Journal articles on the topic 'Australian fiction – 20th century – History and criticism'

The author of the article tried to trace the formation of the idea about the connection of the works of Vladimir Nabokov with Nikolai Gogol's tradition based on the material of the Russian émigréecritics’ works of and literary critics of the 20th—21st centuries. This process is considered as a progressive one, largely specified by the development of researching idea. The émigréecriticism saw the reason for the similarity these writers’ works in their similar aesthetics based on the relationship of the perception of the world and the human. In turn, literary studies of the late 20th century presented a new way of comparison, where Nabokov's prose is considered to be a complicated fiction on the whole, in which there is not only Nikolai Gogol's subtext, but also allusions to the other writers’ works, called "polygenetics". The author of the article offers a generalisation of methodological nature, indicating different types of literary links.

AbstractThe paper first traces the history and elaboration of the tertiary discipline English Literature through the 19th and 20th centuries to the present day, with special focus on the axiology, the values, given to the discipline and with a brief account of literary criticism and literary theory. It then refers to the work on registerial cartography in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and explores the register of the contemporary discipline in first-order field of activity and second-order field of experience, with examples from the language of webpages and exam papers of Australian universities. It continues with a brief overview of the author’s own work using SFL in the study ofthe poeticandthe narrativein English poetry and prose fiction of different historical periods and concludes with a caveat on the central disciplinary process, that of interpretation.

The subject of the paper is prochronism, e.g. the teaching which says that the world was created with the appearance of old age. It is shown that the sources of prochronism could be traced to the medieval doctrine of double truth and philosophy of Descartes, who suggested that cosmological theories on the origin of the Universe are purely conditional, while in fact the world was instantly created complete and mature. The idea of apparent, but non-existent past gained much credence during the first half of the 19th century, when paleontological and geological discoveries raised a question on how to square the age of the Earth and the life on it with the six days of Genesis. The hypothesis of prochronism was most fully developed in «Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot» (1857), the book by the English naturalist P. Gosse. During the Darwinian time the interest in this doctrine was shown not only by Christian thinkers, but also by secular philosophers and science fiction writers. Elements of prochronism were also present in the writings of Scriptural geologists in the 19th century and their successors, the young earth creationists in the 20th century. The main objections against prochronism are critically considered. According to the most popular of them, if God had made the world appear older that it is, He thus would have deceived people. But from the point of view of prochronism, the creation of traces of never existed past was necessitated by the logic of causality, which required God to actualize all the consequences of historical epochs skipped by Him. The link between prochronism and the problem of pre-human sufferings is outlined. The conclusion is made that this doctrine, despite being counter-intuitive and rather notorious, is intellectually consistent and immune to the criticism.

The article, which is historical and scientific by character, presents the current humanitarian issues of professional epistolary communication of an outstanding Russian literary critic, Doctor of Philology, Professor B. F. Egorov (1926–2020) with fellow literary critics. The main directions of scientist’s active and versatile practices are considered on the grounds of his published letters and some letters to him in 1998–2020. The article focuses on professional communication and interaction between Ukrainian and Russian literary critics in the complex modern socio-historical and political conditions of interstate relations. The letters are published for the first time and are accompanied by the necessary historical and cultural comments and bibliographic notes. The material contained in them is important not only for the history of Russian and East Slavic literary criticism of the 20th century, but also it is relevant in terms of the prospects of academic studies of literature and the development of productive communication between scholars studying fiction in order to perform the main cultural function of literary studies.

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

The relevance of the research is determined by the interest of modern literary criticism in the imagological aspects and the problem of developing a research strategy in relation to this kind of texts. The novelty of the work is defined by the genre approach to the study of the image of perception of Japan and the Japanese in Russian pre-revolutionary literature dedicated to the events of the Russian-Japanese war, the introduction of previously unknown texts into scientific circulation, a comparative analysis of narrative strategies that determine the genre specificity of each text. The purpose of the work is to explicate the genre originality of works on the RussianJapanese war, which determines the perspective of the pre-revolutionary artistic reception of the image of perception of Japan and the Japanese in Russia. The methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach that underpins the imagological paradigm of research. The authors rely on Russian and Chinese works on the history of Japan, Russian-Japanese relations, ethnography of Japan, ethnopsychology, religious studies, on the broad context of imagological research; apply historical-literary, comparative-historical, immanent analysis methods. The complex research is based on modern works concerning the problems of genre studies. The article traces the path of transformation of perceptions of Japan and the Japanese in Russian literature since the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of 20th century which is determined by the genre task of the works: from the first travelogues to the jingoistic notes in periodicals and further to “pacifist” fiction and post-war artistic experiences – the spy and detective text by A. I. Kuprin, the military diaries by V. V. Veresaev, a children’s ethnographic story by I. I. Mitropolsky. We conclude that the tragic and inglorious experience of the Russian-Japanese war pushed the horizons of not only the scientific comprehension of Japan and the Japanese by Russian scientists but also giving development to various genres of Russian literature opened the artistic possibilities of new ethnocultural and ethnopsychological experiences of self-knowledge of Russianness and Russians.

