happens next, as Broderick demonstrates his musical prowess, becomes Brady’s teacher, and introduces them to his disciple, young bass player Darcy Burr, will change the young men’s lives forever and set them on a path that leads both to great success and to living nightmare, even after Broderick’s apparent disappearance, for Burr will take on the Piper’s mantle. Koch’s depiction of the lost children motif is distinctively different to the other two novels examined in this essay. Their fate is not so much a mystery as a tragedy and a warning. The lost children of The Doubleman are also lost children of the sixties, bright, talented young people drawn through drugs, immersive music, and half-baked mysticism into darkness and horrifying violence. In his essay “California Dreaming,” published in the collection Crossing the Gap, Koch wrote about this subterranean aspect of the sixties, drawing a connection between it and such real-life sinister “Pipers” as Charles Manson (60). Broderick and Burr are not the same as the serial killer Manson, of course; but the spell they cast over the “lost children” who follow them is only different in degree, not in kind. In the end of the novel, the spell is broken and the world is again transformed. Yet fittingly it is a melancholy transformation: an end of childhood dreams of imaginative potential, as well as dangerous illusions: “And I knew now that it was all gone—like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-Hand” (Koch, Doubleman 357). The power of place, the last of the Piper motifs, is also deeply embedded in The Doubleman. In fact, as with the idea of Otherland, place—or Island, as Henricksen evocatively puts it—is a recurring theme in Koch’s work. He identified primarily and specifically as a Tasmanian writer rather than as simply Australian, pointing out in an essay, “The Lost Hemisphere,” that because of its landscape and latitude, different to the mainland of Australia, Tasmania “genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent” (Crossing the Gap 92). In The Doubleman, Richard Miller imbues his familiar and deeply loved home landscape with great mystical power, a power which is both inherent within it as it is, but also expressive of the Otherland. In “A Tasmanian Tone,” another essay from Crossing the Gap, Koch describes that tone as springing “from a sense of waiting in the landscape: the tense yet serene expectancy of some nameless revelation” (118). But Koch could also write evocatively of landscapes other than Tasmanian ones. The unnerving climax of The Doubleman takes place in Sydney—significantly, as in The Golden Day, in a liminal, metaphysically charged place of rocks and water. That place, which is real, is called Point Piper. In conclusion, the original tale’s three main motifs—lost children, the enigma of the Piper, and the power of place—have been explored in distinctive ways in each of the three novels examined in this article. Contemporary Australia may be a world away from medieval Germany, but the uncanny liminality and capacious ambiguity of the Pied Piper tale has made it resonate potently within these major Australian fictions. Transformed and transformative within the Australian imagination, the theme of the Pied Piper threads like a faintly-heard snatch of unearthly music through the apparently mimetic realism of the novels, destabilising readers’ expectations and leaving them with subversively unanswered questions. ReferencesBird, Carmel. “Dreaming the Place: An Exploration of Antipodean Narratives.” Griffith Review 42 (2013). 1 May 2016 <https://griffithreview.com/articles/dreaming-the-place/>.Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in A Fairy Story Landscape: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2 (2003). 30 April 2016 <http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/index>.Henricksen, Noel. Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books. Melbourne: Educare, 2003.Knox, Malcolm. “A Country of Lost Children.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Aug. 2009. 1 May 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-country-of-lost-children-20090814-el8d.html>.Koch, Christopher. The Doubleman. 1985. Sydney: Minerva, 1996.Koch, Christopher. Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections. 1987. Sydney: Vintage, 2000. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1967. Melbourne: Penguin, 1977.Masson, Sophie. “Captive in Fairyland: The Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.” Nation and Federation in the Celtic World: Papers from the Fourth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, June–July 2001. Ed. Pamela O’Neil. Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2003. Mieder, Wolfgang. “The Pied Piper: Origin, History, and Survival of a Legend.” Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature. 1987. London: Routledge Revivals, 2015.Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Steele, Kathleen. “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Colloquy 20 (2010): 33–56. 27 July 2016 <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts/files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_20_december_2010/steele.pdf>.

Abstract:

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; co*kie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “1363.0 Book Publishers, Australia, 2003–04.” 2005. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1363.0>. Bair, Deirdre “Too Much S & M.” Sydney Morning Herald 10–11 Sept. 2005: 17. Basset, Troy J., and Christina M. Walter. “Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891–1906.” Book History 4 (2001): 205–36. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. “Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace.” M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 1 June 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>. Carter, David, and Anne Galligan. “Introduction.” Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. 1–14. Corporall, Glenda. Project Octopus: Report Commissioned by the Australian Society of Authors. Sydney: Australian Society of Authors, 1990. Dempsey, John “Biography Rewrite: A&E’s Signature Series Heads to Sib Net.” Variety 4 Jun. 2006. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944601.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1>. Donaldson, Ian. “Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography.” Australian Book Review 286 (Nov. 2006): 23–29. Douglas, Kate. “‘Blurbing’ Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography.” Biography 24.4 (2001): 806–26. Eliot, Simon. “Very Necessary but not Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History.” Book History 5 (2002): 283–93. Feather, John, and Hazel Woodbridge. “Bestsellers in the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 23.3 (Sept. 2007): 210–23. Feather, JP, and M Reid. “Bestsellers and the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 11.1 (1995): 57–72. Galligan, Anne. “Living in the Marketplace: Publishing in the 1990s.” Publishing Studies 7 (1999): 36–44. Grossman, Lev. “Time’s Person of the Year: You.” Time 13 Dec. 2006. Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. Starck, Nigel. “Capturing Life—Not Death: A Case For Burying The Posthumous Parallax.” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 5.2 (2001). 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/starck.htm>.

Abstract:

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." NATE Classroom 17 (2012): 27–30.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1997. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York UP, 2010.Hills, Matt. "Rebranding Dr Who and Reimagining Sherlock: 'Quality' Television as 'Makeover TV Drama'." International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (2015): 317–31.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. Postmillennial Pop. New York: New York UP, 2013.Mars-Jones, Adam. "A Thin Slice of Cake." The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2003. 5 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/16/andrewmotion.fiction›.McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Herndon, VA: State U of New York P, 2001. Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount/Columbia Pictures, 1981.Wolf, Maryanne, and Mirit Barzillai. "The Importance of Deep Reading." Educational Leadership. March (2009): 32–36.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.

Abstract:

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating org*sm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigg*r at it.WAGNER: Snigg*r when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, co*ckles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

Abstract:

Introduction: Doctor Who's “Wilderness Years”1989 saw the cancellation of the BBC's long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who (1965 -). The 1990s were largely bereft of original Doctor Who television content, leading fans to characterise that decade as the “wilderness years” for the franchise (McNaughton 194). From another perspective, though, the 1990s was an unprecedented time of production for Doctor Who media. From 1991 to 1997, Virgin Publishing was licensed by the BBC's merchandising division to publish a series of original Doctor Who novels, which they produced and marketed as a continuation of the television series (Gulyas 46). This series of novels, Doctor Who: The New Adventures (commonly referred to as “the Virgin New Adventures” by fans) proved popular enough to support a monthly release schedule, and from 1994 onwards, a secondary "Missing Adventures" series.Despite their central role in the 1990s, however, many fans have argued that the Doctor Who novels format makes them either less "canonical" than the television series, or completely "apocryphal" (Gulyas 48). This fits with a general trend in transmedia properties, where print-based expansions or spin-offs are generally considered less official or authentic than those that are screen-based (Hills 223). This article argues that the openness of the series to contributions from fan writers – and also some of the techniques and approaches prioritised in fan fiction - resulted in the Virgin range of Doctor Who novels having an unusually significant impact on the development and evolution of the franchise as a whole when compared to the print-based transmedia extensions of other popular series’. The article also argues that the tonal and stylistic influence of the New Adventures novels on the revived Doctor Who television series offers an interesting counter-example to the usually strict hierarchies of content that are implied in Henry Jenkins's influential model of transmedia storytelling. Transmedia StorytellingJenkins uses the term “transmedia storytelling” to describe the ways in which media franchises frequently expand beyond the format they originate with, potentially encompassing television series, films, games, toys, comics and more (Jenkins “Transmedia 202”). In discussing this paradigm, Jenkins notes the ways in which contemporary productions increasingly prioritise “integration and coordination” between the different forms of media (Jenkins Convergence Culture 105). As Jenkins argues, “most discussions of transmedia place a high emphasis on continuity – assuming that transmedia requires a high level of coordination and creative control and that all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative or world” (Jenkins “Transmedia 202”). Due to this increased emphasis on continuity, the ability to decide which media will be considered as “canonical” within the story-world of the franchise becomes an important one. Where previously questions of canon had been largely confined to fan discussions, debates and interpretive readings of media texts (Jenkins Textual Poachers 102-104), the proprietors of franchises in a transmedia economy have an interest in proactively defining and policing the canon. Designating a particular piece of media as a “canonical” expansion or spinoff of its parent text can be a useful marketing tool, as it creates the expectation that it will provide an important contribution. Correspondingly, declaring that a particular set of media texts is no longer canonical can make the franchise more accessible and allow the authors of new material more creative freedom (Proctor and Freeman 238-9).While Jenkins argues that a reliance on “one single source or ur-text” (“Transmedia 101”) is counter to the spirit of transmedia storytelling, Pillai notes that his emphasis on cohesiveness across diverse media tends to implicitly prioritise the parent text over its various offshoots (103-4). As the parent text establishes continuity and canon, any transmedia supplements are obligated to remain consistent with it, but this is often a one-sided and hierarchical relationship. For example, in the Star Wars transmedia franchise, the film series is considered crucial in establishing the canon; and transmedia supplements are obliged to remain consistent with it in order to be recognised as authentic. The filmmakers, however, are largely free to ignore or contradict the contributions of spin-off books.Hills notes that the components of transmedia franchises are often arranged into “transmedial hierarchies” (223), where screen-based media like films, television series and video games are assigned dominance over print-based productions like comics and novels. This hierarchy means that print-based works typically have a less secure place within the canon of transmedia franchises, despite often contributing a disproportionately large quantity of narratives and concepts (Guynes 143). Using the Star Wars Expanded Universe as an example, he notes a tendency whereby “franchise novels” are generally considered as disposable, and are easily erased or decanonised despite significantly long, carefully interwoven and coordinated periods of storytelling (143-5). Doctor Who as a Transmedia FranchiseWhile questions of canon are frequently debated and discussed among Doctor Who fans, it is less easy to make absolutist distinctions between canonical and apocryphal texts in Doctor Who than it is in other popular transmedia franchises. Unlike comparable transmedia productions, Doctor Who has traditionally lacked a singular authority over questions of canon and consistency in the manner that Jenkins argues for in his implicitly hierarchical conception of transmedia storytelling (Convergence Culture 106). Where franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek or The X-Files have been guided by creator-figures who either exert direct control over their various iterations or oblige them to remain broadly consistent with their original vision, Doctor Who has generally avoided this focus; creative control has passed between various showrunners and production teams, who have been largely free to establish their own style and tone.Furthermore, the franchise has traditionally favoured a largely self-contained and episodic style of storytelling; and different storylines and periods from its long history often contradict one another. For these reasons, Booth suggests that the largely retroactive attempts on the part of fans and critics to read the entire series as the type of transmedia production that Jenkins advocates for (i.e. an internally consistent narrative of connected stories) are counter-productive. He argues that Doctor Who is perhaps best understood not as a continuing series but as a long-running anthology, where largely autonomous stories and serials can be grouped into distinct “periods” of resemblance in terms of style and subject matter (198-206).As Britton argues, when appreciating Doctor Who as franchise, there is no particular need to assign primary importance to the parent media. Since its first season in 1965, the Doctor Who television series has been regularly supplemented by other media in the form of comics, annuals, films, stage-plays, audio-dramas, and novelisations. Britton maintains that as the transmedia works follow the same loosely connected, episodic structure as the television series, they operate as equally valid or equally disposable components within its metanarrative (1-9). Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell argues that given the accommodating nature of the show’s time-travel premise (which can easily accommodate the inconsistencies that Jenkins argues should be avoided in transmedia storytelling), and in the absence of a singular revered creator-figure or authority, absolutist pronouncements on canon from any source are unnecessary and exclusionary, either delegitimising texts that the audience may value, or insisting on familiarity with a particular text in order for an experience of the media to be considered “legitimate”. The Transmedia Legacy of the Virgin New AdventuresAs the Virgin Doctor Who novels are not necessarily diminished by either their lack of a clear canonical status or their placement as a print work within a screen-focused property, they can arguably be understood as constituting their own distinct “period” of Doctor Who in the manner defined by Booth. This claim is supported by the ways in which the New Adventures distinguish themselves from the typically secondary or supplemental transmedia extensions of most other television franchises.In contrast with the one-sided and hierarchical relationship that typically exists between the parent text and its transmedia extensions (Pillai 103-4), the New Adventures range did not attempt to signal their authenticity through stylistic and narrative consistency with their source material. Virgin had already published a long series of novelisations of story serials from the original television series under its children’s imprint, Target, but from their inception the New Adventures were aimed at a more mature audience. The editor of the range, Peter Darvill-Evans, observed that by the 1990s, Doctor Who’s dedicated fan base largely consisted of adults who had grown up with the series in the 1970s and 1980s rather than the children that both the television series and the novelisations had traditionally targeted (Perryman 23). The New Adventures were initially marketed as being “too broad and deep for the small screen” (Gulyas 46), positioning them as an improvement or evolution rather than an attempt to imitate the parent media or to compensate for its absence.By comparison, most other 1990s print-based supplements to popular screen franchises tended to closely mimic the style, tone and storytelling structure of their source material. For example, the Star Wars "Expanded Universe" series of novels (which began in 1991) were subject to strict editorial oversight to ensure they remained consistent with the films and were initially marketed as "film-like events" as a way of emphasising their equivalence to the original media (Proctor and Freeman 226). The Virgin New Adventures were also distinctive due to their open submission policy (which actively encouraged submissions from fan writers who had not previously achieved conventional commercial publication) alongside work from "professional" authors (Perryman 24). This policy began because Darvill-Evans noted the ability, high motivation and deep understanding of Doctor Who possessed by fan writers (Bishop) and it proved essential in establishing the more mature approach that the series was aiming for. After three indifferently received novels from professional authors, the first work from a fan author, Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation (1991) became highly popular, due to its more grounded, serious and complex exploration of the character of the Doctor and their human companion. Following the success of Cornell’s novel, the series began to establish its own distinctive tone, emphasising gritty urban settings, character development and interpersonal drama, and the exploration of moral ambiguities and social and political issues that would have not been permissible in the original television series (Gulyas 46-8).Works by previously unpublished fan authors came to dominate the range to such an extent that the New Adventures has been described as “licensing professionally produced fan fiction” (Perryman 23). This trajectory established the New Adventures as an unusual hybrid text, combining the sanction of an official license with the usually unofficial phenomenon of fan custodianship. The cancellation of a television series (as experienced by Doctor Who in 1989) often allows its fan community to take custodianship of it in a variety of ways (McNoughton 194). While a series is being broadcast, fans are often constructed as elite but essentially ”powerless” readers, whose interpretations and desires can easily be contradicted or ignored by the series creators (Tulloch and Jenkins 141). With cancellation and a diminishing mass audience, fans become the custodians of the series and its memory. Their interpretations can no longer be overwritten, and they become the principle market for official merchandise and transmedia extensions (McNoughton 194-6).Also, fans can explore and fulfil their desires for the narrative direction and tone of the series, through the “cottage industries” of fan-created merchandise (196) and “gift economies” of fan fiction (Flegal and Roth 258), without being impeded or overruled by official developments in the parent media. This movement towards fan custodianship and production became more visible during the 1990s, as digital technology allowed for rapid communication, connection and exchange (Coppa 53). The Virgin New Adventures range arguably operated as a meeting point between officially sanctioned commercial spin-off media and the fan-centric industries of production that work to prolong the life and memory of a cancelled television series. Indeed, the direct inclusion of fan authors and the techniques and approaches associated with fan fiction likely helped to establish the deeper, more mature interpretation of Doctor Who offered by the New Adventures.As Stein and Busse observe, a recurring feature of fan fiction has been a focus on exploring the inner lives of the characters from its source media, and adding depth and complexity to their relationships (196-8). Furthermore, the successful New Adventures fan authors tended to offer support and encouragement to each other via their informal networks, which affected the development of the series as a transmedia production (Perryman 24). Flegal and Roth note that in contrast to often solitary and individualistic forms of “professional” and “literary” writing, the composition of fan fiction emerges out of collegial, supportive and reciprocal communities (265-8). The meeting point that the Virgin New Adventures provided between professional writing practice and the attitudes and approaches common to the types of fan fiction that were becoming more prominent in the nineties (Coppa 53-5) helped to shape the evolution of Doctor Who as a franchise.Where previous Doctor Who stories (regardless of the media or medium) had been largely isolated from each other, the informal fan networks that connected the New Adventures authors allowed and encouraged them to collaborate more closely, ensuring consistency between the instalments and plotting out multi-volume story-arcs and character development. Where the Star Wars Expanded Universe series of novels ensured consistency through extensive and often intrusive top-down editorial control (Proctor and Freeman 226-7), the New Adventures developed this consistency through horizontal relationships between authors. While Doctor Who has always been a transmedia franchise, the Virgin New Adventures may be the first point where it began to fully engage with the possibilities of the coordinated and consistent transmedia storytelling discussed by Jenkins (Perryman 24-6). It is notable that this largely developed out of the collaborative and reciprocal relationships common to communities of fan-creators rather than through the singular and centralised control that Jenkins advocates.While the Virgin range of Doctor Who novels ended long before the revival of the television series in 2005, its influence on the style, tone and subject matter of the new series has been noted. As Perryman argues, the emphasis on more cohesive story-arcs and character development between episodes has been inherited from the New Adventures (24). The 2005 series also followed the Virgin novels in presenting the Doctor’s companions with detailed backgrounds and having their relationships shift and evolve, rather than remaining static like they did in the original series. The more distinctly urban focus of the new series was also likely shaped by the success of the New Adventures (Haslop 217); its well-publicised emphasis on inclusiveness and diversity was likewise prefigured by the Virgin novels, which were the first Doctor Who media to include non-Anglo and LGBQT companions (McKee "How to tell the difference" 181-2). It is highly unusual for a print-based transmedia extension to have this level of impact. Indeed, one of the most visible and profitable transmedia initiatives that began in the 1990s, the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (which like the New Adventures was presented as an officially sanctioned continuation of the original media), was unceremoniously decanonised in 2014, and the interpretations of Star Wars characters and themes that it had developed over more than a decade of storytelling were almost entirely disregarded by the new films (Proctor and Freeman 235-7). The comparably large influence that the New Adventures had on the development of its franchise indicates the success of its fan-centric approach in developing a more relationship-driven and character-focused interpretation of its parent media.The influence of the New Adventures is also felt more directly through the continuing careers of its authors. A number of the fan writers who achieved their first commercial publication with the New Adventures (e.g. Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss) went on to write scripts for the new series. The first showrunner, Russell T. Davies, was the author of the later novels, Damaged Goods (1997), and the second, Steven Moffat, had been an active member of Doctor Who fan communities that discussed and promoted the Virgin books (Bishop). As the former New Adventures author Kate Orman notes, this movement from writing usually secondary franchise novels to working on and having authority over the parent media is almost unheard of (McKee “Interview with Kate Orman” 138), and speaks to the success of the combination of fan authorship and official licensing and support found in the New Adventures. As Hadas notes, the chief difference between the new series of Doctor Who and its classic version is that former and long-term fans of the series are now directly involved in its production, thus complicating Tullouch and Jenkin’s assessment of Doctor Who fans as a “powerless elite” (141). ConclusionThe continuing influence of the nineties New Adventures novels can still be detected in the contemporary series. These novels operate with regard to the themes, preoccupations and styles of storytelling that this range pioneered within the Doctor Who franchise, and which developed directly out of its innovative and unusual strategy of giving official sanction and editorial support to typically obscured and subcultural modes of fan writing. The reductive and exclusionary question of canon can be avoided when considering the above novels. These transmedia productions are important to the evolution and development of the media franchise as a whole. In this respect, the Virgin New Adventures operate as their own distinctive, legitimate and influential "period" within Doctor Who, demonstrating the creative potential of an approach to transmedia storytelling that deemphasises strict hierarchies of content and control and can readily include the contributions of fan producers.ReferencesBishop, David. “Four Writers, One Discussion: Andy Lane, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat and David Bishop.” Time Space Visualiser 43 (March 1995). 1 Nov. 2018 <http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv43/onediscussion.html>.Booth, Paul. “Periodising Doctor Who.” Science Fiction Film and Television 7.2 (2014). 195-215.Britton, Piers D. TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who. London: I.B. Tauris and Company, 2011.Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2009. 41-59.Cornell, Paul. “Canonicity in Doctor Who”. PaulConell.com. 10 Feb. 2007. 30 Nov. 2018 <https://www.paulcornell.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who/>.Doctor Who. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1965 to present.Flegal, Monica, and Jenny Roth. “Writing a New Text: the Role of Cyberculture in Fanfiction Writers’ Transition to ‘Legitimate’ Publishing.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 10.2 (2016): 253-270.Gulyas, Aaron. “Don’t Call It a Comeback.” Doctor Who in Time and Space: Essays on Themes, Characters, History and Fandom, 1963-2012. Ed. Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan. Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2013. 44-63.Guynes, Sean. “Publishing the New Jedi Order: Media Industries Collaboration and the Franchise Novel.” Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. Eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 143-154.Hadas, Leora. “Running the Asylum? Doctor Who’s Ascended Fan-Showrunners.” Deletion. 23 June 2014. 30 Nov. 2018 <http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-5/running-asylum-doctor-whos-ascended-fan-showrunners/>.Haslop, Craig. “Bringing Doctor Who Back for the Masses: Regenerating Cult, Commodifying Class.” Science Fiction Film and Television 9.2 (2016): 209-297.Hills, Matt. “From Transmedia Storytelling to Transmedia Experience: Star Wars Celebration as a Crossover/Hierarchical Space.” Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. Eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 213-224.Jenkins III, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. 1992.———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.———. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 22 Mar. 2007. 30 Nov. 2018 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html>.———. “Transmedia Storytelling 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 1 Aug. 2011. 30 Nov. 2018 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.McKee, Alan. "How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption: A Case Study in Doctor Who Fandom." Cult Television. Eds. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Richard M. Pearson. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004: 167-186.———. “Interview with Kate Orman: Dr Who Author.” Continuum 19.1 (2005): 127-139. McNaughton, Douglas. “Regeneration of a Brand: The Fan Audience and the 2005 Doctor Who Revival.” Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who. Ed. Christopher J. Hansen. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 192-208.Perryman, Neil. “Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in ‘Transmedia Storytelling’.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14.1 (2008): 21-39.Pillai, Nicolas. “’What Am I Looking at, Mulder?’ Licensed Comics and the Freedoms of Transmedia Storytelling.” Science Fiction Film and Television 6.1 (2013): 101-117.Porter, Lynnette. The Doctor Who Franchise: American Influence, Fan Culture, and the Spinoffs. Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2018.Procter, William, and Matthew Freeman. “’The First Step into a Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars.” Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf. New York: Routledge. 2016. 223-245.Stein, Louisa, and Kristina Busse. “Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context.” Popular Communication 7.4 (2009): 192-207.Tullouch, John, and Henry Jenkins III. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Abstract:

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM.Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is possibly the best known cinematic example of HM, and this film version of the 1986 novel by Winston Groom particularly excels in seamlessly inserting images of a fictional character into verified history, as represented by well-known television newsreel footage. In Zemeckis’s adaptation, gaps were created in the celluloid artefact and filled digitally with images of the actor, Tom Hanks, playing the eponymous role. Words are often deemed less trustworthy than images, however, and fiction is considered particularly unreliable--although there are some exceptions conceded. In addition to Gregory’s novel; Midnight’s Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie; The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco; and The Flashman Papers (1969-2005) by George MacDonald Fraser, are three well-known, loved and lauded examples of literary HM, which even if they fail to convince the reader of their bona fides, nevertheless win a place in many hearts. But despite the genre’s popularity, there is nevertheless a conceptual gap in the literary theory of Hutcheon given her (perfectly understandable) inability in 1988 to predict the future of e-publishing. This article will attempt to address that shortcoming by exploring the potential for authors of HM e-novels to use hyperlinks which immediately direct the reader to fact providing webpages such as those available at the website Wikipedia, like a much speedier (and more independent) version of the footnotes in Fraser’s Flashman novels.Of course, as Roland Barthes declared in 1977, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (146) and, as per any academic work that attempts to contribute to knowledge, a text’s sources--its “quotations”--must be properly identified and acknowledged via checkable references if credibility is to be securely established. Hence, in explaining the way claims to fact in the HM novel can be confirmed by independently published experts on the Internet, this article will also address the problem Hutcheon identifies, in that for many readers the entirety of the HM novel assumes questionable authenticity, that is, the novel’s “meta-fictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3). This article (and the PhD in creative writing I am presently working on at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia) will possibly develop the concept of HM to a new level: one at which the Internet-connected reader of the hyperlinked e-novel is made fully (and even instantly) aware of those literary elements of the narrative that are legitimate and factual as distinct from those that are fictional, that is, illegitimate. Furthermore, utilising examples from my own (yet-to-be published) hyperlinked HM e-novel, this article demonstrates that such hyperlinking can add an ironic sub-text to a fictional character’s thoughts and utterances, through highlighting the reality concerning their mistaken or naïve beliefs, thus creating HM narratives that serve an entertainingly complex yet nevertheless truly educational purpose.As a relatively new and under-researched genre of historical writing, HM differs dramatically from the better known style of standard historical or biographical narrative, which typically tends to emphasise mimesis, the cataloguing of major “players” in historical events and encyclopaedic accuracy of dates, deaths and places. Instead, HM involves the re-contextualisation of real-life figures from the past, incorporating the lives of entirely (or, as in the case of Gregory’s Mary Boleyn, at least partly) fictitious characters into their generally accepted famous and factual activities, and/or the invention of scenarios that gel realistically--but entertainingly--within a landscape of well-known and well-documented events. As Hutcheon herself states: “The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these” ("Intertextuality", 11). Similarly, Gregory emphasises the need for authors of HM to extend themselves beyond the encyclopaedic archive: “Archives are not history. The trouble with archives is that the material is often random and atypical. To have history, you have to have a narrative” (University of Sussex). Functionally then, HM is an intertextual narrative genre which serves to communicate to a contemporary audience an expanded story or stories of the past which present an ultimately more self-reflective, personal and unpredictable authorship: it is a distinctly auteurial mode of biographical history writing for it places the postmodern author’s imaginative “signature” front and foremost.Hutcheon later clarified that the quest for historical truth in fiction cannot possibly hold up to the persuasive powers of a master novelist, as per the following rationale: “Fact is discourse-defined: an event is not” ("Historiographic Metafiction", 843). This means, in a rather simplistic nutshell, that the new breed of HM novel writer is not constrained by what others may call fact: s/he knows that the alleged “fact” can be renegotiated and redefined by an inventive discourse. An event, on the other hand, is responsible for too many incontrovertible consequences for it to be contested by her/his mere discourse. So-called facts are much easier for the HM writer to play with than world changing events. This notion was further popularised by Ansgar Nunning when he claimed the overtly explicit work of HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). HM authors can radically alter, it seems, the way the reader perceives the facts of history especially when entertaining, engaging and believable characters are deliberately devised and manipulated into the narrative by the writer. Little wonder, then, that Hutcheon bemoans the unfortunate reality that for many readers the entirety of a HM work assumes questionable “veracity” due to its author’s insertion of imaginary and therefore illegitimate personages.But there is an advantage to be found in this, the digital era, and that is the Internet’s hyperlink. In our ubiquitously networked electronic information age, novels written for publication as e-books may, I propose, include clickable links on the names of actual people and events to Wikipedia entries or the like, thus strengthening the reception of the work as being based on real history (the occasional unreliability of Wikipedia notwithstanding). If picked up for hard copy publication this function of the HM e-novel can be replicated with the inclusion of icons in the printed margins that can be scanned by smartphones or similar gadgets. This small but significant element of the production reinforces the e-novel’s potential status as a new form of HM and addresses Hutcheon’s concern that for HM novels, their imaginative but illegitimate invention of characters “renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3).Some historic scenarios are so little researched or so misunderstood and discoloured by the muddy waters of time and/or rumour that such hyperlinking will be a boon to HM writers. Where an obscure facet of Australian history is being fictionalised, for example, these edifying hyperlinks can provide additional background information, as Glenda Banks and Martin Andrew might have wished for when they wrote regarding Bank’s Victorian goldfields based HM novel A Respectable Married Woman. This 2012 printed work explores the lives of several under-researched and under-represented minorities, such as settler women and Aboriginal Australians, and the author Banks lamented the dearth of public awareness regarding these peoples. Indeed, HM seems tailor-made for exposing the subaltern lives of those repressed individuals who form the human “backdrop” to the lives of more famous personages. Banks and Andrew explain:To echo the writings of Homi K. Bhaba (1990), this sets up a creative site for interrogating the dominant, hegemonic, ‘normalised’ master narratives about the Victorian goldfields and ‘re-membering’ a marginalised group - the women of the goldfields, the indigenous [sic], the Chinese - and their culture (2013).In my own hyperlinked short story (presently under consideration for publishing elsewhere), which is actually a standalone version of the first chapter of a full-length HM e-novel about Aboriginal Australian activists Eddie Mabo and Chicka Dixon and the history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, entitled The Bullroarers, I have focussed on a similarly under-represented minority, that being light-complexioned, mixed race Aboriginal Australians. My second novel to deal with Indigenous Australian issues (see Starrs, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance), it is my first attempt at writing HM. Hopefully avoiding overkill whilst alerting readers to those Wikipedia pages with relevance to the narrative theme of non-Indigenous attitudes towards light-complexioned Indigenous Australians, I have inserted a total of only six hyperlinks in this 2200-word piece, plus the explanatory foreword stating: “Note, except where they are well-known place names or are indicated as factual by the insertion of Internet hyperlinks verifying such, all persons, organisations, businesses and places named in this text are entirely fictitious.”The hyperlinks in my short story all take the reader not to stubs but to well-established Wikipedia pages, and provide for the uninformed audience the following near-unassailable facts (i.e. events):The TV program, A Current Affair, which the racist character of the short story taken from The Bullroarers, Mrs Poulter, relies on for her prejudicial opinions linking Aborigines with the dealing of illegal drugs, is a long-running, prime-time Channel Nine production. Of particular relevance in the Wikipedia entry is the comment: “Like its main rival broadcast on the Seven Network, Today Tonight, A Current Affair is often considered by media critics and the public at large to use sensationalist journalism” (Wikipedia, “A Current Affair”).The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on the lawns opposite the Old Parliament House in Canberra, was established in 1972 and ever since has been the focus of Aboriginal Australian land rights activism and political agitation. In 1995 the Australian Register of the National Estate listed it as the only Aboriginal site in Australia that is recognised nationally for representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their political struggles (Wikipedia, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy”).In 1992, during an Aboriginal land rights case known as Mabo, the High Court of Australia issued a judgment constituting a direct overturning of terra nullius, which is a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one”, and which had previously formed the legal rationale and justification for the British invasion and colonisation of Aboriginal Australia (Wikipedia, “Terra Nullius”).Aboriginal rights activist and Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936 to 1992), was instrumental in the High Court decision to overturn the doctrine of terra nullius in 1992. In that same year, Eddie Mabo was posthumously awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Awards (Wikipedia, “Eddie Mabo”).The full name of what Mrs Poulter blithely refers to as “the Department of Families and that” is the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (Wikipedia, “The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs”).The British colonisation of Australia was a bloody, murderous affair: “continuous Aboriginal resistance for well over a century belies the ‘myth’ of peaceful settlement in Australia. Settlers in turn often reacted to Aboriginal resistance with great violence, resulting in numerous indiscriminate massacres by whites of Aboriginal men, women and children” (Wikipedia, “History of Australia (1788 - 1850)”).Basically, what is not evidenced empirically with regard to the subject matter of my text, that is, the egregious attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians towards Indigenous Australians, can be extrapolated thanks to the hyperlinks. This resonates strongly with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion in 2012 that those under-represented by mainstream, patriarchal epistemologies need to be engaged in acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” (143) so as to be re-presented as authentic identities in these HM artefacts of literary research.Exerting auteurial power as an Aboriginal Australian author myself, I have sought to imprint on my writing a multi-levelled signature pertaining to my people’s under-representation: there is not just the text I have created but another level to be considered by the reader, that being my careful choice of Wikipedia pages to hyperlink certain aspects of the creative writing to. These electronic footnotes serve as politically charged acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” Aboriginal Australian history, to reuse the words of Smith, for when we Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away from the colonising overseers, our readers witness the Other writing back, critically. As I have stated previously (see Starrs, "Writing"), receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed rational, enlightened and civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately eroded and made into the Other: s/he is rendered the villainous, predatory savage by the auteurial signatures in revisionist histories such as The Bullroarers.Whilst the benefit in these hyperlinks as electronic educational footnotes in my short story is fairly obvious, what may not be so obvious is the ironic commentary they can make, when read in conjunction with the rest of The Bullroarers. Although one must reluctantly agree with Wayne C. Booth’s comment in his classic 1974 study A Rhetoric of Irony that, in some regards, “the very spirit and value [of irony] are violated by the effort to be clear about it” (ix), I will nevertheless strive for clarity and understanding by utilizing Booth’s definition of irony “as something that under-mines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates by destroying all dogmas or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (ix). The reader of The Bullroarers is not expecting the main character, Mrs Poulter, to be the subject of erosive criticism that destroys her “dogmas” about Aboriginal Australians--certainly not so early in the narrative when it is unclear if she is or is not the protagonist of the story--and yet that’s exactly what the hyperlinks do. They expose her as hopelessly unreliable, laughably misinformed and yes, unforgivably stupid. They reveal the illegitimacy of her beliefs. Perhaps the most personally excoriating of these revelations is provided by the link to the Wikipedia entry on the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, which is where her own daughter, Roxy, works, but which Mrs Poulter knows, gormlessly, as “the Department of Families and that”. The ignorant woman spouts racist diatribes against Aboriginal Australians without even realising how inextricably linked she and her family, who live at the deliberately named Boomerang Crescent, really are. Therein lies the irony I am trying to create with my use of hyperlinks: an independent, expert adjudication reveals my character, Mrs Poulter, and her opinions, are hiding an “inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (Booth ix), despite the air of easy confidence she projects.Is the novel-reading public ready for these HM hyperlinked e-novels and their potentially ironic sub-texts? Indeed, the question must be asked: can the e-book ever compete with the tactile sensations a finely crafted, perfectly bound hardcover publication provides? Perhaps, if the economics of book buying comes into consideration. E-novels are cheap to publish and cheap to purchase, hence they are becoming hugely popular with the book buying public. Writes Mark co*ker, the founder of Smashwords, a successful online publisher and distributor of e-books: “We incorporated in 2007, and we officially launched the business in May 2008. In our first year, we published 140 books from 90 authors. Our catalog reached 6,000 books in 2009, 28,800 in 2010, 92,000 in 2011, 191,000 in 2012 and as of this writing (November 2013) stands at over 250,000 titles” (co*ker 2013). co*ker divulged more about his company’s success in an interview with Forbes online magazine: “‘It costs essentially the same to pump 10,000 new books a month through our network as it will cost to do 100,000 a month,’ he reasons. Smashwords book retails, on average, for just above $3; 15,000 titles are free” (Colao 2012).In such a burgeoning environment of technological progress in publishing I am tempted to say that yes, the time of the hyperlinked e-novel has come, and to even predict that HM will be a big part of this new wave of postmodern literature. The hyperlinked HM e-novel’s strategy invites the reader to reflect on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of different forms of narrative, possibly concluding, thanks to ironic electronic footnoting, that not all the novel’s characters and their commentary are to be trusted. Perhaps my HM e-novel will, with its untrustworthy Mrs Poulter and its little-known history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy addressed by gap-filling hyperlinks, establish a legitimising narrative for a people who have traditionally in white Australian society been deemed the Other and illegitimate. Perhaps The Bullroarers will someday alter attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians to the history and political activities of this country’s first peoples, to the point even, that as Nunning warns, we witness a change in the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). If that happens we must be thankful for our Internet-enabled information age and its concomitant possibilities for hyperlinked e-publications, for technology may be separated from the world of art, but it can nevertheless be effectively used to recreate, enhance and access that world, to the extent texts previously considered illegitimate achieve authenticity and veracity.ReferencesBanks, Glenda. A Respectable Married Woman. Melbourne: Lacuna, 2012.Banks, Glenda, and Martin Andrew. “Populating a Historical Novel: A Case Study of a Practice-led Research Approach to Historiographic Metafiction.” Bukker Tillibul 7 (2013). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://bukkertillibul.net/Text.html?VOL=7&INDEX=2›.Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Colao, J.J. “Apple’s Biggest (Unknown) Supplier of E-books.” Forbes 7 June 2012. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/06/07/apples-biggest-unknown-supplier-of-e-books/›.co*ker, Mark. “Q & A with Smashwords Founder, Mark co*ker.” About Smashwords 2013. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹https://www.smashwords.com/about›.Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Pictures, 1994.Fraser, George MacDonald. The Flashman Papers. Various publishers, 1969-2005.Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. NY: Doubleday, 1986.Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. UK: Scribner, 2001.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1988.---. “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History: A Poetics of Postmodernism History, Theory, Fiction.” 1988. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_3553.pdf›.---. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” Eds. P. O’Donnell and R.C. Davis, Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins UP, 1989. 3-32.---. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Ed. Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 830-50.Nunning, Ansgar. “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet.” Style 38.3 (2004): 352-75.Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012.---. “Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?” M/C Journal 17.4 (2014). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/834›.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. London & New York: Zed Books, 2012.University of Sussex. “Philippa Gregory Fills the Historical Gaps.” University of Sussex Alumni Magazine 51 (2012). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.scribd.com/doc/136033913/University-of-Sussex-Alumni-Magazine-Falmer-issue-51›.Wikipedia. “A Current Affair.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Current_Affair›.---. “Aboriginal Tent Embassy.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tent_Embassy›.---. “Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Families,_Housing,_Community_Services_and_Indigenous_Affairs›.---. “Eddie Mabo.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Mabo›.---. “History of Australia (1788 – 1850).” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia_(1788%E2%80%931850)#Aboriginal_resistance›.---. “Terra Nullius.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius›.