Gardens on Fire. Fahrenheit 451 Revisited Resumen: En este trabajo proponemos una reconsideración de una de las historias distópicas más populares y discutidas desde mediados del siglo XX, Fahrenheit 451, del escritor y ensayista estadounidense Ray Bradbury. Aunque esta historia ha atraído desde su publicación la atención del pensamiento político y social, creemos que ha sido ampliamente simplificada. A diferencia de ciertos críticos, no creemos que la fábula política de Bradbury fomente, como muchas otras distopías, una falta de perspectiva histórica o una insuficiente comprensión del presente. Si la visión política y cultural de Bradbury es criticable no lo es por su evasión de la historia, sino más bien por una visión histórica demasiado optimista. También queremos mostrar que Bradbury no fue un humanista enemigo de la cultura de masas, ni de la tecnología. El examen en profundidad de su novela y de numeroso material complementario (otros escritos, entrevistas y documentos) permitirá explicar porqué su historia sobre el sombrío futuro de la sociedad industrial también contenía elementos para imaginar un futuro alternativo. Gracias a ese examen, finalmente, concluiremos que en el caso de Bradbury la ciencia-ficción no solo sirve para imaginar un futuro indeseable, sino, sobre todo, para mantener vivas y transformar tradiciones con las que fabricar un futuro deseable. Abstract: In this paper we propose a reconsideration of one of the most popular and discussed dystopian stories since the mid-20th century, Fahrenheit 451, by the American writer and essayist Ray Bradbury. Although this novel attracted the attention of political and social thought since its publication, we think that it has been largely simplified. Unlike some critics, we do not consider that Bradbury's political fable, like many other dystopias, fosters a lack of historical perspective or an insufficient understanding of the present. If Bradbury's political and cultural vision is open to criticism, it is not only for his evasion of history, but rather for an overly optimistic historical vision. We also make clear that Bradbury was not a humanist enemy of mass culture and technology. A close reading of his novel and numerous supplementary material (other writings, interviews and documents) make us to elucidate why his story about the bleak future of industrial society also contains elements to envisage an alternative future. Thanks to this examination we will conclude that, in the case of Bradbury, science-fiction does not serve just to foretell an undesirable future, but it significantly helps to keep alive and to transform traditions with which to manufacture a desirable future. Palabras clave: distopía, tecnologías, libros, memoria, Bradbury. Keywords: dystopia, technologies, books, memory, Bradbury.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

While mermaids have been found all around the world, their literary and cultural representations are traditionally associated with Europe. Recently attention has been paid to the particular resonance of mer-folk narratives in specifically Australian contexts. Hayward, Floyd, Snell, Organ and Callaway have drawn attention to examples of mer-worlds that directly intersect with and comment on Australian environments. Beginning in the late 19th Century, predominantly women writers relocate mermen and mermaids to explore relationships between land and sea, city and bush that have local resonance for young readers. These stories are often accompanied by rich illustrations designed to appeal to young imaginations. This note comments on three writers whose work relates mer-cultures to Australia: J.M Whitfield, Pixie O’Harris and Harriet Stephens, along with their illustrators, G.W Lambert, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and O’Harris herself.

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.

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 Fagin 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, Hitchcock, 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 circumstances, 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 Amusements 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 Hitchcock, 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.

Australian suburbia, historically and culturally, has been viewed as a feminised domain, associated with the domestic and family, routine and order. Where “the city is coded as a masculine and disorderly space… suburbia, as a realm of domesticity and the family, is coded as a feminine and disciplinary space” (Wilson 46). This article argues how the treatment of suburbia in fiction as “feminine” has impacted not only on the representation and development of the character of the “suburban female”, but also on the shape and form of her narrative journeys. Suburbia’s subordination as domestic and everyday, a restrictive realm of housework and child rearing, refers to the anti-suburban critique and establishes the dichotomy of suburbia/feminine/domesticity in contrast to bush or city/masculine/freedom as first observed by Marilyn Lake in her analysis of 1890s Australia. Despite the fact that suburbia necessarily contains the “masculine” as well as the “feminine”, the “feminine” dominates to such an extent that positive masculine traits are threatened there. In social commentary and also literature, the former is viewed negatively as a state from which to escape. As Tim Rowse suggests, “women, domesticity = spiritual starvation. (Men, wide open spaces, achievement = heroism of the Australian spirit)” (208). In twentieth-century Australian fiction, this is especially the case for male characters, the preservation of whose masculinity often depends on a flight from the suburbs to elsewhere—the bush, the city, or overseas. In Patrick White’s The Tree Of Man (1955), for example, During identifies the recurrent male character of the “tear-away” who “flee(s) domesticity and family life” (96). Novelist George Johnston also establishes a satirical depiction of suburbia as both suffocatingly feminine and as a place to escape at any cost. For example, in My Brother Jack (1964), David Meredith “craves escape from the ‘shabby suburban squalor’ into which he was born” (Gerster 566). Suburbia functions as a departure point for the male protagonist who must discard any remnants of femininity, imposed on him by his suburban childhood, before embarking upon narratives of adventure and maturation as far away from the suburbs as possible. Thus, flight becomes essential to the development of male protagonist and proliferates as a narrative trajectory in Australian fiction. Andrew McCann suggests that its prevalence establishes a fictional “struggle with and escape from the suburb as a condition of something like a fully developed personality” (Decomposing 56-57). In this case, any literary attempt to transform the “suburban female”, a character inscribed by her gender and her locale, without recourse to flight appears futile. However, McCann’s assertion rests on a literary tradition of male flight from suburbia, not female. A narrative of female flight is a relatively recent phenomenon, influenced by the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. For most of the twentieth century, the suburban female typically remained in suburbia, a figure of neglect, satire, and exploitation. A reading of twentieth-century Australian fiction until the 1970s implies that flight from suburbia was not a plausible option for the average “suburban female”. Rather, it is the exceptional heroine, such as Teresa in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945), who is brave, ambitious, or foolish enough to leave, and when she does there were often negative consequences. For most however, suburbia was a setting where she belonged despite its negative attributes. These attributes of conformity and boredom, repetition, and philistinism, as presented by proponents of anti-suburbanism, are mainly depicted as problematic to male characters, not female. Excluded from narratives of flight, for most of the twentieth-century the suburban female typically remained in suburbia, a figure of neglect, satire, and even exploitation, her stories mostly untold. The character of the suburban female emerges out of the suburban/feminine/domestic dichotomy as a recurrent, albeit negative, character in Australian fiction. As Rowse states, the negative image of suburbia is transferred to an equally negative image of women (208). At best, the suburban female is a figure of mild satire; at worst, a menacing threat to masculine values. Male writers George Johnston, Patrick White and, later, David Ireland, portrayed the suburban female as a negative figure, or at least an object of satire, in the life of a male protagonist attempting to escape suburbia and all it stood for. In his satirical novels and plays, for example, Patrick White makes “the unspoken assumption… that suburbia is an essentially female domain” (Gerster 567), exemplifying narrow female stereotypes who “are dumb and age badly, ending up in mindless, usually dissatisfied, maternity and domesticity” (During 95). Feminist Anne Summers condemns White for his portrayal of women which she interprets as a “means of evading having to cope with women as unique and diverse individuals, reducing them instead to a sexist conglomerate”, and for his use of women to “represent suburban stultification” (88). Typically “wife” or “mother”, the suburban female is often used as a convenient device of oppositional resistance to a male lead, while being denied her own voice or story. In Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), for example, protagonist David Meredith contrasts “the subdued vigour of fulfillment tempered by a powerful and deeply-lodged serenity” (215) of motherhood displayed by Jack’s wife Shelia with the “smart and mannish” (213) Helen, but nothing deeper is revealed about the inner lives of these female characters. Feminist scholars identify a failure to depict the suburban female as more than a useful stereotype, partially attributing the cause of this failure to a surfeit of patriarchal stories featuring adventuresome male heroes and set in the outback or on foreign battlefields. Summers states how “more written words have been devoted to creating, and then analysing and extolling… [the] Australian male than to any other single facet of Australian life” (82-83). Where she is more active, the suburban female is a malignant force, threatening to undermine masculine goals of self-realisation or achievement, or at her worst, to wholly emasculate the male protagonist such that he is incapable of escape. Even here the motivations behind her actions are not revealed and she appears two-dimensional, viewed only in relation to her destructive effect on the weakened male protagonist. In her criticism of David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976), Joan Kirkby observes how “the suburbs are populated with real women who are represented in the text as angry mothers and wives or simply as the embodiment of voraciously feral sexuality” (5). In those few instances where the suburban female features as more than an accessory to the male narrative, she lacks the courage and inner strength to embark upon her own journey out of suburbia. Instead, she is depicted as a victim, misunderstood and miserable, entrapped by the suburban milieu to which she is meant to belong but, for some unexplored reason, does not. The inference is that this particular suburban female is atypical, potentially flawed in her inability to find contentment within a region strongly designated her own. The unhappy suburban female is therefore tragic, or at least pitiable, languishing in a suburban environment that she loathes, often satirised for her futile resistance to the status quo. Rarely is she permitted the masculine recourse of flight. In those exceptional instances where she does leave, however, she is unlikely to find what she is looking for. A subsequent return to the place of childhood, most often situated in suburbia, is a recurrent narrative in many stories of Australian female protagonist, but less so the male protagonist. Although this mistreatment of the suburban female is most prevalent in fiction by male writers, female writers were also criticised for failing to give a true and authentic voice to her character, regardless of the broader question of whether writers should be truthful in their characterisations. For example, Summers criticises Henry Handel Richardson as “responsible for, if not creating, then at least providing a powerful reinforcement to the idea that women as wives are impediments to male self-realisation” with characters who “reappear, with the monotonous regularity of the weekly wash, as stereotyped and passive suburban housewives” (87-88). All this changed, however, with the arrival of second wave feminism leading to a proliferation of stories of female exodus from the suburbs. A considered portrait of the life of the suburban female in suburbia was neglected in favour of a narrative journey; a trend attributable in part to a feminist polemic that granted her freedom, adventure, and a story so long as she did not dare choose to stay. During the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, women were urged by leading figures such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer to abandon ascribed roles of housewife and mother, led typically in the suburbs, in pursuit of new freedoms and adventures. As Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd note, “in exhorting women to ‘leave home’ and find their fulfillment in the world of work, early second wave feminists provided a life story through which women could understand themselves as modern individuals” (154) and it is this “life story” which recurs in women’s fiction of the time. Women writers, many of whom identified as feminist, mirrored these trajectories of flight from suburbia in their novels, transplanting the suburban female from her suburban setting to embark upon “new” narratives of self-discovery. The impact of second wave feminism upon the literary output of Australian women writers during the 1970s and 1980s has been firmly established by feminist scholars Johnson, Lloyd, Lake, and Susan Sheridan, who were also active participants in the movement. Sheridan argues that there has been a strong “relationship of women’s cultural production to feminist ideas and politics” (Faultlines xi) and Johnson identifies a “history of feminism as an awakening” at the heart of these “life stories” (11). Citing Mary Morris, feminist Janet Woolf remarks flight as a means by which a feminine history of stagnation is remedied: “from Penelope to the present, women have waited… If we grow weary of waiting, we can go on a journey” (xxii). The appeal of these narratives may lie in attempts by their female protagonists to find new ways of being outside the traditional limits of a domestic, commonly suburban, existence. Flight, or movement, features as a recurrent narrative mode by which these alternative realities are configured, either by mimicking or subverting traditional narrative forms. Indeed, selection of the appropriate narrative form for these emancipatory journeys differed between writers and became the subject of vigorous, feminist and literary debate. For some feminists, the linear narrative was the only true path to freedom for the female protagonist. Following the work of Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Elaine Showalter, Joy Hooton observes how some feminist critics privileged “the integrated ego and the linear destiny, regarding women’s difference in self-realization as a failure or deprivation” (90). Women writers such as Barbara Hanrahan adopted the traditional linear trajectory, previously reserved for the male protagonist as bushman or soldier, explorer or drifter, to liberate the “suburban female”. These stories feature the female protagonist trading a stultifying life in the suburbs for the city, overseas or, less typically, the outback. During these geographical journeys, she is transformed from her narrow suburban self to a more actualised, worldly self in the mode of a traditional, linear Bildungsroman. For example, Hanrahan’s semi-autobiographical debut The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973) is a story of escape from oppressive suburbia, “concentrating on that favourite Australian theme, the voyage overseas” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 63). Similarly, Sea-green (1974) features a “rejection of domestic drabness in favour of experience in London” (Goodwin 252) and Kewpie Doll (1984) is another narrative of flight from the suburbs, this time via pursuit of “an artistic life” (253). In these and other novels, the act of relocation to a specific destination is necessary to transformation, with the inference that the protagonist could not have become what she is at the end of the story without first leaving the suburbs. However, use of this linear narrative, which is also coincidentally anti-suburban, was criticised by Summers (86) for being “masculinist”. To be truly free, she argued, the female protagonist needed to forge her own unique paths to liberation, rather than relying on established masculine lines. Evidence of a “new” non-linear narrative in novels by women writers was interpreted by feminist and literary scholars Gillian Whitlock, Margaret Henderson, Ann Oakley, Sheridan, Johnson, and Summers, as an attempt to capture the female experience more convincingly than the linear form that had been used to recount stories of the journeying male as far back as Homer. Typifying the link between the second wave feminism and fiction, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip features Nora’s nomadic, non-linear “flights” back and forth across Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Nora’s promiscuity belies her addiction to romantic love that compromises her, even as she struggles to become independent and free. In this way, Nora’s quest for freedom­—fragmented, cyclical, repetitive, impeded by men— mirrors Garner’s “attempt to capture certain areas of female experience” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 55), not accessible via a linear narrative. Later, in Honour and Other People’s Children (1980) and The Children’s Bach (1984), the protagonists’ struggles to achieve self-actualisation within a more domesticated, family setting perhaps cast doubt on the efficacy of the feminist call to abandon