Abstract:

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her co*cky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

Abstract:

Of all the characteristics that may be emphasised by those seeking to set apart the serious, authoritative critic from the inconsequential, workaday reviewer, perhaps the most fundamental is the liberty typically enjoyed by the former. So, while the celebrated literary critic F.R. Leavis (in The Great Tradition) is able to confidently assert in microscopic detail the comparative merits of Lawrence, Joyce, Conrad and Woolf, what Meaghan Morris (106) calls the “gulp it down, chew it over, throw it up” crowd strive (in no more than five hundred words and by close of business today, thanks very much) to explain why John Grisham’s latest tome will turn either heads or stomachs. Amongst reviewers, not surprisingly, one can find hugely varying levels of competence and principle. But when it comes to contemporary music, where the art of the review continues to be practiced across a wide range of media, there are many commentators who would deem the virtues of competence and principle irrelevant to begin with. These critics can be grouped into two distinct camps. On the one hand, it has long been argued that discussions of music (popular or otherwise) are intrinsically flawed if they eschew technical analysis. Thus Wilfrid Mellers, in his 1973 book The Music of the Beatles: Twilight of the Gods, states that “descriptive accounts of music cannot be valid unless they are based on what happens in musical terms” (15). In what amounts to a variation on Mellers’s theme, cultural studies analysts have largely studied popular music as “an expression of rebellion, subversion, resistance and critique” (Regev 258), thereby supporting the view that the sounds themselves cannot be discussed with any authority outside of musicology departments. In this way the virtues of Madonna (and, largely due to her extra-musical activities and role in the development of the video clip, it almost always was Madonna) could be couched in terms of ideological meaning without the need to negotiate the awkward terrain of aesthetic content (Frith 14). At the same time, those few critics who shared Mellers’s technical grounding were poking at the alien specimen that is contemporary music with an entirely different set of instruments, but more or less the same results – that is, conducting no doubt useful but ultimately bloodless examinations. A prime example of this is William Echard’s amazingly meticulous musicological/semiotic dismantling of Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”, from which it is nonetheless impossible to discern whether the author actually likes the song in question. However, a second arm of criticism has been even more dismissive of modern music writing. Because here is where Michael Bywater, Martha Bayles, Roger Scruton and others conclude, by implication, that there is no value in such practices for the simple reason that there is essentially no aesthetic value in contemporary music, period. This school of thought, emanating from a lonely island fortress mired in a perceived sea of mass-cultural pollutants, takes Frankfurt School culture industry critique to its (il)logical nadir by roping off high culture from its insidious, ubiquitous opposite and claiming entire genres, such as popular music, to be inherently anti-intellectual: “Pop is surface all the way down. The musical toolbag contains only surface instruments – rhythmic thud, punch, whine and whop – and the emotions, too, are superficial” (Bywater 44). On this thinking the new Eminem record, for example, is seen as part of a phenomenon to brood over rather than as a distinct artefact worthy of thoughtful evaluation. Both strands of critical thought – the first locking contemporary music inside the musicology building, the second dropping it in the garbage can outside – are characterised by the kind of uncompromising, one-way dialogue Robert Dessaix describes as “excluding”. This style of argument, even when meritorious, ensures that anyone who approaches from outside certain scholarly circles is “silenced – but not by respect for authority” (129). It also calls to mind another commonly cited distinction between critic and reviewer (discussed in Morris 108-9) – a superiority of knowledge and taste that defines not only the serious critic but also the limited scope of his or her audience. Although the popular press, too, has its fair share of didactic prose, Dessaix’s theory does suggest where the worth may lie in an oft-maligned occupation like record reviewing. While non-academic music writers must endure likely time and word limitations, the twin criticisms of abstraction and irrelevance, and the tedious old “dancing about architecture” cliché, at least there is some chance they will invite “complicity in an unexpected adventure” (133) by deftly treading that fine line between expert and enthusiast. Whether plotting a course through English literature à la Leavis or discussing the latest batch of Scandinavian death metal albums, it would be churlish to claim that the role of critic/reviewer is not a legitimate one: the impossibly vast array of cultural productions accessible to the modern-day audience make some form of “expert” guidance indispensable. So, as new music tumbles down upon us like an endless monsoonal rain, thousands of fans masquerading as journalists (or, more frighteningly, journalists masquerading as fans) dutifully strive to sort the releases of the past week, year or decade into some semblance of order … and, as with all criticism, the judgements they come up with are only part of the story. The greatest trick a reviewer (and when referring to the practice of “reviewing” one trusts that at least some degree of editorial control is involved – read the customer comments at Amazon.com and weep) can master is to convince the reader that his or her piece of creative non-fiction is a minor work of art, whilst simultaneously putting forward a lucid argument to the effect that the object under scrutiny is (or isn’t, as the case may be) a valuable one. And, despite the endless kilometres of formulaic and/or sycophantic copy that clog review columns in newspapers, magazines, and on innumerable Web-sites, it does happen every now and then. In Spin magazine’s review of the year 2000’s musical landscape, Jon Dolan provided the following capsule review of P.J. Harvey’s fifth album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: Chapter V: Polly Gets Her Gun. But it’s not the return to true grit that makes this her best record since she was Jesus with PMS; it’s that whereas the old stuff took your head off, this rewires your guts. All the beautiful bullsh*t’s here – pathetic fallacies, Patti Smith mythopoeia, a Thom Yorke duet – but it’s more earned, more cathartic. Sand in her joints. Wind through her hair. Blood on her tracks. What I believe Dolan achieves here is a near-perfect amalgamation of instruction and art. He doesn’t ram his analysis down our throats – to discover how he feels about Harvey, the writer assumes you actually might know something about her yourself: her approximate location on the rock family tree (the Patti Smith allusion is indirect, yet perceptive); that she has been brilliant before (this record merely presenting a new type of brilliance); that at its best her music is complicated and unconventional, furious and revolutionary. The subtlety of the writing evokes shared connections for those familiar with the artist’s recorded output, at the same time inviting neophytes to come and see what all the fuss is about. Not only do the last three sentences summarise Harvey’s resolve, free will and intensity in thrillingly-eloquent prose, but the oblique Bob Dylan reference invites readers to consider complex associations across space and time whilst implicitly recognising their ability to figure out those associations for themselves. And all of this in well under one hundred words. Dolan’s seamless, perspicacious set-piece is evidence that, in all forms of art, the informal-yet-intelligent review can stand alongside the meticulous, highly-ritualised assessment of the academically-situated critic. Of course serious criticism has an important role but it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligent writing, and besides, there are some aesthetic pleasures that are only enhanced by a less pretentious style of analysis. Or, as P.J. Harvey herself puts it on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: “I can’t believe life’s so complex/when I just want to sit here and watch you undress.” The art of the entertaining, insightful review is alive and well in creative non-fiction; you just have to sort through a considerable amount of chaff to find it. References Bayles, Martha. “Body and Soul: The Musical Miseducation of the Youth.” Public Interest 131 (1998): 36-49. Bywater, Michael. “Never Mind the Width, Feel the Lack of Quality.” The Spectator 13 May 1995: 44-5. Dessaix, Robert. (& So Forth). Sydney: MacMillan, 1998. Echard, William. “An Analysis of Neil Young’s ‘Powderfinger’ Based on Mark Johnson’s Image Schemata.” Popular Music 18.1 (1999): 133-44. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948. Mellers, Wilfrid. The Music of the Beatles: Twilight of the Gods. New York: Schirmer, 1973. Morris, Meaghan. The Pirate’s Fiancee. London: Verso, 1988. Regev, Motti. “The ‘Pop-Rockization’ of Popular Music.” Popular Music Studies. Ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus. London: Arnold, 2002. 117-30. Scruton, Roger. Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Biron, Dean. "The Tortoise and the Hare." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/05-biron.php>. APA Style Biron, D. (Oct. 2005) "The Tortoise and the Hare," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/05-biron.php>.

Abstract:

Art Imitating ArtThis article discusses the global, historical and literary references that are present in the video game franchise Bayonetta. In particular, references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the works of Dr John Dee, and European traditions of witchcraft are examined. Bayonetta is modern in the sense that she is a woman of the world. Her character shows how history and literature may be used, re-used, and evolve into new formats, and how modern games travel abroad through time and space.Drawing creative inspiration from other works is nothing new. Ideas and themes, art and literature are frequently borrowed and recast. Carmel Cedro cites Northrop Frye in the example of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. These writers created stories and characters that have developed a level of acclaim and resonated with many individuals, resulting in countless homages over the years. The forms that these appropriations take vary widely. Media formats, such as film adaptations and even books, take the core characters or narrative from the original and re-work them into a different context. For example, the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1883 was adapted into the 2002 Walt Disney animated film Treasure Planet. The film maintained the concepts of the original narrative and retained key characters but re-imaged them to fit the science fiction genre (Clements and Musker).The video-game franchise Bayonetta draws inspiration from distinct sources creating the foundation for the universe and some plot points to enhance the narrative. The main sources are Dante’s Divine Comedy, the projections of John Dee and his mystical practices as well as the medieval history of witches.The Vestibule: The Concept of BayonettaFigure 1: Bayonetta Concept ArtBayonetta ConceptsThe concept of Bayonetta was originally developed by video game designer Hideki Kamiya, known previously for his work including The Devil May Cry and the Resident Evil game series. The development of Bayonetta began with Kamiya requesting a character design that included three traits: a female lead, a modern witch, and four guns. This description laid the foundations for what was to become the hack and slash fantasy heroine that would come to be known as Bayonetta. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri during the 1300s, was a revolutionary piece of literature for its time, in that it was one of the first texts that formalised the vernacular Italian language by omitting the use of Latin, the academic language of the time. Dante’s work was also revolutionary in its innovative contemplations on religion, art and sciences, creating a literary collage of such depth that it would continue to inspire hundreds of years after its first publication.Figure 2: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and his Divine Comedy, surrounded by depictions of scenes in the textBayonetta explores the themes of The Divine Comedy in a variety of ways, using them as an obvious backdrop, along with subtle homages and references scattered throughout the game. The world of Bayonetta is set in the Trinity of Realities, three realms that co-exist forming the universe: Inferno, Paradiso and the Chaos realm—realm of humans—and connected by Purgitorio—the intersection of the trinity. In the game, Bayonetta travels throughout these realms, primarily in the realm of Purgitorio, the area in which magical and divine entities may conduct their business. However, there are stages within the game where Bayonetta finds herself in Paradiso and the human realm. This is a significant factor relating to The Divine Comedy as these realms also form the areas explored by Dante in his epic poem. The depth of these parallels is not exclusive to factors in Dante’s masterpiece, as there are also references to other art and literature inspired by Dante’s legacy. For example, the character Rodin in Bayonetta runs a bar named “The Gates of Hell.” In 1917 French artist Auguste Rodin completed a sculpture, The Gates of Hell depicting scenes and characters from The Divine Comedy. Rodin’s bar in Bayonetta is manifested as a dark impressionist style of architecture, with an ominous atmosphere. In early concept art, the proprietor of the bar was to be named Mephisto (Kamiya) derived from “Mephistopheles”, another name for the devil in some mythologies. Figure 3: Auguste Rodin's Gate of Hell, 1917Aspects of Dante’s surroundings and the theological beliefs of his time can be found in Bayonetta, as well as in the 2013 anime film adaptation Bayonetta, Bloody Fate. The Christian virtues, revered during the European Middle Ages, manifest themselves as enemies and adversaries that Bayonetta must combat throughout the game. Notably, the names of the cardinal virtues serve as “boss ranked” foes. Enemies within a game, usually present at the end of a level and more difficult to defeat than regular enemies within “Audito Sphere” of the “Laguna Hierarchy” (high levels of the hierarchy within the game), are named in Italian; Fortitudo, Temperantia, Lustitia, and Sapientia. These are the virtues of Classical Greek Philosophy, and reflect Dante’s native language as well as the impact the philosophies of Ancient Greece had on his writings. The film adaption of Bayonetta incorporated many elements from the game. To adjust the game effectively, it was necessary to augment the plot in order to fit the format of this alternate media. As it was no longer carried by gameplay, the narrative became paramount. The diverse plot points of the new narrative allowed for novel possibilities for further developing the role of The Divine Comedy in Bayonetta. At the beginning of the movie, for example, Bayonetta enters as a nun, just as she does in the game, only here she is in church praying rather than in a graveyard conducting a funeral. During her prayer she recites “I am the way into the city of woe, abandon all hope, oh, ye who enter here,” which is a Canto of The Divine Comedy. John Dee and the AngelsDr John Dee (1527—1608), a learned man of Elizabethan England, was a celebrated philosopher, mathematician, scientist, historian, and teacher. In addition, he was a researcher of magic and occult arts, as were many of his contemporaries. These philosopher magicians were described as Magi and John Dee was the first English Magus (French). He was part of a school of study within the Renaissance intelligensia that was influenced by the then recently discovered works of the gnostic Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be of great antiquity. This was in an age when religion, philosophy and science were intertwined. Alchemy and chemistry were still one, and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler and Tyco Brahe cast horoscopes. John Dee engaged in spiritual experiments that were based in his Christian faith but caused him to be viewed in some circles as dangerously heretical (French).Based on the texts of Hermes Trismegistas and other later Christian philosophical and theological writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Dee and his contemporaries believed in celestial hierarchies and levels of existence. These celestial hierarchies could be accessed by “real artificial magic,” or applied science, that included mathematics, and the cabala, or the mystical use of permutations of Hebrew texts, to access supercelestial powers (French). In his experiments in religious magic, Dee was influenced by the occult writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535). In Agrippa’s book, De Occulta Philosophia, there are descriptions for seals, symbols and tables for summoning angels, to which Dee referred in his accounts of his own magic experiments (French). Following his studies, Dee constructed a table with a crystal placed on it. By use of suitable rituals prescribed by Agrippa and others, Dee believed he summoned angels within the crystal, who could be seen and conversed with. Dee did not see these visions himself, but conversed with the angels through a skryer, or medium, who saw and heard the celestial beings. Dee recorded his interviews in his “Spiritual Diaries” (French). Throughout Bayonetta there are numerous seals and devices that would appear to be inspired by the work of Dee or other Renaissance Magi.In these sessions, John Dee, through his skryer Edward Kelley, received instruction from several angels. The angels led him to believe he was to be a prophet in the style of the biblical Elijah or, more specifically like Enoch, whose prophesies were detailed in an ancient book that was not part of the Bible, but was considered by many scholars as divinely inspired. As a result, these experiments have been termed “Enochian conversations.” The prophesies received by Dee foretold apocalyptic events that were to occur soon and God’s plan for the world. The angels also instructed Dee in a system of magic to allow him to interpret the prophesies and participate in them as a form of judge. Importantly, Dee was also taught elements of the supposed angelic language, which came to be known as “Enochian” (Ouellette). Dee wrote extensively about his interviews with the angels and includes statements of their hierarchy (French, Ouellette). This is reflected in the “Laguna Hierarchy” of Bayonetta, sharing similarities in name and appearance of the angels Dee had described. Platinum Games creative director Jean-Pierre Kellams acted as writer and liaison, assisting the English adaptation of Bayonetta and was tasked by Hideki Kamiya to develop Bayonetta’s incantations and subsequently the language of the angels within the game (Kellams).The Hammer of WitchesOne of the earliest and most integral components of the Bayonetta franchise is the fact that the title character is a witch. Witches, sorcerers and other practitioners of magic have been part of folklore for centuries. Hideki Kamiya stated that the concept of” classical witches” was primarily a European legend. In order to emulate this European dimension, he had envisioned Bayonetta as having a British accent which resulted in the game being released in English first, even though Platinum Games is a Japanese company (Kamiya). The Umbra Witch Clan hails from Europe within the Bayonetta Universe and relates more closely to the traditional European medieval witch tradition (Various), although some of the charms Bayonetta possesses acknowledge the witches of different parts of the world and their cultural context. The Evil Harvest Rosary is said to have been created by a Japanese witch in the game. Bayonetta herself and other witches of the game use their hair as a conduit to summon demons and is known as “wicked weaves” within the game. She also creates her tight body suit out of her hair, which recedes when she decides to use a wicked weave. Using hair in magic harks back to a legend that witches often utilised hair in their rituals and spell casting (Guiley). It is also said that women with long and beautiful hair were particularly susceptible to being seduced by Incubi, a form of demon that targets sleeping women for sexual intercourse. According to some texts (Kramer), witches formed into the beings that they are through consensual sex with a devil, as stated in Malleus Maleficarum of the 1400s, when he wrote that “Modern Witches … willingly embrace this most foul and miserable form of servitude” (Kramer). Bayonetta wields her sexuality as proficiently as she does any weapon. This lends itself to the belief that women of such a seductive demeanour were consorts to demons.Purgitorio is not used in the traditional sense of being a location of the afterlife, as seen in The Divine Comedy, rather it is depicted as a dimension that exists concurrently within the human realm. Those who exist within this Purgitorio cannot be seen with human eyes. Bayonetta’s ability to enter and exit this space with the use of magic is likened to the myth that witches were known to disappear for periods of time and were purported to be “spirited away” from the human world (Kamiya).Recipes for gun powder emerge from as early as the 1200s but, to avoid charges of witchcraft due to superstitions of the time, they were hidden by inventors such as Roger Bacon (McNab). The use of “Bullet Arts” in Bayonetta as the main form of combat for Umbra Witches, and the fact that these firearm techniques had been honed by witches for centuries before the witch hunts, implies that firearms were indeed used by dark magic practitioners until their “discovery” by ordinary humans in the Bayonetta universe. In addition to this, that “Lumen Sages” are not seen to practice bullet arts, builds on the idea of guns being a practice of black magic. “Lumen Sages” are the Light counterpart and adversaries of the Umbra Witches in Bayonetta. The art of Alchemy is incorporated into Bayonetta as a form of witchcraft. Players may create their own health, vitality, protective and mana potions through a menu screen. This plays on the taboo of chemistry and alchemy of the 1500s. As mentioned, John Dee's tendency to dabble in such practices was considered by some to be heretical (French, Ouellette).Light and dark forces are juxtaposed in Bayonetta through the classic adversaries, Angels and Demons. The moral flexibility of both the light and dark entities in the game leaves the principles of good an evil in a state of ambiguity, which allows for uninhibited flow in the story and creates a non-linear and compelling narrative. Through this non-compliance with the pop culture counterparts of light and dark, gamers are left to question the foundations of old cultural norms. This historical context lends itself to the Bayonetta story not only by providing additional plot points, but also by justifying the development decisions that occur in order to truly flesh out Bayonetta’s character.ConclusionCompelling story line, characters with layered personality, and the ability to transgress boundaries of time and travel are all factors that provide a level of depth that has become an increasingly important aspect in modern video gameplay. Gamers love “Easter eggs,” the subtle references and embellishments scattered throughout a game that make playing games like Bayonetta so enjoyable. Bayonetta herself is a global traveller whose journeying is not limited to “abroad.” She transgresses cultural, time, and spatial boundaries. The game is a mosaic of references to spatial time dimensions, literary, and historical sources. This mix of borrowings has produced an original gameplay and a unique storyline. Such use of literature, mythology, and history to enhance the narrative creates a quest game that provides “meaningful play” (Howard). This process of creation of new material from older sources is a form of renewal. As long as contemporary culture presents literature and history to new audiences, the older texts will not be forgotten, but these elements will undergo a form of renewal and restoration and the present-day culture will be enhanced as a result. In the words of Bayonetta herself: “As long as there’s music, I’ll keep on dancing.”ReferencesCedro, Carmel. "Dolly Varden: Sweet Inspiration." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 37-46. French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. London: London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1972. Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley, Mass.: A.K. Peters, 2008. Kamiya, Hideki.Bayonetta. Bayonetta. Videogame. Sega, Japan, 2009.Kellams, Jean-Pierre. "Butmoni Coronzon (from the Mouth of the Witch)." Platinum Games 2009.Kramer, Heinrich. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Eds. Sprenger, Jakob, or joint author, and Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1971.McNab, C. Firearms: The Illustrated Guide to Small Arms of the World. Parragon, 2008.Ouellette, Francois. "Prophet to the Elohim: John Dee's Enochian Conversations as Christian Apocalyptic Discourse." Master of Arts thesis. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2004.Treasure Planet. The Walt Disney Company, 2003.Various. "Bayonetta Wikia." 2016.

Abstract:

These days, when we speak of the Internet, electronic networks, or computer-mediated communication (CMC) in general, the term 'cyberspace' all too readily presents itself as a blanket description of these communications systems. Without question it's an attractive and powerful metaphor -- and that "the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor" (Lakoff & Johnson 3) has by now been proven convincingly by the work of cognitive linguists. They have found that "metaphors serve to organise and interpret experience" (Closs Traugott 49), and so the influence, especially on users only just coming to terms with the Net, of an image of computer-mediated communication processes as taking place in a cyber-space of some description is immense: it's no accident that we speak of homepages and attempt to enter Websites and ftp servers, which in turn protect themselves from the outside cyberworld using firewalls. In itself, that's no problem -- we need salient metaphors in order to conceptualise new realms of experience, and a spatial approach to experiencing the Internet comes naturally, given that in 'real life' we interact with a spatial world, after all; we're experts in understanding things through spatial analogies. All those analogies tend to be limited to three- (or, allowing for the temporal dimension, four-) dimensional spatial models, however -- most obviously in the science fiction literature that first popularised the term 'cyberspace', where writers like William Gibson describe the network matrix as a "transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity" (Gibson 68). Quite obviously, this form of cyberspace basically replicates the structures of the 'real' world: it's merely adding an easy changeability and a suspension of physical laws which material existence cannot offer, but sticking to three dimensions. Outside the VR labs and slick computer graphics-heavy Hollywood movies, however, 'cyberspace' as we experience it today is far removed from such three-dimensional dreams. For the average Internet user, cyberspace has come to stand mainly for the World Wide Web, and here the deeply-ingrained 3D concepts the term conjures up serve to confuse rather than aid an understanding. At the most basic level -- that of the computer screen --, cyberspace inevitably appears in only two dimensions, of course, and it's hard to imagine one's clicking through a range of Webpages as an effortless glide over, or at least a walk through, the global village. On the other hand, with regards to organising the documents that make up that cyberspace, there is no reason why a three-dimensional approach should be favoured over one in any other number of dimensions: as calculating machines without the perceptually-determined preferences of humans, computers can think in four, five, n dimensions just as well as in three. Were we to force our 3D thinking on the machines, in fact, we'd probably end up limiting their usefulness (which in many cases is limited enough as it is). The problem that cyberspace isn't simply a common, Euclidean 3D space is what frequently confuses its human visitors, though: like Homer J. Simpson stepping out of the 2D cartoon into the third dimension, we're disoriented, even frightened -- ask any novice Websurfer who is just trying to find their path through cyberspace. Jumping from site to site, the relative locations to one another of the places they visit remain unclear; 'how do I get to...' is one of the most frequently heard questions. Many of the paths through the Web are temporary, after all, and there are many unexpected shortcuts and hidden passages, as well as roadblocks and detours. Again, an overly three-dimensional conceptualisation obscures more than it describes here: while we may well regard the sites and servers of major organisations as the highrisers in the cyberspatial cityscape, entering them through the main foyer (the central Webpage) is just one of our many options: we might just as well 'materialise' directly in a basem*nt room, as it were, by following a link to a specific page on the site, or enter the hidden thirteenth floor by jumping to a page that hasn't been publicised. Hyperlinks are our wormholes in cyberspace, defined only by their beginning and end, with an indefinite distance in between. How do you explain such feats to someone applying a strict 3D thinking to the Web? Stuck with the traditional options of three-dimensional experience, such a person wouldn't even think these actions possible. That cyberspatial geometry is far from fixed makes the situation even worse. The perception of space crucially depends on understanding the relations between lengths, heights, depths, and locations, but in cyberspace the lengths, heights, depths, and locations depend on one's perception: Websites seem extensive or small to us depending exclusively on how much of them we've explored -- largely, this is because there is never any way to view a site in its entirety, simply because there is no vantage point in cyberspace from which to do so (we're always either immersed in a site, looking from within, or at an unknown distance from it, unable to see from without -- but never just close by, where we might survey the whole site). And our perception of relative location depends entirely on the available hypertext links we are aware of -- the sites listed in our bookmarks are merely a step away, nextdoor, but those we're only vaguely aware of and have to hunt through Yahoo! and other search engines for can be a very long way off. (But we can bring them into immediate proximity simply by adding a bookmark later on.) Finally, while we may change the geography of our cyberworld through our own interventions, attaching Webpages to our individual nets by way of links, these may also slip away again unnoticed -- like a boat from its moorings -- by relocating to a different server or by restructuring their site contents. The relatively stability of three-dimensional space in the 'real' world just doesn't translate to cyberspace. These problems with the spatial metaphor for the Internet and the Web also affect other metaphors similarly grounded in three-dimensional experience. The most persistent and influential of these is the image of the 'global village' that was invented by Marshall McLuhan. This village model has inherited all the 3D limitations we've already seen, and additionally this particular three-dimensional arrangement also introduces further complications in that the idyllic and simplistic image the word 'village' conjures up hardly fits the confusing, contradictory, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and highly-populated nature of the Web -- calling this structure a 'global metropolis' seems to be at least some improvement over the 'global village' model (cf. Bruns sect. 4 bite 15ff.), as it opens up the possibility of individual suburbs with their own local identities, of a city centre with the major communal services, of internal politics amongst opposing factions of citizens, and of a number of outskirts areas with various connections to centre and outside. Again, this thought construct necessarily falls short of describing Internet reality in its entirety, of course -- an even more accurate term than 'global metropolis' may be 'Western-hemispheral n-dimensional population centre of variable shape', but that's a bit of a mouthful, really, and so I'll stick with 'global metropolis' for now, adding the caveat that the apparent three-dimensionality of this image shouldn't be taken for granted. In this, interestingly, cyberspace perhaps isn't all that far removed from the 'real world' -- after all, modern physicists are increasingly convinced that there are more dimensions to the universe than the human eye may be prepared to see. References Bruns, Axel. "'Every Home Is Wired': The Use of Internet Discussion Fora by a Subcultural Community." 1998. 5 Nov. 1998. <http://www.uq.net.au/~zzabruns/uni/honours/thesis.php>. Closs Traugott, Elizabeth. "'Conventional' and 'Dead' Metaphors Revisited." The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in Language and Thought. Eds. René Dirven and Wolf Paprotté. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985. 17-56. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The n-Dimensional Village: Coming to Terms with Cyberspatial Topography." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/village.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The n-Dimensional Village: Coming to Terms with Cyberspatial Topography," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/village.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1998) The n-Dimensional Village: Coming to Terms with Cyberspatial Topography. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/village.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