family, motherhood, and all things domestic in preference for the masculinist tradition of emancipatory flight. Pam Gilbert, for instance, reads The Children’s Bach as “an extremely perceptive analysis of a woman caught within spheres of domesticity, nurturing, loneliness, and sexuality” (18) via the character of “protected suburban mum, Athena” (19). The complexity of this characterisation of a suburban female belies the anti-suburban critique by not resorting to satire or stereotype, but by engaging deeply with a woman’s life inside suburbia. It also allows that flight from suburbia is not always possible, or even desired. Also seeming to contradict the plausibility of linear flight, Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), features (another) Nora returning to her childhood Brisbane after a lifetime of flight; first from her suburban upbringing and then from a repressive marriage to the relative freedoms of London. The poignancy of the novel, set towards the end of the protagonist’s life, rests in Nora’s inability to find a true sense of belonging, despite her migrations. She “has spent most of her life waiting, confined to houses or places that restrict her, places she feels she does not belong to, including her family home, the city of Brisbane, her husband’s house, Australia itself” (Gleeson-White 184). Thus, although Nora’s life can be read as “the story of a very slow emergence from a doomed attempt to lead a conventional, married life… into an independent existence in London” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 65), the novel suggests that the search for belonging—at least for Australian women—is problematic. Moreover, any narrative of female escape from suburbia is potentially problematic due to the gendering of suburban experience as feminine. The suburban female who leaves suburbia necessarily rejects not only her “natural” place of belonging, but domesticity as a way of being and, to some extent, even her sex. In her work on memoir, Hooton identifies a stark difference between the shape of female and male biography to argue that women’s experience of life is innately non-linear. However, the use of non-linear narrative by feminist fiction writers of the second wave was arguably more conscious, even political in seeking a new, untainted form through which to explore the female condition. It was a powerful notion, arguably contributing to a golden age of women’s writing by novelists Helen Garner, Barbara Hanrahan, Jessica Anderson, and others. It also exerted a marked effect on fiction by Kate Grenville, Amanda Lohrey, and Janette Turner Hospital, as well as grunge novelists, well into the 1990s. By contrast, other canonical, albeit older, women writers of the time, Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolley, neither of whom identified as feminist (Fringe 341; Neuter 196), do not seek to “rescue” the suburban female from her milieu. Like Patrick White, Astley seems, at least superficially, to perpetuate narrow stereotypes of the suburban female as “mindless consumers of fashion” and/or “signifiers of sexual disorder” (Sheridan, Satirist 262). Although flight is permitted those female characters who “need to ‘vanish’ if they are to find some alternative to narrow-mindedness and social oppression” (Gelder and Salzman, Celebration 186), it has little to do with feminism. As Brian Matthews attests of Astley’s work, “nothing could be further from the world-view of the second wave feminist writers of the 1980s” (76) and indeed her female characters are generally less sympathetic than those inhabiting novels by the “feminist” writers. Jolley also leaves the female protagonist to fend for herself, with a more optimistic, forceful vision of “female characters who, in their sheer eccentricity, shed any social expectations” to inhabit “a realm empowered by the imagination” (Gelder and Salzman, Celebration 194). If Jolley’s suburban females desire escape then they must earn it, not by direct or shifting relocations, but via other, more extreme and often creative, modes of transformation. These two writers however, were exceptional in their resistance to the influence of second wave feminism. Thus, three narrative categories emerge in which the suburban female may be transformed: linear flight from suburbia, non-linear flight from suburbia, or non-flight whereby the protagonist remains inside suburbia throughout the entire novel. Evidence of a rejection of the flight narrative by contemporary Australian women writers may signal a re-examination of the suburban female within, not outside, her suburban setting. It may also reveal a weakening of the influence of both second wave feminism and anti-suburban critiques on this much maligned character of Australian fiction, and on suburbia as a fictional setting. References Anderson, Jessica. Tirra Lirra by the River. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978. Astley, Thea. “Writing as a Neuter: Extracts from Interview by Candida Baker.” Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers. Ed. Gillian Whitlock. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1989. 195-6. Durez, Jean. “Laminex Dreams: Women, Suburban Comfort and the Negation of Meanings.” Meanjin 53.1 (1994): 99-110. During, Simon. Patrick White. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1996. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965. Garner, Helen. Honour and Other People’s Children. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1982. ———. The Children’s Bach. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1984. ———. Monkey Grip. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2009. Gelder, Ken, and Paul Salzman. The New Diversity. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989. ———. After the Celebration. Melbourne: UP, 2009. Gerster, Robin. “Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction.” Meanjin 49.3 (1990): 565-75. Gilbert, Pam. Coming Out from Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers. London: Pandora Press, 1988. Gleeson-White, Jane. Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Goodwin, Ken. A History of Australian Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1986. Greer, Germain. The Female Eunuch. London: Granada, 1970. Hanrahan, Barbara. The Scent of Eucalyptus. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1973. ———. Sea-Green. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. ———. Kewpie Doll. London: Hogarth Press, 1989. Hooton, Joy. Stories of Herself When Young: Autobiographies of Childhood by Australian Women Writers. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1990. Ireland, David. The Glass Canoe. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1976. Johnson, Lesley. The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993. ———, and Justine Lloyd. Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. New York: Berg, 2004. Johnston, George. My Brother Jack. London: Collins/Fontana, 1967. Jolley, Elizabeth. “Fringe Dwellers: Extracts from Interview by Jennifer Ellison.” Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers. Ed. Gillian Whitlock. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1989. 334-44. Kirkby, Joan. “The Pursuit of Oblivion: In Flight from Suburbia.” Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): 1-19. Lake, Marilyn. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999. McCann, Andrew. “Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity.” Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): 56-71. Matthews, Brian. “Before Feminism… After Feminism.” Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds. Eds. Susan Sheridan and Paul Genoni. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 72-6. Rowse, Tim. Australian Liberalism and National Character. Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1978. Saegert, Susan. “Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities.” Signs 5.3 (1990): 96-111. Sheridan, Susan. Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s–1930s. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995. ———. “Reading the Women’s Weekly: Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.” Transitions: New Australian Feminisms. Eds. Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995. ———. "Thea Astley: A Woman among the Satirists of Post-War Modernity." Australian Feminist Studies 18.42 (2003): 261-71. Sowden, Tim. “Streets of Discontent: Artists and Suburbia in the 1950s.” Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs. Eds. Sarah Ferber, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. 76-93. Stead, Christina. For Love Alone. Sydney: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police. Melbourne: Penguin, 2002. White, Patrick. The Tree of Man. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956. ———. A Fringe of Leaves. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. Wolff, Janet. Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

‘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 Coker, 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” (Coker 2013). Coker 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/›.Coker, Mark. “Q & A with Smashwords Founder, Mark Coker.” 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›.

IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. 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The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. 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IntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection (Fox and Sornil), considering these publications is important. As de Certeau argues, it can be of considerable consequence to identify and analyse everyday practices (such as producing and reading popular magazines) that seem so minor and insignificant as to be unworthy of notice, as these practices have the ability to affect our lives. It is important in this case as these publications were part of the post-war gastronomic environment in Australia in which national tastes in domestic cookery became radically internationalised (Santich). To further investigate Australian magazines, as well as suggesting how these cosmopolitan eating habits became more widely embraced, this article will survey the various ways in which the idea of “abroad” is expressed in one Australian culinary serial from the post-war period, Australian Wines & Food Quarterly magazine, which was published from 1956 to 1960. The methodological approach taken is an historically-informed content analysis (Krippendorff) of relevant material from these magazines combined with germane media data (Hodder). All issues in the serial’s print run have been considered.Australian Post-War Culinary PublishingTo date, studies of 1950s writing in Australia have largely focused on literary and popular fiction (Johnson-Wood; Webby) and literary criticism (Bird; Dixon; Lee). There have been far fewer studies of non-fiction writing of any kind, although some serial publications from this time have attracted some attention (Bell; Lindesay; Ross; Sheridan; Warner-Smith; White; White). In line with studies internationally, groundbreaking work in Australian food history has focused on cookbooks, and includes work by Supski, who notes that despite the fact that buying cookbooks was “regarded as a luxury in the 1950s” (87), such publications were an important information source in terms of “developing, consolidating and extending foodmaking knowledge” at that time (85).It is widely believed that changes to Australian foodways were brought about by significant post-war immigration and the recipes and dishes these immigrants shared with neighbours, friends, and work colleagues and more widely afield when they opened cafes and restaurants (Newton; Newton; Manfredi). Although these immigrants did bring new culinary flavours and habits with them, the overarching rhetoric guiding population policy at this time was assimilation, with migrants expected to abandon their culture, language, and habits in favour of the dominant British-influenced ways of living (Postiglione). While migrants often did retain their foodways (Risson), the relationship between such food habits and the increasingly cosmopolitan Australian food culture is much more complex than the dominant cultural narrative would have us believe. It has been pointed out, for example, that while the haute cuisine of countries such as France, Italy, and Germany was much admired in Australia and emulated in expensive dining (Brien and Vincent), migrants’ own preference for their own dishes instead of Anglo-Australian choices, was not understood (Postiglione). Duruz has added how individual diets are eclectic, “multi-layered and hybrid” (377), incorporating foods from both that person’s own background with others available for a range of reasons including availability, cost, taste, and fashion. In such an environment, popular culinary publishing, in terms of cookbooks, specialist magazines, and recipe and other food-related columns in general magazines and newspapers, can be posited to be another element contributing to this change.Australian Wines & Food QuarterlyAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly (AWFQ) is, as yet, a completely unexamined publication, and there appears to be only three complete sets of this magazine held in public collections. It is important to note that, at the time it was launched in the mid-1950s, food writing played a much less significant part in Australian popular publishing than it does today, with far fewer cookbooks released than today, and women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers containing only small recipe sections. In this environment, a new specialist culinary magazine could be seen to be timely, an audacious gamble, or both.All issues of this magazine were produced and printed in, and distributed from, Melbourne, Australia. Although no sales or distribution figures are available, production was obviously a struggle, with only 15 issues published before the magazine folded at the end of 1960. The title of the magazine changed over this time, and issue release dates are erratic, as is the method in which volumes and issues are numbered. Although the number of pages varied from 32 up to 52, and then less once again, across the magazine’s life, the price was steadily reduced, ending up at less than half the original cover price. All issues were produced and edited by Donald Wallace, who also wrote much of the content, with contributions from family members, including his wife, Mollie Wallace, to write, illustrate, and produce photographs for the magazine.When considering the content of the magazine, most is quite familiar in culinary serials today, although AWFQ’s approach was radically innovative in Australia at this time when cookbooks, women’s magazines, and newspaper cookery sections focused on recipes, many of which were of cakes, biscuits, and other sweet baking (Bannerman). AWFQ not only featured many discursive essays and savory meals, it also featured much wine writing and review-style content as well as information about restaurant dining in each issue.Wine-Related ContentWine is certainly the most prominent of the content areas, with most issues of the magazine containing more wine-related content than any other. Moreover, in the early issues, most of the food content is about preparing dishes and/or meals that could be consumed alongside wines, although the proportion of food content increases as the magazine is published. This wine-related content takes a clearly international perspective on this topic. While many articles and advertisements, for example, narrate the long history of Australian wine growing—which goes back to early 19th century—these articles argue that Australia's vineyards and wineries measure up to international, and especially French, examples. In one such example, the author states that: “from the earliest times Australia’s wines have matched up to world standard” (“Wine” 25). This contest can be situated in Australia, where a leading restaurant (Caprice in Sydney) could be seen to not only “match up to” but also, indeed to, “challenge world standards” by serving Australian wines instead of imports (“Sydney” 33). So good, indeed, are Australian wines that when foreigners are surprised by their quality, this becomes newsworthy. This is evidenced in the following excerpt: “Nearly every English businessman who has come out to Australia in the last ten years … has diverted from his main discussion to comment on the high quality of Australian wine” (Seppelt, 3). In a similar nationalist vein, many articles feature overseas experts’ praise of Australian wines. Thus, visiting Italian violinist Giaconda de Vita shows a “keen appreciation of Australian wines” (“Violinist” 30), British actor Robert Speaight finds Grange Hermitage “an ideal wine” (“High Praise” 13), and the Swedish ambassador becomes their advocate (Ludbrook, “Advocate”).This competition could also be located overseas including when Australian wines are served at prestigious overseas events such as a dinner for members of the Overseas Press Club in New York (Australian Wines); sold from Seppelt’s new London cellars (Melbourne), or the equally new Australian Wine Centre in Soho (Australia Will); or, featured in exhibitions and promotions such as the Lausanne Trade Fair (Australia is Guest;“Wines at Lausanne), or the International Wine Fair in Yugoslavia (Australia Wins).Australia’s first Wine Festival was held in Melbourne in 1959 (Seppelt, “Wine Week”), the joint focus of which was the entertainment and instruction of the some 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who were expected. At its centre was a series of free wine tastings aiming to promote Australian wines to the “professional people of the community, as well as the general public and the housewife” (“Melbourne” 8), although admission had to be recommended by a wine retailer. These tastings were intended to build up the prestige of Australian wine when compared to international examples: “It is the high quality of our wines that we are proud of. That is the story to pass on—that Australian wine, at its best, is at least as good as any in the world and better than most” (“Melbourne” 8).There is also a focus on promoting wine drinking as a quotidian habit enjoyed abroad: “We have come a long way in less than twenty years […] An enormous number of husbands and wives look forward to a glass of sherry when the husband arrives home from work and before dinner, and a surprising number of ordinary people drink table wine quite un-selfconsciously” (Seppelt, “Advance” 3). However, despite an acknowledged increase in wine appreciation and drinking, there is also acknowledgement that this there was still some way to go in this aim as, for example, in the statement: “There is no reason why the enjoyment of table wines should not become an Australian custom” (Seppelt, “Advance” 4).The authority of European experts and European habits is drawn upon throughout the publication whether in philosophically-inflected treatises on wine drinking as a core part of civilised behaviour, or practically-focused articles about wine handling and serving (Keown; Seabrook; “Your Own”). Interestingly, a number of Australian experts are also quoted as stressing that these are guidelines, not strict rules: Crosby, for instance, states: “There is no ‘right wine.’ The wine to drink is the one you like, when and how you like it” (19), while the then-manager of Lindemans Wines is similarly reassuring in his guide to entertaining, stating that “strict adherence to the rules is not invariably wise” (Mackay 3). Tingey openly acknowledges that while the international-style of regularly drinking wine had “given more dignity and sophistication to the Australian way of life” (35), it should not be shrouded in snobbery.Food-Related ContentThe magazine’s cookery articles all feature international dishes, and certain foreign foods, recipes, and ways of eating and dining are clearly identified as “gourmet”. Cheese is certainly the most frequently mentioned “gourmet” food in the magazine, and is featured in every issue. These articles can be grouped into the following categories: understanding cheese (how it is made and the different varieties enjoyed internationally), how to consume cheese (in relation to other food and specific wines, and in which particular parts of a meal, again drawing on international practices), and cooking with cheese (mostly in what can be identified as “foreign” recipes).Some of this content is produced by Kraft Foods, a major advertiser in the magazine, and these articles and recipes generally focus on urging people to eat more, and varied international kinds of cheese, beyond the ubiquitous Australian cheddar. In terms of advertorials, both Kraft cheeses (as well as other advertisers) are mentioned by brand in recipes, while the companies are also profiled in adjacent articles. In the fourth issue, for instance, a full-page, infomercial-style advertisement, noting the different varieties of Kraft cheese and how to serve them, is published in the midst of a feature on cooking with various cheeses (“Cooking with Cheese”). This includes recipes for Swiss Cheese fondue and two pasta recipes: spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce, and a so-called Italian spaghetti with anchovies.Kraft’s company history states that in 1950, it was the first business in Australia to manufacture and market rindless cheese. Through these AWFQ advertisements and recipes, Kraft aggressively marketed this innovation, as well as its other new products as they were launched: mayonnaise, cheddar cheese portions, and Cracker Barrel Cheese in 1954; Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the first cream cheese to be produced commercially in Australia, in 1956; and, Coon Cheese in 1957. Not all Kraft products were seen, however, as “gourmet” enough for such a magazine. Kraft’s release of sliced Swiss Cheese in 1957, and processed cheese slices in 1959, for instance, both passed unremarked in either the magazine’s advertorial or recipes.An article by the Australian Dairy Produce Board urging consumers to “Be adventurous with Cheese” presented general consumer information including the “origin, characteristics and mode of serving” cheese accompanied by a recipe for a rich and exotic-sounding “Wine French Dressing with Blue Cheese” (Kennedy 18). This was followed in the next issue by an article discussing both now familiar and not-so familiar European cheese varieties: “Monterey, Tambo, Feta, Carraway, Samsoe, Taffel, Swiss, Edam, Mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, Red Malling, Cacio Cavallo, Blue-Vein, Roman, Parmigiano, Kasseri, Ricotta and Pepato” (“Australia’s Natural” 23). Recipes for cheese fondues recur through the magazine, sometimes even multiple times in the same issue (see, for instance, “Cooking With Cheese”; “Cooking With Wine”; Pain). In comparison, butter, although used in many AWFQ’s recipes, was such a common local ingredient at this time that it was only granted one article over the entire run of the magazine, and this was largely about the much more unusual European-style unsalted butter (“An Expert”).Other international recipes that were repeated often include those for pasta (always spaghetti) as well as mayonnaise made with olive oil. Recurring sweets and desserts include sorbets and zabaglione from Italy, and flambéd crepes suzettes from France. While tabletop cooking is the epitome of sophistication and described as an international technique, baked Alaska (ice cream nestled on liquor-soaked cake, and baked in a meringue shell), hailing from America, is the most featured recipe in the magazine. Asian-inspired cuisine was rarely represented and even curry—long an Anglo-Australian staple—was mentioned only once in the magazine, in an article reprinted from the South African The National Hotelier, and which included a recipe alongside discussion of blending spices (“Curry”).Coffee was regularly featured in both articles and advertisements as a staple of the international gourmet kitchen (see, for example, Bancroft). Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, percolating and brewing, and serving of coffee were common during the magazine’s run, and are accompanied with advertisements for Bushell’s, Robert Timms’s and Masterfoods’s coffee ranges. AWFQ believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption was the result of increased participation in quality internationally-influenced dining experiences, whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39), or at home (Adams). Tea, traditionally the Australian hot drink of choice, is not mentioned once in the magazine (Brien).International Gourmet InnovationsAlso featured in the magazine are innovations in the Australian food world: new places to eat; new ways to cook, including a series of sometimes quite unusual appliances; and new ways to shop, with a profile of the first American-style supermarkets to open in Australia in this period. These are all seen as overseas innovations, but highly suited to Australia. The laws then controlling the service of alcohol are also much discussed, with many calls to relax the licensing laws which were seen as inhibiting civilised dining and drinking practices. The terms this was often couched in—most commonly in relation to the Olympic Games (held in Melbourne in 1956), but also in relation to tourism in general—are that these restrictive regulations were an embarrassment for Melbourne when considered in relation to