IntroductionAccounts of criminals, their victims, and their pursuers have become entrenched within the sphere of popular culture; most obviously in the genres of true crime and crime fiction. The centrality of the pursuer in the form of the detective, within these stories, dates back to the nineteenth century. This, often highly-stylised and regularly humanised protagonist, is now a firm feature of both factual and fictional accounts of crime narratives that, today, regularly focus on the energies of the detective in solving a variety of cases. So familiar is the figure of the detective, it seems that these men and women—amateurs and professionals—have always had an important role to play in the pursuit and punishment of the wrongdoer. Yet, the first detectives were forced to overcome significant resistance from a suspicious public. Some early efforts to reimagine punishment and to laud the detective include articles written by Charles Dickens; pieces on public hangings and policing that reflect the great Victorian novelist’s commitment to shed light on, through written commentaries, a range of important social issues. This article explores some of Dickens’s lesser-known pieces, that—appearing in daily newspapers and in one of his own publications Household Words—helped to change some common perceptions of punishment and policing. Image 1: Harper's Magazine 7 December 1867 (Charles Dickens Reading, by Charles A. Barry). Image credit: United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. A Reliance on the Scaffold: Early Law Enforcement in EnglandCrime control in 1720s England was dependent upon an inconsistent, and by extension ineffective, network of constables and night watchmen. It would be almost another three decades before Henry Fielding established the Bow Street Foot Patrol, or Bow Street Runners, in 1749, “six men in blue coats, patrolling the area within six miles of Charing Cross” (Worsley 35). A large-scale, formalised police force was attempted by Pitt the Younger in 1785 with his “Bill for the Further prevention of Crime and for the more Speedy Detection and Punishment of Offenders against the Peace” (Lyman 144). The proposed legislation was withdrawn due to fierce opposition that was underpinned by fears, held by officials, of a divestment of power to a new body of law enforcers (Lyman 144).The type of force offered in 1785 would not be realised until the next century, when the work of Robert Peel saw the passing of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829. The Police Act, which “constituted a revolution in traditional methods of law enforcement” (Lyman 141), was focused on the prevention of crime, “to reassure the lawful and discourage the wrongdoer” (Hitchens 51). Until these changes were implemented violent punishment, through the Waltham Black Act 1723, remained firmly in place (Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill 359) as part of the state’s arsenal against crime (Pepper 473).The Black Act, legislation often referred to as the ‘Bloody Code’ as it took the number of capital felonies to over 350 (Pepper 473), served in lieu of consistency and cooperation, across the country, in relation to the safekeeping of the citizenry. This situation inevitably led to anxieties about crime and crime control. In 1797 Patrick Colquhoun, a magistrate, published A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis in which he estimated that, out of a city population of just under 1 million, 115,000 men and women supported themselves “in and near the Metropolis by pursuits either criminal-illegal-or immoral” (Lyman 144). Andrew Pepper highlights tensions between “crime, governance and economics” as well as “rampant petty criminality [… and] widespread political corruption” (474). He also notes a range of critical responses to crime and how, “a particular kind of writing about crime in the 1720s demonstrated, perhaps for the first time, an awareness of, or self-consciousness about, this tension between competing visions of the state and state power” (Pepper 474), a tension that remains visible today in modern works of true crime and crime fiction. In Dickens’s day, crime and its consequences were serious legal, moral, and social issues (as, indeed, they are today). An increase in the crime rate, an aggressive state, the lack of formal policing, the growth of the printing industry, and writers offering diverse opinions—from the sympathetic to the retributive—on crime changed crime writing. The public wanted to know about the criminal who had disturbed society and wanted to engage with opinions on how the criminal should be stopped and punished. The public also wanted to be updated on changes to the judicial system such as the passing of the Judgement of Death Act 1823 which drastically reduced the number of capital crimes (Worsley 122) and how the Gaols Act, also of 1823, “moved tentatively towards national prison reform” (Gattrell 579). Crimes continued to be committed and alongside the wrongdoers were readers that wanted to be diverted from everyday events by, but also had a genuine need to be informed about, crime. A demand for true crime tales demonstrating a broader social need for crimes, even the most minor infractions, to be publicly punished: first on the scaffold and then in print. Some cases were presented as sensationalised true crime tales; others would be fictionalised in short stories and novels. Standing Witness: Dickens at the ScaffoldIt is interesting to note that Dickens witnessed at least four executions in his lifetime (Simpson 126). The first was the hanging of a counterfeiter, more specifically a coiner, which in the 1800s was still a form of high treason. The last person executed for coining in England was in early 1829; as Dickens arrived in London at the end of 1822, aged just 10-years-old (Simpson 126-27) he would have been a boy when he joined the crowds around the scaffold. Many journalists and writers who have documented executions have been “criticised for using this spectacle as a source for generating sensational copy” (Simpson 127). Dickens also wrote about public hangings. His most significant commentaries on the issue being two sets of letters: one set published in The Daily News (1846) and a second set published in The Times (1849) (Brandwood 3). Yet, he was immune from the criticism directed at so many other writers, in large part, due to his reputation as a liberal, “social reformer moved by compassion, but also by an antipathy toward waste, bureaucratic incompetence, and above all toward exploitation and injustice” (Simpson 127). As Anthony Simpson points out, Dickens did not sympathise with the condemned: “He wrote as a realist and not a moralist and his lack of sympathy for the criminal was clear, explicit and stated often” (128). Simpson also notes that Dickens’s letters on execution written in 1846 were “strongly supportive of total abolition” while later letters, written in 1849, presented arguments against public executions rather than the practice of execution. In 1859 Dickens argued against pardoning a poisoner. While in 1864 he supported the execution of the railway carriage murderer Franz Müller, explaining he would be glad to abolish both public executions and capital punishment, “if I knew what to do with the Savages of civilisation. As I do not, I would rid Society of them, when they shed blood, in a very solemn manner” (in Simpson 138-39) that is, executions should proceed but should take place in private.Importantly, Dickens was consistently concerned about society’s fascination with the scaffold. In his second letter to The Daily News, Dickens asks: round what other punishment does the like interest gather? We read of the trials of persons who have rendered themselves liable to transportation for life, and we read of their sentences, and, in some few notorious instances, of their departure from this country, and arrival beyond the sea; but they are never followed into their cells, and tracked from day to day, and night to night; they are never reproduced in their false letters, flippant conversations, theological disquisitions with visitors, lay and clerical […]. They are tried, found guilty, punished; and there an end. (“To the Editors of The Daily News” 6)In this passage, Dickens describes an overt curiosity with those criminals destined for the most awful of punishments. A curiosity that was put on vile display when a mob gathered on the concourse to watch a hanging; a sight which Dickens readily admitted “made [his] blood run cold” (“Letter to the Editor” 4).Dickens’s novels are grand stories, many of which feature criminals and criminal sub-plots. There are, for example, numerous criminals, including the infamous fa*gin in Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1838); several rioters are condemned to hang in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (1841); there is murder in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844); and murder, too, in Bleak House (1853). Yet, Dickens never wavered in his revulsion for the public display of the execution as revealed in his “refusal to portray the scene at the scaffold [which] was principled and heartfelt. He came, reluctantly to support capital punishment, but he would never use its application for dramatic effect” (Simpson 141).The Police Detective: A Public Relations ExerciseBy the mid-1700s the crime story was one of “sin to crime and then the gallows” (Rawlings online): “Crimes of every defcription (sic) have their origin in the vicious and immoral habits of the people” (Colquhoun 32). As Philip Rawlings notes, “once sin had been embarked upon, capture and punishment followed” (online). The origins of this can be found in the formula relied upon by Samuel Smith in the seventeenth century. Smith was the Ordinary of Newgate, or prison chaplain (1676–1698), who published Accounts of criminals and their gruesome ends. The outputs swelled the ranks of the already burgeoning market of broadsides, handbills and pamphlets. Accounts included: 1) the sermon delivered as the prisoner awaited execution; 2) a brief overview of the crimes for which the prisoner was being punished; and 3) a reporting of the events that surrounded the execution (Gladfelder 52–53), including the prisoner’s behaviour upon the scaffold and any last words spoken. For modern readers, the detective and the investigation is conspicuously absent. These popular Accounts (1676–1772)—over 400 editions offering over 2,500 criminal biographies—were only a few pence a copy. With print runs in the thousands, the Ordinary earnt up to £200 per year for his efforts (Emsley, Hitchco*ck, and Shoemaker online). For:penitence and profit made comfortable bedfellows, ensuring true crime writing became a firm feature of the business of publishing. That victims and villains suffered was regrettable but no horror was so terrible anyone forgot there was money to be made. (Franks, “Stealing Stories” 7)As the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution were having their full impact, many were looking for answers, and certainty, in a period of radical social transformation. Sin as a central motif in crime stories was insufficient: the detective was becoming essential (Franks, “True Crime” 239). “In the nineteenth century, the role of the newly-fashioned detective as an agent of consolation or security is both commercially and ideologically central to the subsequent project of popular crime writing” (Bell 8). This was supported by an “increasing professionalism and proficiency of policemen, detectives, and prosecutors, new understandings about psychology, and advances in forensic science and detection techniques” (Murley 10). Elements now included in most crime narratives. Dickens insisted that the detective was a crucial component of the justice system—a figure to be celebrated, one to take centre stage in the crime story—reflecting his staunch support “of the London Metropolitan Police” (Simpson 140). Indeed, while Dickens is known principally for exposing wretched poverty, he was also interested in a range of legal issues as can be evinced from his writings for Household Words. Image 2: Household Words 27 July 1850 (Front Page). Image credit: Dickens Journals Online. W.H. Wills argued for the acceptance of the superiority of the detective when, in 1850, he outlined the “difference between a regular and a detective policeman” (368). The detective must, he wrote: “counteract every sort of rascal whose only means of existence it avowed rascality, but to clear up mysteries, the investigation of which demands the utmost delicacy and tact” (368). The detective is also extraordinarily efficient; cases are solved quickly, in one example a matter is settled in just “ten minutes” (369).Dickens’s pro-police pieces, included a blatantly promotional, two-part work “A Detective Police Party” (1850). The narrative begins with open criticism of the Bow Street Runners contrasting these “men of very indifferent character” to the Detective Force which is “so well chosen and trained, proceeds so systematically and quietly, does its business in such a workman-like manner, and is always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the public” (“Police Party, Part I” 409). The “party” is just that: a gathering of detectives and editorial staff. Men in a “magnificent chamber”, seated at “a round table […] with some glasses and cigars arranged upon it; and the editorial sofa elegantly hemmed in between that stately piece of furniture and the wall” (“Police Party, Part I” 409). Two inspectors and five sergeants are present. Each man prepared to share some of their experiences in the service of Londoners:they are, [Dickens tells us] one and all, respectable-looking men; of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation, and quick perception when addressed; and generally presenting in their faces, traces more or less marked of habitually leading lives of strong mental excitement. (“Police Party, Part I” 410) Dickens goes to great lengths to reinforce the superiority of the police detective. These men, “in a glance, immediately takes an inventory of the furniture and an accurate sketch of the editorial presence” and speak “very concisely, and in well-chosen language” and who present as an “amicable brotherhood” (“Police Party, Part I” 410). They are also adaptable and constantly working to refine their craft, through apeculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circ*mstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! (“Police Party, Part II” 459)These detectives are also, in some ways, familiar. Dickens’s offerings include: a “shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman – in appearance not at all unlike a very acute, thoroughly-trained schoolmaster”; a man “with a ruddy face and a high sun-burnt forehead, [who] has the air of one who has been a Sergeant in the army” (“Police Party, Part I” 409-10); and another man who slips easily into the role of the “greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, un-suspicious, and confiding young butcher” (“Police Party, Part II” 457). These descriptions are more than just attempts to flesh out a story; words on a page reminding us that the author is not just another journalist but one of the great voices of the Victorian era. These profiles are, it is argued here, a deliberate strategy to reassure readers.In summary, police detectives are only to be feared by those residing on the wrong side of the law. For those without criminal intent; detectives are, in some ways, like us. They are people we already know and trust. The stern but well-meaning, intelligent school teacher; the brave and loyal soldier defending the Empire; and the local merchant, a person we see every day. Dickens provides, too, concrete examples for how everyone can contribute to a safer society by assisting these detectives. This, is perfect public relations. Thus, almost singlehandedly, he builds a professional profile for a new type of police officer. The problem (crime) and its solution (the detective) neatly packaged, with step-by-step instructions for citizens to openly support this new-style of constabulary and so achieve a better, less crime-ridden community. This is a theme pursued in “Three Detective Anecdotes” (1850) where Dickens continued to successfully merge “solid lower-middle-class respectability with an intimate knowledge of the criminal world” (Priestman 177); so, proffering the ideal police detective. A threat to the criminal but not to the hard-working and honest men, women, and children of the city.The Detective: As Fact and as FictionThese writings are also a precursor to one of the greatest fictional detectives of the English-speaking world. Dickens observes that, for these new-style police detectives: “Nothing is so common or deceptive as such appearances at first” (“Police Party, Part I” 410). In 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle would write that: “There is nothing so deceptive as an obvious fact” (78). Dickens had prepared readers for the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes: who was smarter, more observant and who had more determination to take on criminals than the average person. The readers of Dickens were, in many respects, positioned as prototypes of Dr John Watson: a hardworking, loyal Englishman. Smart. But not as smart as those who would seek to do harm. Watson needed Holmes to make the world a better place; the subscriber to Household Words needed the police detective.Another article, “On Duty with Inspector Field” (1851), profiled the “well-known hand” responsible for bringing numerous offenders to justice and sending them, “inexorably, to New South Wales” (Dickens 266). Critically this true crime narrative would be converted into a crime fiction story as Inspector Field is transformed (it is widely believed) into the imagined Inspector Bucket. The 1860s have been identified as “a period of awakening for the detective novel” (Ashley x), a predictor of which is the significant sub-plot of murder in Dickens’s Bleak House. In this novel, a murder is committed with the case taken on, and competently solved by, Bucket who is a man of “skill and integrity” a man presented as an “ideal servant” though one working for a “flawed legal system” (Walton 458). Mr Snagsby, of Bleak House, observes Bucket as a man whoseems in some indefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply at the very last moment [… He] notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger, or the brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt. (278) This passage, it is argued here, places Bucket alongside the men at the detective police party in Household Words. He is simultaneously superhuman in mind and manner, though rather ordinary in dress. Like the real-life detectives of Dickens’s articles; he is a man committed to keeping the city safe while posing no threat to law-abiding citizens. ConclusionThis article has explored, briefly, the contributions of the highly-regarded Victorian author, Charles Dickens, to factual and fictional crime writing. The story of Dickens as a social commentator is one that is familiar to many; what is less well-known is the connection of Dickens to important conversations around capital punishment and the rise of the detective in crime-focused narratives; particularly how he assisted in building the professional profile of the police detective. In this way, through fact and fiction, Dickens performed great (if under-acknowledged) public services around punishment and law enforcement: he contributed to debates on the death penalty and he helped to build trust in the radical social project that established modern-day policing.AcknowledgementsThe author offers her sincere thanks to the New South Wales Dickens Society, Simon Dwyer, and Peter Kirkpatrick. The author is also grateful to the reviewers of this article for their thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions. ReferencesAshley, Mike. “Introduction: Seeking the Evidence.” The Notting Hill Mystery. Author. Charles Warren Adams. London: The British Library, 2012. xxi-iv. Bell, Ian A. “Eighteenth-Century Crime Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003/2006. 7-17.Brandwood, Katherine. “The Dark and Dreadful Interest”: Charles Dickens, Public Death and the Amusem*nts of the People. MA Thesis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2013. 19 Feb. 2017 <https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558266/Brandwood_georgetown_0076M_12287.pdf;sequence=1>.Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. London: Macmillan & Co, 1964.Cruickshanks, Eveline, and Howard Erskine-Hill. “The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism.” Journal of British Studies 24.3 (1985): 358-65.Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. London: Richard Bentley,1838.———. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty. London: Chapman & Hall, 1841. ———. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman & Hall, 1844.———. “To the Editors of The Daily News.” The Daily News 28 Feb. 1846: 6. (Reprinted in Antony E. Simpson. Witnesses to the Scaffold. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008. 141–149.)———. “Letter to the Editor.” The Times 14 Nov. 1849: 4. (Reprinted in Antony E. Simpson. Witnesses to the Scaffold. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008. 149-51.)———. “A Detective Police Party, Part I.” Household Words 1.18 (1850): 409-14.———. “A Detective Police Party, Part II.” Household Words 1.20 (1850): 457-60.———. “Three Detective Anecdotes.” Household Words 1.25 (1850): 577-80.———. “On Duty with Inspector Field.” Household Words 3.64 (1851): 265-70.———. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853/n.d.Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. London: Penguin, 1892/1981. 74–99.Emsley, Clive, Tim Hitchco*ck, and Robert Shoemaker. “The Proceedings: Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online, n.d. 4 Feb. 2017 <https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Ordinarys-accounts.jsp>. Franks, Rachel. “True Crime: The Regular Reinvention of a Genre.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 1.2 (2016): 239-54. ———. “Stealing Stories: Punishment, Profit and the Ordinary of Newgate.” Refereed Proceedings of the 21st Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs: Authorised Theft. Eds. Niloofar Fanaiyan, Rachel Franks, and Jessica Seymour. 2016. 1-11. 20 Mar. 2017 <http://www.aawp.org.au/publications/the-authorised-theft-papers/>.Gatrell, V.A.C. The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Gladfelder, Hal. Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Hitchens, Peter. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003.Lyman, J.L. “The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829.” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 55.1 (1964): 141-54.Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport: Praeger, 2008.Pepper, Andrew. “Early Crime Writing and the State: Jonathan Wilde, Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville in 1720s London.” Textual Practice 25.3 (2011): 473-91. Priestman, Martin. “Post-War British Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 173-89.Rawlings, Philip. “True Crime.” The British Criminology Conferences: Selected Proceedings, Volume 1: Emerging Themes in Criminology. Eds. Jon Vagg and Tim Newburn. London: British Society of Criminology (1998). 4 Feb. 2017 <http://www.britsoccrim.org/volume1/010.pdf>.Simpson, Antony E. Witnesses to the Scaffold: English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008.Walton, James. “Conrad, Dickens, and the Detective Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23.4 (1969): 446-62.Wills, William Henry. “The Modern Science of Thief-Taking.” Household Words 1.16 (1850): 368-72.Worsley, Lucy. A Very British Murder: The Curious Story of How Crime Was Turned into Art. London: BBC Books, 2013/2014.

Abstract:

Last year, the ABC’s Media Watch (17 Oct. 2005) noted the continuing outrage in the tabloid media over “the dirtiest house in NSW”. The program took issue with Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph, and the descriptor “exclusive” attached to their article on a property in beachside Bondi (9 Oct. 2005). In fact, as Media Watch pointed out, Channel Seven’s current affairs flagship Today Tonight had already made repeat visits to the residence. A Current Affair, Channel Nine’s rival show, as well as Bondi’s local newspaper also offered coverage. However, I am interested not in the number of times the story appeared – though this is certainly a symptom of what I do want to talk about. Instead, I want to consider the affect generated by this reportage. In turn, I want to consider what this reveals about our attitudes to refuse, and how these attitudes work to constitute social order in capitalist discourse. The overwhelming affective register of the language deployed to speak about the house is disgust. Adam Bell in The Sunday Telegraph paints a visceral picture entitled “A stinking mess”. He writes that the Bondi premises are engulfed in a stinking three-metre high pile of decaying rubbish that poses a serious health and safety risk. … Stacked with empty boxes, beer cartons, broken furniture, canned fruit, newspapers and cardboard, the waste dump fills the entire front and backyards of the house and spills onto the street. On hot days, the stench of the rotting garbage is detected blocks away while at night, rats and co*ckroaches are regularly seen running in and out of the mess. … The rubbish is piled so high only the roof of the 1920s Californian bungalow is clearly visible from the front. (9 Oct. 2005) Bell’s follow-up speaks of “the huge pile of filth at the infamous Bondi rubbish house” and of “a team of cleaners dressed in forensic ‘space suits’” (27 Nov. 2005). Other News Limited journalists who subsequently visited the site conjured similar imagery (Goldner; Cummings). Television was not to be outdone: Today Tonight called it “the house from hell”, whilst A Current Affair focused on the “disgraceful pile of rat-infested rubbish [that] just gets higher and higher” (Media Watch). The tonality of the language is a dimension of the prevalent discourse of “aspirationalism” that is central to the popularist politics of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. One key signifier of “aspiration” is property ownership expressed through the rhetoric of the “home.” The affective dimension of the reporting—the disgust—stems from the disjuncture of the exalted (Bondi Beach, high property values) and the abject (refuse). It is a tool used to discursively fix the inappropriate physical and social location of the refuse so as to locate what is culturally valued. Bell’s initial article mentions no less than three times in 600 words that the house is a “million dollar property” and is “located in one of Sydney’s most prestigious and expensive suburbs” (9 Oct. 2005). His second article also mentioned the property’s value (27 Nov. 2005), as did another article by a colleague at The Daily Telegraph (9 Dec. 2005). Today Tonight emphasized that the house was in “an exclusive beachside suburb” and that it was “smack bang in the middle of one of Australia’s most expensive and best known suburbs” (Media Watch). William Ian Miller in Anatomy of Disgust explains how the affective response to an encounter like the one with Bondi’s “rubbish house” can be attributed to feelings about organisation. Miller positions disgust as “a strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its danger to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity, contact or ingestion” (2). In other words, disgust is the product of an aversion to something that breaches the lines of containment, and therefore signals a threat to established order. The body – a network of physiological and neurological processes, which constitute multiple systems of order in their own right – cannot cope with such a breakdown and reacts accordingly. David Trotter elaborates: Psychological activity [is] an attempt to impose order on experience: bodily paroxysm is a way of confronting and resolving urgent abstract dilemmas. According to this view, you vomit because you have lost confidence in your ability to make sense of the world: your ability to categorize, order, explain, or tell stories about what has happened to you. Disgust is the product of conceptual trauma. (158-9) The “conceptual trauma” in the case of Bondi’s “rubbish house” is a reaction to a transgression of the order of capitalist social space, which then becomes a discursive conduit for its hegemonic renewal. Indeed, the concern with the malfunction in social order that the misplaced refuse represents confirms what anthropologist Mary Douglas has been telling us for some time: If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. (36) Certainly, the associated health risks to Mary Bobolas, the house’s owner/occupier, and the wider community from her hoarding are not purely ideological. However, it is impossible to divorce the social discourses surrounding refuse from the series of social and technological developments that Dominique Laporte in his History of sh*t calls the “privatisation” of waste (28). The social and technical apparatuses which enable dominant sociogenetic attitudes regarding refuse include the increasing emphasis on private property, the emergence of the family unit as the primary site for the coalescence of socializing forces and inventions such as the toilet (Elias 137-40). Laporte believes that this process in instrumental in creating the individuated, capitalist subject, which, in the context of contemporary Australian capitalist discourse, is the middle-class homeowner. The construction of complex regulatory architecture to manage practices and tastes substantiates American novelist Don DeLillo’s proposal that civilisation did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage came first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. … Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it. (287-8) Most of the systems to which DeLillo refers are designed to counter the visibility of refuse and channel it to a demarcated, separate space. This is the paradox of refuse: our sense of order depends upon it, yet in affluent society we are anxious about confronting it. Over the years, Bondi Beach has been sanitised both materially and socially. The sewage outfall is a heritage site and the area is no longer working class. Yet, it seems the sh*t is still washing up on the shore: significantly, the refuse Bobolas accumulates is other people’s rubbish collected from “the streets, garbage bins and council clean-ups” (Bell 9 Oct. 2005). It is produced by the very homeowners whose disgust is so palpable. However, the media coverage of the “rubbish house” does not merely remind the rich and famous residents of their own refuse, nor does it function as a critique of conspicuous consumption. The media event of the “rubbish house” illustrates how “matter out of place” and the resulting affect of disgust are exploited discursively by hegemonic culture in order to maintain the ideology of “aspirationalism” and reiterate the wider capitalist project. References Bell, Adam. “A Stinking Mess – Mountain of Garbage in Sydney Yard.” Sunday Telegraph [Sydney] 9 Oct. 2005: 9. Bell, Adam. “End of the Dirt House.” Sunday Telegraph [Sydney] 27 Nov. 2005: 17. Cummings, Larissa. “Bondi Mountain of Rubbish Rises Again.” Daily Telegraph [Sydney] 20 May 2006: 15. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002. Elias, Norbert. The Civilising Process: The History of Manners: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Goldner, Viva. “Rage over Rubbish – Daughters Defend Garbage Mountain.” Daily Telegraph [Sydney] 9 Dec. 2005: 17. Laporte, Dominique. History of sh*t. Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 2002. Media Watch. ABC TV. 17 Oct. 2005. Transcript. 23 Jul 2006 http://www.abc. net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1483767.htm. net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1483767.htm> Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, Mass & London: Harvard UP, 1997. Trotter, David. Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Location, Location: Situating Bondi’s “Rubbish House”." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/07-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Nov. 2006) "Location, Location: Situating Bondi’s “Rubbish House”," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/07-seale.php>.

Abstract:

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. 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Abstract:

Introduction Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade, with high profile films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, and An Inconvenient Truth garnering increased attention both at the box office and in the news media. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact. Films are now typically released with websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds, and web videos to increase both reach and impact. This combination of technology and broader audience appeal has given rise to a current landscape in which documentary films are imbedded within coordinated multi-media campaigns. New media have not only opened up new avenues for communicating with audiences, they have also created new opportunities for data collection and analysis of film impacts. A recent report by McKinsey and Company highlighted this potential, introducing and discussing the implications of increasing consumer information being recorded on the Internet as well as through networked sensors in the physical world. As they found: "Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy" (Manyika et al. iv). This data can be mined to learn a great deal about both individual and cultural response to documentary films and the issues they represent. Although film has a rich history in humanities research, this new set of tools enables an empirical approach grounded in the social sciences. However, several researchers across disciplines have noted that limited investigation has been conducted in this area. Although there has always been an emphasis on social impact in film and many filmmakers and scholars have made legitimate (and possibly illegitimate) claims of impact, few have attempted to empirically justify these claims. Over fifteen years ago, noted film scholar Brian Winston commented that "the underlying assumption of most social documentaries—that they shall act as agents of reform and change—is almost never demonstrated" (236). A decade later, Political Scientist David Whiteman repeated this sentiment, arguing that, "despite widespread speculation about the impact of documentaries, the topic has received relatively little systematic attention" ("Evolving"). And earlier this year, the introduction to a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on documentary film stated, "documentary film, despite its growing influence and many impacts, has mostly been overlooked by social scientists studying the media and communication" (Nisbet and Aufderheide 451). Film has been studied extensively as entertainment, as narrative, and as cultural event, but the study of film as an agent of social change is still in its infancy. This paper introduces a systematic approach to measuring the social impact of documentary film aiming to: (1) discuss the context of documentary film and its potential impact; and (2) argue for a social science approach, discussing key issues about conducting such research. Changes in Documentary Practice Documentary film has been used as a tool for promoting social change throughout its history. John Grierson, who coined the term "documentary" in 1926, believed it could be used to influence the ideas and actions of people in ways once reserved for church and school. He presented his thoughts on this emerging genre in his 1932 essay, First Principles of Documentary, saying, "We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form" (97). Richard Barsam further specified the definition of documentary, distinguishing it from non-fiction film, such that all documentaries are non-fiction films but not all non-fiction films are documentaries. He distinguishes documentary from other forms of non-fiction film (i.e. travel films, educational films, newsreels) by its purpose; it is a film with an opinion and a specific message that aims to persuade or influence the audience. And Bill Nichols writes that the definition of documentary may even expand beyond the film itself, defining it as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" (12). Documentary film has undergone many significant changes since its inception, from the heavily staged romanticism movement of the 1920s to the propagandist tradition of governments using film to persuade individuals to support national agendas to the introduction of cinéma vérité in the 1960s and historical documentary in the 1980s (cf. Barnouw). However, the recent upsurge in popularity of documentary media, combined with technological advances of internet and computers have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as both art and agent for social change. One such opportunity is in the creation of film-based social action campaigns. Over the past decade, filmmakers have taken a more active role in promoting social change by coordinating film releases with action campaigns. Companies such as Participant Media (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., etc.) now create "specific social action campaigns for each film and documentary designed to give a voice to issues that resonate in the films" (Participant Media). In addition, a new sector of "social media" consultants are now offering services, including "consultation, strategic planning for alternative distribution, website and social media development, and complete campaign management services to filmmakers to ensure the content of nonfiction media truly meets the intention for change" (Working Films). The emergence of new forms of media and technology are changing our conceptions of both documentary film and social action. Technologies such as podcasts, video blogs, internet radio, social media and network applications, and collaborative web editing "both unsettle and extend concepts and assumptions at the heart of 'documentary' as a practice and as an idea" (Ellsworth). In the past decade, we have seen new forms of documentary creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Likewise, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including "action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels" that often turn into "ongoing 'legacy' programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film's domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows" (Participant Media). This move towards multi-media documentary film is becoming not only commonplace, but expected as a part of filmmaking. NYU film professor and documentary film pioneer George Stoney recently noted, "50 percent of the documentary filmmaker's job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action" (qtd. in Nisbet, "Gasland"). In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, coined the term "transmedia storytelling", which he later defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" ("Transmedia"). When applied to documentary film, it is the elements of the "issue" raised by the film that get dispersed across these channels, coordinating, not just an entertainment experience, but a social action campaign. Dimensions of Evaluation It is not unreasonable to assume that such film campaigns, just like any policy or program, have the possibility to influence viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Measuring this impact has become increasingly important, as funders of documentary and issue-based films want look to understand the "return on investment" of films in terms of social impact so that they can compare them with other projects, including non-media, direct service projects. Although we "feel" like films make a difference to the individuals who also see them in the broader cultures in which they are embedded, measurement and empirical analysis of this impact are vitally important for both providing feedback to filmmakers and funders as well as informing future efforts attempting to leverage film for social change. This type of systematic assessment, or program evaluation, is often discussed in terms of two primary goals—formative (or process) and summative (or impact) evaluation (cf. Muraskin; Trochim and Donnelly). Formative evaluation studies program materials and activities to strengthen a program, and summative evaluation examines program outcomes. In terms of documentary film, these two goals can be described as follows: Formative Evaluation: Informing the Process As programs (broadly defined as an intentional set of activities with the aim of having some specific impact), the people who interact with them, and the cultures they are situated in are constantly changing, program development and evaluation is an ongoing learning cycle. Film campaigns, which are an intentional set of activities with the aim of impacting individual viewers and broader cultures, fit squarely within this purview. Without formulating hypotheses about the relationships between program activities and goals and then collecting and analyzing data during implementation to test them, it is difficult to learn ways to improve programs (or continue doing what works best in the most efficient manner). Attention to this process enables those involved to learn more about, not only what works, but how and why it works and even gain insights about how program outcomes may be affected by changes to resource availability, potential audiences, or infrastructure. Filmmakers are constantly learning and honing their craft and realizing the impact of their practice can help the artistic process. Often faced with tight budgets and timelines, they are forced to confront tradeoffs all the time, in the writing, production and post-production process. Understanding where they are having impact can improve their decision-making, which can help both the individual project and the overall field. Summative Evaluation: Quantifying Impacts Evaluation is used in many different fields to determine whether programs are achieving their intended goals and objectives. It became popular in the 1960s as a way of understanding the impact of the Great Society programs and has continued to grow since that time (Madaus and Stufflebeam). A recent White House memo stated that "rigorous, independent program evaluations can be a key resource in determining whether government programs are achieving their intended outcomes as well as possible and at the lowest possible cost" and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched an initiative to increase the practice of "impact evaluations, or evaluations aimed at determining the causal effects of programs" (Orszag 1). Documentary films, like government programs, generally target a national audience, aim to serve a social purpose, and often do not provide a return on their investment. Participant Media, the most visible and arguably most successful documentary production company in the film industry, made recent headlines for its difficulty in making a profit during its seven-year history (Cieply). Owner and founder Jeff Skoll reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company and CEO James Berk added that the company sometimes measures success, not by profit, but by "whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically" (Cieply). Because of this, documentary projects often rely on grant funding, and are starting to approach funders beyond traditional arts and media sources. "Filmmakers are finding new fiscal and non-fiscal partners, in constituencies that would not traditionally be considered—or consider themselves—media funders or partners" (BRITDOC 6). And funders increasingly expect tangible data about their return on investment. Says Luis Ubiñas, president of Ford Foundation, which recently launched the Just Films Initiative: In these times of global economic uncertainty, with increasing demand for limited philanthropic dollars, assessing our effectiveness is more important than ever. Today, staying on the frontlines of social change means gauging, with thoughtfulness and rigor, the immediate and distant outcomes of our funding. Establishing the need for evaluation is not enough—attention to methodology is also critical. Valid research methodology is a critical component of understanding around the role entertainment can play in impacting social and environmental issues. The following issues are vital to measuring impact. Defining the Project Though this may seem like an obvious step, it is essential to determine the nature of the project so one can create research questions and hypotheses based on a complete understanding of the "treatment". One organization that provides a great example of the integration of documentary film imbedded into a larger campaign or movement is Invisible Children. Founded in 2005, Invisible Children is both a media-based organization as well as an economic development NGO with the goal of raising awareness and meeting the needs of child soldiers and other youth suffering as a result of the ongoing war in northern Uganda. Although Invisible Children began as a documentary film, it has grown into a large non-profit organization with an operating budget of over $8 million and a staff of over a hundred employees and interns throughout the year as well as volunteers in all 50 states and several countries. Invisible Children programming includes films, events, fundraising campaigns, contests, social media platforms, blogs, videos, two national "tours" per year, merchandise, and even a 650-person three-day youth summit in August 2011 called The Fourth Estate. Individually, each of these components might lead to specific outcomes; collectively, they might lead to others. In order to properly assess impacts of the film "project", it is important to take all of these components into consideration and think about who they may impact and how. This informs the research questions, hypotheses, and methods used in evaluation. Film campaigns may even include partnerships with existing social movements and non-profit organizations targeting social change. The American University Center for Social Media concluded in a case study of three issue-based documentary film campaigns: Digital technologies do not replace, but are closely entwined with, longstanding on-the-ground activities of stakeholders and citizens working for social change. Projects like these forge new tools, pipelines, and circuits of circulation in a multiplatform media environment. They help to create sustainable network infrastructures for participatory public media that extend from local communities to transnational circuits and from grassroots communities to policy makers. (Abrash) Expanding the Focus of Impact beyond the Individual A recent focus has shifted the dialogue on film impact. Whiteman ("Theaters") argues that traditional metrics of film "success" tend to focus on studio economic indicators that are far more relevant to large budget films. Current efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size, the author claims, are really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact. He instead stresses the importance of developing a more comprehensive model. His "coalition model" broadens the range and types of impact of film beyond traditional metrics to include the entire filmmaking process, from production to distribution. Whiteman (“Theaters”) argues that a narrow focus on the size of the audience for a film, its box office receipts, and viewers' attitudes does not incorporate the potential reach of a documentary film. Impacts within the coalition model include both individual and policy levels. Individual impacts (with an emphasis on activist groups) include educating members, mobilizing for action, and raising group status; policy includes altering both agenda for and the substance of policy deliberations. The Fledgling Fund (Barrett and Leddy) expanded on this concept and identified five distinct impacts of documentary film campaigns. These potential impacts expand from individual viewers to groups, movements, and eventually to what they call the "ultimate goal" of social change. Each is introduced briefly below. Quality Film. The film itself can be presented as a quality film or media project, creating enjoyment or evoking emotion in the part of audiences. "By this we mean a film that has a compelling narrative that draws viewers in and can engage them in the issue and illustrate complex problems in ways that statistics cannot" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Awareness. Film can increase public awareness by bringing light to issues and stories that may have otherwise been unknown or not often thought about. This is the level of impact that has received the most attention, as films are often discussed in terms of their "educational" value. "A project's ability to raise awareness around a particular issue, since awareness is a critical building block for both individual change and broader social change" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Engagement. Impact, however, need not stop at simply raising public awareness. Engagement "indicates a shift from simply being aware of an issue to acting on this awareness. Were a film and its outreach campaign able to provide an answer to the question 'What can I do?' and more importantly mobilize that individual to act?" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This is where an associated film campaign becomes increasingly important, as transmedia outlets such as Facebook, websites, blogs, etc. can build off the interest and awareness developed through watching a film and provide outlets for viewers channel their constructive efforts. Social Movement. In addition to impacts on individuals, films can also serve to mobilize groups focused on a particular problem. The filmmaker can create a campaign around the film to promote its goals and/or work with existing groups focused on a particular issue, so that the film can be used as a tool for mobilization and collaboration. "Moving beyond measures of impact as they relate to individual awareness and engagement, we look at the project's impact as it relates to the broader social movement … if a project can strengthen the work of key advocacy organizations that have strong commitment to the issues raised in the film" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). Social Change. The final level of impact and "ultimate goal" of an issue-based film is long-term and systemic social change. "While we understand that realizing social change is often a long and complex process, we do believe it is possible and that for some projects and issues there are key indicators of success" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This can take the form of policy or legislative change, passed through film-based lobbying efforts, or shifts in public dialogue and behavior. Legislative change typically takes place beyond the social movement stage, when there is enough support to pressure legislators to change or create policy. Film-inspired activism has been seen in issues ranging from environmental causes such as agriculture (Food Inc.) and toxic products (Blue Vinyl) to social causes such as foreign conflict (Invisible Children) and education (Waiting for Superman). Documentary films can also have a strong influence as media agenda-setters, as films provide dramatic "news pegs" for journalists seeking to either sustain or generation new coverage of an issue (Nisbet "Introduction" 5), such as the media coverage of climate change in conjunction with An Inconvenient Truth. Barrett and Leddy, however, note that not all films target all five impacts and that different films may lead to different impacts. "In some cases we could look to key legislative or policy changes that were driven by, or at least supported by the project... In other cases, we can point to shifts in public dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed" (7). It is possible that specific film and/or campaign characteristics may lead to different impacts; this is a nascent area for research and one with great promise for both practical and theoretical utility. Innovations in Tools and Methods Finally, the selection of tools is a vital component for assessing impact and the new media landscape is enabling innovations in the methods and strategies for program evaluation. Whereas the traditional domain of film impact measurement included box office statistics, focus groups, and exit surveys, innovations in data collection and analysis have expanded the reach of what questions we can ask and how we are able to answer them. For example, press coverage can assist in understanding and measuring the increase in awareness about an issue post-release. Looking directly at web-traffic changes "enables the creation of an information-seeking curve that can define the parameters of a teachable moment" (Hart and Leiserowitz 360). Audience reception can be measured, not only via interviews and focus groups, but also through content and sentiment analysis of web content and online analytics. "Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden" (Manyika et al. 5). These new tools are significantly changing evaluation, expanding what we can learn about the social impacts of film through triangulation of self-report data with measurement of actual behavior in virtual environments. Conclusion The changing media landscape both allows and impels evaluation of film impacts on individual viewers and the broader culture in which they are imbedded. Although such analysis may have previously been limited to box office numbers, critics' reviews, and theater exit surveys, the rise of new media provides both the ability to connect filmmakers, activists, and viewers in new ways and the data in which to study the process. This capability, combined with significant growth in the documentary landscape, suggests a great potential for documentary film to contribute to some of our most pressing social and environmental needs. A social scientific approach, that combines empirical analysis with theory applied from basic science, ensures that impact can be measured and leveraged in a way that is useful for both filmmakers as well as funders. In the end, this attention to impact ensures a continued thriving marketplace for issue-based documentary films in our social landscape. References Abrash, Barbara. "Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement." American University Center for Social Media 21 Apr. 2010. 26 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/›. Aufderheide, Patricia. "The Changing Documentary Marketplace." Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 24-28. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. 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Abstract:

On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.

Abstract:

Computer and video games are one of the primary uses of personal computer technologies, and yet despite an increasing interest in cultural practices that are organised around computer and information technologies cultural studies has paid very little attention to this phenomenon. In the War of Desire and Technology Allucquére Roseanne Stone comments "that there seems no question that a significant proportion of young people will spend a significant and increasing proportion of their waking hours playing computer-based games in one form or another, and so far the implications of this trend have yet to be fully addressed in academic forums" (26). This Christmas will undoubtedly follow the trend of the last few years, with video game consoles and software being the biggest toy sellers. In the lead-up to this Christmas Nintendo shipped 5,000,000 units of the much-anticipated Shigeru Miyamoto-designed game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Zelda series of adventure games made its first appearance in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) with The Legend of Zelda (which sold 6.5 million units worldwide). It is increasingly evident that whether it is in games arcades, on console systems such as the Nintendo 64, or on personal computers, the playing of computer games is a crucial component of the popular cultural terrain. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the fifth installment in the series, the player controls a young boy, Link, through his adventures in the 3D-rendered fantasy world of Hyrule. By defeating various monsters, solving puzzles, and discovering magical items the player progresses through the game with the aim of saving Hyrule and rescuing Princess Zelda by defeating the evil Ganondorf. Yup, once you get past all of the 3D polygon graphics enabled by the Nintendo 64 platform this game is your basic rescue-the-princess quest with all of the troubling gender implications that this raises. Cultural theorists such as Stone and Dan Fleming raise the concern that this rapidly expanding industry that is an increasingly significant component of many young people's cultural lives is limited to the problems associated with a narrowly defined masculine identity. Stone asks should things like computer games, which are so terrifically absorbing and which take up so much waking time -- so much precious, irreplaceable waking time -- be expected to possess a modicum of invention, to be able to stretch players' imaginations and skills beyond the ability to hit targets and dodge obstacles? (163-64) Fleming observes that "this remarkable technology could support a much richer play space and with it a position less rigidly tied to a simplistically projected male identity" (57). But the narrative content of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time does not come even close to explaining what it is about playing the game that hooks the gamer into this 30-50 hour experience, and keeps us coming back for more -- just one more session until I finish that Dungeon. Fleming makes the important point that an analysis of the symbolic content of games tells us very little about what it is actually like to play them. He takes the step of shifting our attention from the meanings of cultural objects to their status as events (11-16). The criticism that computer and video game content is dominated by a constraining masculine identity is important, but is no more than a starting point. Is this all that can be said about games such as Zelda? I would argue that the activity of playing computer games cannot simply be approached through a textual analysis of the symbolic content of games. If we tentatively accept that gaming is not simply a content, but an activity, then, how can we analyse or describe this activity? Does cultural studies provide us with the tools necessary to describe it as a cultural experience? How is this experience organised, and what ramifications does it have for cultural studies' understanding of contemporary cultural technologies? An initial avenue of inquiry is provided by the term gameplay. Gameplay is a term that constantly emerges in my discussions with both gamers and game designers. It is a quite ephemeral and at moments incoherent concept that is used to describe the experience of a player's visceral immersion in and interactive engagement with a particular game's environment. It is an aspect of computer gaming that resists or at least would seem to be excessive to representation or symbolising. The very ephemeral and rather vague ways in which it is used have made it tempting to reject any serious analysis of it as an incoherence which may well function to simply side-step or avoid criticism of games' very obvious problem with representations of gender. However, as a player of computer games I recognise the experience that gamers are attempting to describe with the term gameplay and find it difficult to reject it out of hand simply because my theoretical vocabulary as a cultural analyst has difficulties in accommodating it. Where is the problem -- with the cultural experience or the theoretical vocabulary? In many of my discussions with gamers the term gameplay functions as something of a shared horizon or assumed knowledge. If I ask what gameplay is or does I will often receive a response such as the following: "Gameplay is what makes a game fun. It is the fun factor". If I then query what elements or features in particular make a game fun the response will invariably be, "well good gameplay is what is important. Graphics and stuff can be good, but often are just eye-candy". The discussion will generally end with a comment such as "you've played [Game X], you know what I mean, it has great gameplay". This term seems to function as something of a marker for how the cultural experience of gameplay exceeds our symbolic vocabulary. It opens out onto the event status of playing. (But I think exchanges such as the above are also about the event of a research relation.) In email discussions Cameron Brown, a lead game designer employed by Auran (a Brisbane, Australia based game software company -- Auran and Activision co-developed the real-time strategy game Dark Reign) described gameplay in the following terms: I was made 'lead tester' for 'Radical Rex', a SNES [Super Nintendo Entertainment System] platformer.... It got to the point where I could finish the game (10 levels plus bonus 8 levels) in 27 minutes -- about 40 minutes if I held the controller upside down. I could literally play the first level with my eyes closed, using only muscle memory! Anyway, Mario Kart: sometimes, playing it, I lost all sense of everything except the game. My hands moved without conscious intervention on my part.... I believe the MK 'trance state' short circuits this delay not requiring the brain to be aware of something before the hands have responded." The term gameplay appears throughout gamers' discussions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on newsgroups (rec.games.video.nintendo) and fan WWW sites, for example Nintendojo. The Next-Generation review of Zelda describes a gaming experience "beyond the superficialities of graphics, sound, and controls (which are all excellent) ... that sucks the player into a mystical world that has never been seen or felt before". Eric Enrico Mattei, a reviewer on Nintendojo, asserts that the quality of gameplay in Zelda is such "that you are COMPLETELY IMMERSED in Zelda's world". Writing in anticipation of Zelda's release Mikey Veroni comments that "ease of control is important in Zelda 64 (not to mention any game) because only then can the player feel like Link is acting and responding exactly to the player's actions. Perfect gameplay is so simple yet terribly crucial at the same time". Miyamoto, the designer of Zelda, said in a recent interview that in creating game environments such as Zelda he is concerned with "how players feel when they are touching the controller, so that is the way I'm always making the video game. I'm always thinking of the player's feelings". These various ways of talking about and describing the experience of playing computer and video games are not exactly new or mysterious. They draw on well-established conventions and metaphors for understanding the human interface with technology or equipment in general. When I asked Cameron about his use of the phrase "muscle memory", for example, he responded that it came from a guitar player magazine and was used in the context of explaining exercises to teach your fingers how to play a scale. Other sources for this technological sublime relation include science fiction texts such as William Gibson's descriptions of the experience of jacking into the matrix of cyberspace in Neuromancer. Dan Fleming's careful distinction between the symbolic content of games and the experience of playing them would seem to apply to the above descriptions of gameplay. He asserts that playing a game like Nintendo's platform adventure Mario Brothers is an intriguing experience that involves "the replacement of the gameworld's thematics by its geometry, which is where the fully engaged action really is" (191). Fleming sums up by commenting that "at their best computer games simply operate elsewhere for much of the time" (193). Although I have reservations about the tendency to position gameplay and representation in an almost strict opposition the foregrounding of this elsewhere of playability is useful in that it suggests the status of computer gaming as an event rather than a text or content to be interpreted. In his recent essay, "The Being of Culture, Beyond Representation", Alec McHoul argues, against representationalist understandings of cultural objects, for an approach that takes into account the movements and dynamics of "event-ness or eventality" (2). This shift away from a representational framework towards what McHoul calls "eventalistic experiencing" is where I head in my engagement with gameplay. This spectral dynamic of computer gaming calls us to change our modes of engaging with research objects. The issues of control and controllers appear in many of the gamers' discussions of playing Zelda. Fleming refers to this experience: "the player feels the responsiveness of the controller, the forward momentum, the onset of a relaxed energy, a feeling of competence" (192). Entering into the world of the game is also a skill or competence; it involves the ability to effectively use the game control system or interface to navigate through the play environment. This game control would seem to function within the terms of a traditional controlling masculine subjectivity. It appears to be about enjoying a sense of ease, empowerment and control in a technologically mediated environment. Relations between the human and the technological are from the outset caught up in fantasies of control. But the event of playing, the elsewhere of gameplay, exceeds the limits of our stories about an autonomous self in control of and using technology. When we play games like Zelda we are being positioned in those regions of cultural experience that involve a transformation in the mode of our relation to technological equipment. Our assumptions regarding the relation and separation between the human and the technological -- and perhaps also the gender implications of these relations -- are increasingly transformed, subverted, and questioned. Computer gaming is at least in part about the enjoyment gamers derive from the blurring and confusion of the boundaries between the technological and the self: techno-enjoyment. This element of enjoyment exceeds both the symbolic and the corporeal. But it should not be understood as some kind of more real or immediate bodily experience posited outside of and in opposition to the representational. It invokes another materiality of the technological object that is other than a reduction to technics or the human. It is a spectral interspace: the relation between the human and nonhuman. This relation with technology is not simply or only at the level of representation, nor at the materiality of the technological object or the bodily experience and sensations of the gamer. Gaming opens onto this domain of materialised techno-enjoyment. And in this region of cultural experience it is no longer clearly decidable who or what is in control. This experience of gameplay radically undermines notions of equipmentality grounded in a controlling human subject. Cultural Studies academics -- and I include myself in this group -- should be cautious about rushing to reduce the experience of gameplay to a problem or issue of representation. This is not to argue that representational effects are not operative in the practices of computer gaming. It is to argue the careful consideration of other important effects and processes. References Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Gamecenter.com. "An Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto." 1998. 10 Dec. 1998 <http://www.gamecenter.com/News/Item/0,3,0-2305,00.html?st.gc.ttn.si.gn>. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Game cartridge. Nintendo. 1998. McHoul, Alec. "The Being of Culture, Beyond Representation." 1998. 15 Oct. 1998 <http://kali.murdoch.edu.au/~mchoul/being.php>. Mattei, Eric Enrico. "Review of Zelda 64." 1998. 12 Dec. 1998 <http://www.nintendojo.com/reviews/staff/zeldaem.htm>. Next Generation. "Review of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." 24 Nov. 1998. 13 Dec. 1998 <http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/reviews/437.php>. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1995. Veroni, Mikey. "Legendary." 1998. 10 Dec. 1998 <http://www.nintendojo.com/specials/zelda2/index.htm>. Zelda-related WWW sites -- Nintendojo -- Zelda Central -- Zelda 64 Central -- Zelda 64 Headquarters -- Zelda Headquarters -- Zelda's Shrine -- Hyrule: The Land of Zelda Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Banks. "Controlling Gameplay." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php>. Chicago style: John Banks, "Controlling Gameplay," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Banks. (1998) Controlling gameplay. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