international practices (see, for example, Ludbrook, “Present”). This was at a time when the nightly hotel closing time of 6.00 pm (and the performance of the notorious “six o’clock swill” in terms of drinking behaviour) was only repealed in Victoria in 1966 (Luckins).Embracing scientific approaches in the kitchen was largely seen to be an American habit. The promotion of the use of electricity in the kitchen, and the adoption of new electric appliances (Gas and Fuel; Gilbert “Striving”), was described not only as a “revolution that is being wrought in our homes”, but one that allowed increased levels of personal expression and fulfillment, in “increas[ing] the time and resources available to the housewife for the expression of her own personality in the management of her home” (Gilbert, “The Woman’s”). This mirrors the marketing of these modes of cooking and appliances in other media at this time, including in newspapers, radio, and other magazines. This included features on freezing food, however AWFQ introduced an international angle, by suggesting that recipe bases could be pre-prepared, frozen, and then defrosted to use in a range of international cookery (“Fresh”; “How to”; Kelvinator Australia). The then-new marvel of television—another American innovation—is also mentioned in the magazine ("Changing concepts"), although other nationalities are also invoked. The history of the French guild the Confrerie de la Chaine des Roitisseurs in 1248 is, for instance, used to promote an electric spit roaster that was part of a state-of-the-art gas stove (“Always”), and there are also advertisements for such appliances as the Gaggia expresso machine (“Lets”) which draw on both Italian historical antecedence and modern science.Supermarket and other forms of self-service shopping are identified as American-modern, with Australia’s first shopping mall lauded as the epitome of utopian progressiveness in terms of consumer practice. Judged to mark “a new era in Australian retailing” (“Regional” 12), the opening of Chadstone Regional Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne on 4 October 1960, with its 83 tenants including “giant” supermarket Dickens, and free parking for 2,500 cars, was not only “one of the most up to date in the world” but “big even by American standards” (“Regional” 12, italics added), and was hailed as a step in Australia “catching up” with the United States in terms of mall shopping (“Regional” 12). This shopping centre featured international-styled dining options including Bistro Shiraz, an outdoor terrace restaurant that planned to operate as a bistro-snack bar by day and full-scale restaurant at night, and which was said to offer diners a “Persian flavor” (“Bistro”).ConclusionAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly was the first of a small number of culinary-focused Australian publications in the 1950s and 1960s which assisted in introducing a generation of readers to information about what were then seen as foreign foods and beverages only to be accessed and consumed abroad as well as a range of innovative international ideas regarding cookery and dining. For this reason, it can be posited that the magazine, although modest in the claims it made, marked a revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing. As yet, only slight traces can be found of its editor and publisher, Donald Wallace. The influence of AWFQ is, however, clearly evident in the two longer-lived magazines that were launched in the decade after AWFQ folded: Australian Gourmet Magazine and The Epicurean. Although these serials had a wider reach, an analysis of the 15 issues of AWFQ adds to an understanding of how ideas of foods, beverages, and culinary ideas and trends, imported from abroad were presented to an Australian readership in the 1950s, and contributed to how national foodways were beginning to change during that decade.ReferencesAdams, Jillian. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 23–36.“Always to Roast on a Turning Spit.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 17.“An Expert on Butter.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 11.“Australia Is Guest Nation at Lausanne.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 18–19.“Australia’s Natural Cheeses.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 23.“Australia Will Be There.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 14.“Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 16.“Australia Wins Six Gold Medals.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 3.Bancroft, P.A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 10. 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Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2004.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Kennedy, H.E. “Be Adventurous with Cheese.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 18–19.Keown, K.C. “Some Notes on Wine.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 32–33.Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.“Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wines and Food 4.2: 23.Lindesay, Vance. The Way We Were: Australian Popular Magazines 1856–1969. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1983.Luckins, Tanja. “Pigs, Hogs and Aussie Blokes: The Emergence of the Term “Six O’clock Swill.”’ History Australia 4.1 (2007): 8.1–8.17.Ludbrook, Jack. “Advocate for Australian Wines.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 3–4.Ludbrook, Jack. “Present Mixed Licensing Laws Harm Tourist Trade.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 14, 31.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Mackay, Colin. “Entertaining with Wine.” Australian Wines &Foods Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 3–5.Le Masurier, Megan, and Rebecca Johinke. “Magazine Studies: Pedagogy and Practice in a Nascent Field.” TEXT Special Issue 25 (2014). 20 July 2016 <http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue25/LeMasurier&Johinke.pdf>.“Melbourne Stages Australia’s First Wine Festival.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 8–9.Newton, John, and Stefano Manfredi. “Gottolengo to Bonegilla: From an Italian Childhood to an Australian Restaurant.” Convivium 2.1 (1994): 62–63.Newton, John. 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Kent Town: Wakefield P, 2012.Seabrook, Douglas. “Stocking Your Cellar.” Australian Wines & Foods Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 19–20.Seppelt, John. “Advance Australian Wine.” Australian Wines & Foods Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 3–4.Seppelt, R.L. “Wine Week: 1959.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 3.Sheridan, Susan, Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett, and Lyndall Ryan. (2002) Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years. Sydney: UNSW P, 2002.Supski, Sian. “'We Still Mourn That Book’: Cookbooks, Recipes and Foodmaking Knowledge in 1950s Australia.” Journal of Australian Studies 28 (2005): 85–94.“Sydney Restaurant Challenges World Standards.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 33.Tingey, Peter. “Wineman Rode a Hobby Horse.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 35.“Violinist Loves Bach—and Birds.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 30.Wallace, Donald. Ed. Australian Wines & Food Quarterly. Magazine. Melbourne: 1956–1960.Warner-Smith, Penny. “Travel, Young Women and ‘The Weekly’, 1959–1968.” Annals of Leisure Research 3.1 (2000): 33–46.Webby, Elizabeth. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.White, Richard. “The Importance of Being Man.” Australian Popular Culture. Eds. Peter Spearritt and David Walker. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979. 145–169.White, Richard. “The Retreat from Adventure: Popular Travel Writing in the 1950s.” Australian Historical Studies 109 (1997): 101–103.“Wine: The Drink for the Home.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 2.10 (1959): 24–25.“Wines at the Lausanne Trade Fair.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 15.“Your Own Wine Cellar” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.2 (1957): 19–20.