IntroductionCulinary education in Ireland has long been influenced by culinary education being delivered in catering colleges in the United Kingdom (UK). Institutionalised culinary education started in Britain through the sponsorship of guild conglomerates (Lawson and Silver). The City & Guilds of London Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education opened its central institution in 1884. Culinary education in Ireland began in Kevin Street Technical School in the late 1880s. This consisted of evening courses in plain cookery. Dublin’s leading chefs and waiters of the time participated in developing courses in French culinary classics and these courses ran in Parnell Square Vocational School from 1926 (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). St Mary’s College of Domestic Science was purpose built and opened in 1941 in Cathal Brugha Street. This was renamed the Dublin College of Catering in the 1950s. The Council for Education, Recruitment and Training for the Hotel Industry (CERT) was set up in 1963 and ran cookery courses using the City & Guilds of London examinations as its benchmark. In 1982, when the National Craft Curriculum Certification Board (NCCCB) was established, CERT began carrying out their own examinations. This allowed Irish catering education to set its own standards, establish its own criteria and award its own certificates, roles which were previously carried out by City & Guilds of London (Corr). CERT awarded its first certificates in professional cookery in 1989. The training role of CERT was taken over by Fáilte Ireland, the State tourism board, in 2003. Changing Trends in Cookery and Culinary Textbooks at DIT The Dublin College of Catering which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) is the flagship of catering education in Ireland (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The first DIT culinary award, was introduced in 1984 Certificate in Diet Cookery, later renamed Higher Certificate in Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts. On the 19th of July 1992 the Dublin Institute of Technology Act was enacted into law. This Act enabled DIT to provide vocational and technical education and training for the economic, technological, scientific, commercial, industrial, social and cultural development of the State (Ireland 1992). In 1998, DIT was granted degree awarding powers by the Irish state, enabling it to make major awards at Higher Certificate, Ordinary Bachelor Degree, Honors Bachelor Degree, Masters and PhD levels (Levels six to ten in the National Framework of Qualifications), as well as a range of minor, special purpose and supplemental awards (National NQAI). It was not until 1999, when a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education in Ireland (Duff, The Story), that a more diverse range of textbooks was recommended based on a new liberal/vocational educational philosophy. DITs School of Culinary Arts currently offers: Higher Certificates Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts; Higher Certificate in Culinary Arts (Professional Culinary Practice); BSc (Ord) in Baking and Pastry Arts Management; BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts; BSc (Hons) Bar Management and Entrepreneurship; BSc (Hons) in Culinary Entrepreneurship; and, MSc in Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development. From 1942 to 1970, haute cuisine, or classical French cuisine was the most influential cooking trend in Irish cuisine and this is reflected in the culinary textbooks of that era. Haute cuisine has been influenced by many influential writers/chefs such as Francois La Varenne, Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Ferand Point, Paul Bocuse, Anton Mosiman, Albert and Michel Roux to name but a few. The period from 1947 to 1974 can be viewed as a “golden age” of haute cuisine in Ireland, as more award-winning world-class restaurants traded in Dublin during this period than at any other time in history (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). Hotels and restaurants were run in the Escoffier partie system style which is a system of hierarchy among kitchen staff and areas of the kitchens specialising in cooking particular parts of the menu i.e sauces (saucier), fish (poissonnier), larder (garde manger), vegetable (legumier) and pastry (patissier). In the late 1960s, Escoffier-styled restaurants were considered overstaffed and were no longer financially viable. Restaurants began to be run by chef-proprietors, using plate rather than silver service. Nouvelle cuisine began in the 1970s and this became a modern form of haute cuisine (Gillespie). The rise in chef-proprietor run restaurants in Ireland reflected the same characteristics of the nouvelle cuisine movement. Culinary textbooks such as Practical Professional Cookery, La Technique, The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking, The Art of the Garde Mange and Patisserie interpreted nouvelle cuisine techniques and plated dishes. In 1977, the DIT began delivering courses in City & Guilds Advanced Kitchen & Larder 706/3 and Pastry 706/3, the only college in Ireland to do so at the time. Many graduates from these courses became the future Irish culinary lecturers, chef-proprietors, and culinary leaders. The next two decades saw a rise in fusion cooking, nouvelle cuisine, and a return to French classical cooking. Numerous Irish chefs were returning to Ireland having worked with Michelin starred chefs and opening new restaurants in the vein of classical French cooking, such as Kevin Thornton (Wine Epergne & Thorntons). These chefs were, in turn, influencing culinary training in DIT with a return to classical French cooking. New Classical French culinary textbooks such as New Classical Cuisine, The Modern Patisserie, The French Professional Pastry Series and Advanced Practical Cookery were being used in DIT In the last 15 years, science in cooking has become the current trend in culinary education in DIT. This is acknowledged by the increased number of culinary science textbooks and modules in molecular gastronomy offered in DIT. This also coincided with the launch of the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts in DIT moving culinary education from a technical to a liberal education. Books such as The Science of Cooking, On Food and Cooking, The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy now appear on recommended textbooks for culinary students.For the purpose of this article, practical classes held at DIT will be broken down as follows: hot kitchen class, larder classes, and pastry classes. These classes had recommended textbooks for each area. These can be broken down into three sections: hot kitche, larder, and pastry. This table identifies that the textbooks used in culinary education at DIT reflected the trends in cookery at the time they were being used. Hot Kitchen Larder Pastry Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. The International Confectioner. 1968. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. 1914. The Larder Chef, Classical Food Preparation and Presentation. 1969. Patisserie. 1971. All in the Cooking, Books 1&2. 1943 The Art of the Garde Manger. 1973. The Modern Patissier. 1986 Larousse Gastronomique. 1961. New Classic Cuisine. 1989. Professional French Pastry Series. 1987. Practical Cookery. 1962. The Curious Cook. 1990. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. 1991. Practical Professional Cookery. 1972. On Food and Cooking. The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991 La Technique. 1976. Advanced Practical Cookery. 1995. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. 1994. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. 1979. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Culinary Artistry. Dornenburg, 1996. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach. 1985. Garde Manger, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. 2004. Grande Finales: The Art of the Plated Dessert. 1997. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Fat Duck Cookbook. 2009. Modern Gastronomy. 2010. Tab.1. DIT Culinary Textbooks.1942–1960 During the first half of the 20th century, senior staff working in Dublin hotels, restaurants and clubs were predominately foreign born and trained. The two decades following World War II could be viewed as the “golden age” of haute cuisine in Dublin as many award-wining restaurants traded in the city at this time (Mac Con Iomaire “The Emergence”). Culinary education in DIT in 1942 saw the use of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire as the defining textbook (Bowe). This was first published in 1903 and translated into English in 1907. In 1979 Cracknell and Kaufmann published a more comprehensive and update edited version under the title The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Escoffier for use in culinary colleges. This demonstrated that Escoffier’s work had withstood the test of the decades and was still relevant. Le Repertoire de La Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, a student of Escoffier, presented the fundamentals of French classical cookery. Le Repertoire was inspired by the work of Escoffier and contains thousands of classical recipes presented in a brief format that can be clearly understood by chefs and cooks. Le Repertoire remains an important part of any DIT culinary student’s textbook list. All in the Cooking by Josephine Marnell, Nora Breathnach, Ann Mairtin and Mor Murnaghan (1946) was one of the first cookbooks to be published in Ireland (Cashmann). This book was a domestic science cooking book written by lecturers in the Cathal Brugha Street College. There is a combination of classical French recipes and Irish recipes throughout the book. 1960s It was not until the 1960s that reference book Larousse Gastronomique and new textbooks such as Practical Cookery, The Larder Chef and International Confectionary made their way into DIT culinary education. These books still focused on classical French cooking but used lighter sauces and reflected more modern cooking equipment and techniques. Also, this period was the first time that specific books for larder and pastry work were introduced into the DIT culinary education system (Bowe). Larousse Gastronomique, which used Le Guide Culinaire as a basis (James), was first published in 1938 and translated into English in 1961. Practical Cookery, which is still used in DIT culinary education, is now in its 12th edition. Each edition has built on the previous, however, there is now criticism that some of the content is dated (Richards). Practical Cookery has established itself as a key textbook in culinary education both in Ireland and England. Practical Cookery recipes were laid out in easy to follow steps and food commodities were discussed briefly. The Larder Chef was first published in 1969 and is currently in its 4th edition. This book focuses on classical French larder techniques, butchery and fishmongery but recognises current trends and fashions in food presentation. The International Confectioner is no longer in print but is still used as a reference for basic recipes in pastry classes (Campbell). The Modern Patissier demonstrated more updated techniques and methods than were used in The International Confectioner. The Modern Patissier is still used as a reference book in DIT. 1970s The 1970s saw the decline in haute cuisine in Ireland, as it was in the process of being replaced by nouvelle cuisine. Irish chefs were being influenced by the works of chefs such as Paul Boucuse, Roger Verge, Michel Guerard, Raymond Olivier, Jean & Pierre Troisgros, Alain Senderens, Jacques Maniere, Jean Delaveine and Michel Guerard who advanced the uncomplicated natural presentation in food. Henri Gault claims that it was his manifesto published in October 1973 in Gault-Millau magazine which unleashed the movement called La Nouvelle Cuisine Française (Gault). In nouvelle cuisine, dishes in Carème and Escoffier’s style were rejected as over-rich and complicated. The principles underpinning this new movement focused on the freshness of ingredients, and lightness and harmony in all components and accompaniments, as well as basic and simple cooking methods and types of presentation. This was not, however, a complete overthrowing of the past, but a moving forward in the long-term process of cuisine development, utilising the very best from each evolution (Cousins). Books such as Practical Professional Cookery, The Art of the Garde Manger and Patisserie reflected this new lighter approach to cookery. Patisserie was first published in 1971, is now in its second edition, and continues to be used in DIT culinary education. This book became an essential textbook in pastrywork, and covers the entire syllabus of City & Guilds and CERT (now Fáilte Ireland). Patisserie covered all basic pastry recipes and techniques, while the second edition (in 1993) included new modern recipes, modern pastry equipment, commodities, and food hygiene regulations reflecting the changing catering environment. The Art of the Garde Manger is an American book highlighting the artistry, creativity, and cooking sensitivity need to be a successful Garde Manger (the larder chef who prepares cold preparation in a partie system kitchen). It reflected the dynamic changes occurring in the culinary world but recognised the importance of understanding basic French culinary principles. It is no longer used in DIT culinary education. La Technique is a guide to classical French preparation (Escoffier’s methods and techniques) using detailed pictures and notes. This book remains a very useful guide and reference for culinary students. Practical Professional Cookery also became an important textbook as it was written with the student and chef/lecturer in mind, as it provides a wider range of recipes and detailed information to assist in understanding the tasks at hand. It is based on classical French cooking and compliments Practical Cookery as a textbook, however, its recipes are for ten portions as opposed to four portions in Practical Cookery. Again this book was written with the City & Guilds examinations in mind. 1980s During the mid-1980s, many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated. They returned in the late-1980s and early-1990s having gained vast experience of nouvelle and fusion cuisine in London, Paris, New York, California and elsewhere (Mac Con Iomaire, “The Changing”). These energetic, well-trained professionals began opening chef-proprietor restaurants around Dublin, providing invaluable training and positions for up-and-coming young chefs, waiters and culinary college graduates. The 1980s saw a return to French classical cookery textbook such as Professional Cookery: The Process Approach, New Classic Cuisine and the Professional French Pastry series, because educators saw the need for students to learn the basics of French cookery. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach was written by Daniel Stevenson who was, at the time, a senior lecturer in Food and Beverage Operations at Oxford Polytechnic in England. Again, this book was written for students with an emphasis on the cookery techniques and the practices of professional cookery. The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking by Escoffier continued to be used. This book is used by cooks and chefs as a reference for ingredients in dishes rather than a recipe book, as it does not go into detail in the methods as it is assumed the cook/chef would have the required experience to know the method of production. Le Guide Culinaire was only used on advanced City & Guilds courses in DIT during this decade (Bowe). New Classic Cuisine by the classically French trained chefs, Albert and Michel Roux (Gayot), is a classical French cuisine cookbook used as a reference by DIT culinary educators at the time because of the influence the Roux brothers were having over the English fine dining scene. The Professional French Pastry Series is a range of four volumes of pastry books: Vol. 1 Doughs, Batters and Meringues; Vol. 2 Creams, Confections and Finished Desserts; Vol. 3 Petit Four, Chocolate, Frozen Desserts and Sugar Work; and Vol. 4 Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, Modern Desserts. These books about classical French pastry making were used on the advanced pastry courses at DIT as learners needed a basic knowledge of pastry making to use them. 1990s Ireland in the late 1990s became a very prosperous and thriving European nation; the phenomena that became known as the “celtic tiger” was in full swing (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The Irish dining public were being treated to a resurgence of traditional Irish cuisine using fresh wholesome food (Hughes). The Irish population was considered more well-educated and well travelled than previous generations and culinary students were now becoming interested in the science of cooking. In 1996, the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts program at DIT was first mooted (Hegarty). Finally, in 1999, a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education underpinned by a new liberal/vocational philosophy in education (Duff). Teaching culinary arts in the past had been through a vocational education focus whereby students were taught skills for industry which were narrow, restrictive, and constraining, without the necessary knowledge to articulate the acquired skill. The reading list for culinary students reflected this new liberal education in culinary arts as Harold McGee’s books The Curious Cook and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explored and explained the science of cooking. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen proposed that “science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world” (Vega 373). Advanced Practical Cookery was written for City & Guilds students. In DIT this book was used by advanced culinary students sitting Fáilte Ireland examinations, and the second year of the new BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts. Culinary Artistry encouraged chefs to explore the creative process of culinary composition as it explored the intersection of food, imagination, and taste (Dornenburg). This book encouraged chefs to develop their own style of cuisine using fresh seasonal ingredients, and was used for advanced students but is no longer a set text. Chefs were being encouraged to show their artistic traits, and none more so than pastry chefs. Grande Finale: The Art of Plated Desserts encouraged advanced students to identify different “schools” of pastry in relation to the world of art and design. The concept of the recipes used in this book were built on the original spectacular pieces montées created by Antoine Carême. 2000–2013 After nouvelle cuisine, recent developments have included interest in various fusion cuisines, such as Asia-Pacific, and in molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomists strive to find perfect recipes using scientific methods of investigation (Blanck). Hervè This experimentation with recipes and his introduction to Nicholos Kurti led them to create a food discipline they called “molecular gastronomy”. In 1998, a number of creative chefs began experimenting with the incorporation of ingredients and techniques normally used in mass food production in order to arrive at previously unattainable culinary creations. This “new cooking” (Vega 373) required a knowledge of chemical reactions and physico-chemical phenomena in relation to food, as well as specialist tools, which were created by these early explorers. It has been suggested that molecular gastronomy is “science-based cooking” (Vega 375) and that this concept refers to conscious application of the principles and tools from food science and other disciplines for the development of new dishes particularly in the context of classical cuisine (Vega). The Science of Cooking assists students in understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking. This book takes traditional French techniques and recipes and refutes some of the claims and methods used in traditional recipes. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen is used for the advanced larder modules at DIT. This book builds on basic skills in the Larder Chef book. Molecular gastronomy as a subject area was developed in 2009 in DIT, the first of its kind in Ireland. The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy underpin the theoretical aspects of the module. This module is taught to 4th year BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts students who already have three years experience in culinary education and the culinary industry, and also to MSc Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development students. Conclusion Escoffier, the master of French classical cuisine, still influences culinary textbooks to this day. His basic approach to cooking is considered essential to teaching culinary students, allowing them to embrace the core skills and competencies required to work in the professional environment. Teaching of culinary arts at DIT has moved vocational education to a more liberal basis, and it is imperative that the chosen textbooks reflect this development. This liberal education gives the students a broader understanding of cooking, hospitality management, food science, gastronomy, health and safety, oenology, and food product development. To date there is no practical culinary textbook written specifically for Irish culinary education, particularly within this new liberal/vocational paradigm. There is clearly a need for a new textbook which combines the best of Escoffier’s classical French techniques with the more modern molecular gastronomy techniques popularised by Ferran Adria. References Adria, Ferran. Modern Gastronomy A to Z: A Scientific and Gastronomic Lexicon. London: CRC P, 2010. Barker, William. The Modern Patissier. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Barham, Peter. The Science of Cooking. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2000. Bilheux, Roland, Alain Escoffier, Daniel Herve, and Jean-Maire Pouradier. Special and Decorative Breads. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987. Blanck, J. "Molecular Gastronomy: Overview of a Controversial Food Science Discipline." Journal of Agricultural and Food Information 8.3 (2007): 77-85. Blumenthal, Heston. The Fat Duck Cookbook. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Bode, Willi, and M.J. Leto. The Larder Chef. Oxford: Butter-Heinemann, 1969. Bowe, James. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin. 7 Apr. 2013. Boyle, Tish, and Timothy Moriarty. Grand Finales, The Art of the Plated Dessert. New York: John Wiley, 1997. Campbell, Anthony. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin, 10 Apr. 2013. Cashman, Dorothy. "An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks." Unpublished M.Sc Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Ceserani, Victor, Ronald Kinton, and David Foskett. Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1962. Ceserani, Victor, and David Foskett. Advanced Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1995. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma, 1987. Cousins, John, Kevin Gorman, and Marc Stierand. "Molecular Gastronomy: Cuisine Innovation or Modern Day Alchemy?" International Journal of Hospitality Management 22.3 (2009): 399–415. Cracknell, Harry Louis, and Ronald Kaufmann. Practical Professional Cookery. London: MacMillan, 1972. Cracknell, Harry Louis, and Ronald Kaufmann. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. New York: John Wiley, 1979. Dornenburg, Andrew, and Karen Page. Culinary Artistry. New York: John Wiley, 1996. Duff, Tom, Joseph Hegarty, and Matt Hussey. The Story of the Dublin Institute of Technology. Dublin: Blackhall, 2000. Escoffier, Auguste. Le Guide Culinaire. France: Flammarion, 1921. Escoffier, Auguste. The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. Ed. Crachnell, Harry, and Ronald Kaufmann. New York: John Wiley, 1986. Gault, Henri. 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