Introduction When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less ‘original’ than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary ‘re-’ in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction? (Re-)Reading: Critical Theory and Originality My juxtaposition of the terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘radical’, and the attempted play on the auto-antonymy of the verb ‘to cleave’, are designed to prompt a re(-)read of the analysis that so famously took the text away from the author in the late-1960s through to the 1990s, which is to say the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Roland Barthes’s work (especially 69–77) appropriated the familiar terms of literary analysis and reversed them, making of them perhaps a re-appropriation in the sense of taking them into new territory: the text, formerly a paper-based platform for the written word, was now a virtual interface between the word and its reader, the new locus of the production of meaning; the work, on the other hand, which had previously pertained to the collective creative imaginings of the author, was now synonymous with the physical writing passed on by the author to the reader. And by ‘passed on’ was meant ‘passed over’, achevé (perfected, terminated, put to death)—completed, then, but only insofar as its finite sequence of words was set; for its meaning was henceforth dependent on its end user. The new textual life that surged from the ‘death of the author’ was therefore always already an afterlife, a ‘living on’, to use Jacques Derrida’s term (Bloom et al. 75–176). It is in this context that the re-reading encouraged by Barthes has always appeared to mark a rupture a teasing of ‘reading’ away from the original series of words and the ‘Meaning’ as intended by the author, if any coherence of intention is possible across the finite sequence of words that constitute the written work. The reader must learn to re-read, Barthes implored, or otherwise be condemned to read the same text everywhere. In this sense, the ‘re-’ prefix marks an active engagement with the text, a reflexivity of the act of reading as an act of transformation. The reader whose consumption of the text is passive, merely digestive, will not transform the words (into meaning); and crucially, that reader will not herself be transformed. For this is the power of reflexive reading—when one reads text as text (and not ‘losing oneself’ in the story) one reconstitutes oneself (or, perhaps, loses control of oneself more fully, more productively); not to do so, is to take an unchanged constant (oneself) into every textual encounter and thus to produce sameness in ostensible difference. One who rereads a text and discovers the same story twice will therefore reread even when reading a text for the first time. The hyphen of the re-read, on the other hand, distances the reader from the text; but it also, of course, conjoins. It marks the virtual space where reading occurs, between the physical text and the reading subject; and at the same time, it links all texts in an intertextual arena, such that the reading experience of any one text is informed by the reading of all texts (whether they be works read by an individual reader or works as yet unencountered). Such a theory of reading appears to shift originality so far from the author’s work as almost to render the term obsolete. But the thing about reflexivity is that it depends on the text itself, to which it always returns. As Barbara Johnson has noted, the critical difference marked by Barthes’s understandings of the text, and his calls to re-read it, is not what differentiates it from other texts—the universality of the intertext and the reading space underlines this; instead, it is what differentiates the text from itself (“Critical Difference” 175). And while Barthes’s work packages this differentiation as a rupture, a wrenching of ownership away from the author to a new owner, the work and text appear less violently opposed in the works of the Yale School deconstructionists. In such works as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” (1977), the hyphenation of the re-read is less marked, with re-reading, as a divergence from the text as something self-founding, self-coinciding, emerging as something inherent in the original text. The cleaving of one from and back into the other takes on, in Miller’s essay, the guise of parasitism: the host, a term that etymologically refers to the owner who invites and the guest who is invited, offers a figure for critical reading that reveals the potential for creative readings of ‘meaning’ (what Miller calls the nihilistic text) inside the transparent ‘Meaning’ of the text, by which we recognise one nonetheless autonomous text from another (the metaphysical text). Framed in such terms, reading is a reaction to text, but also an action of text. I should argue then that any engagement with the original is re-actionary—my caveat being that this hyphenation is a marker of auto-antonymy, a link between the text and otherness. Translation and Originality Questions of a translator’s status and the originality of the translated text remain vexed. For scholars of translation studies like Brian Nelson, the product of literary translation can legitimately be said to have been authored by its translator, its status as literary text being equal to that of the original (3; see also Wilson and Gerber). Such questions are no more or less vexed today, however, than they were in the days when criticism was grappling with translation through the lens of deconstruction. To refer again to the remarkable work of Johnson, Derrida’s theorisation of textual ‘living on’—the way in which text, at its inception, primes itself for re-imagining, by dint of the fundamental différance of the chains of signification that are its DNA—bears all the trappings of self-translation. Johnson uses the term ‘self-différance’ (“Taking Fidelity” 146–47) in this respect and notes how Derrida took on board, and discussed with him, the difficulties that he was causing for his translator even as he was writing the ‘original’ text of his essay. If translation, in this framework, is rendered impossible because of the original’s failure to coincide with itself in a transparently meaningful way, then its practice “releases within each text the subversive forces of its own foreignness” (Johnson, “Taking Fidelity” 148), thereby highlighting the debt owed by Derrida’s notion of textual ‘living on’—in (re-)reading—to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation as a mode, its translatability, the way in which it primes itself for translation virtually, irrespective of whether or not it is actually translated (70). In this way, translation is a privileged site of textual auto-differentiation, and translated text can, accordingly, be considered every bit as ‘original’ as its source text—simply more reflexive, more aware of its role as a conduit between the words on the page and the re-imagining that they undergo, by which they come to mean, when they are re-activated by the reader. Emily Apter—albeit in a context that has more specifically to do with the possibilities of comparative literature and the real-world challenges of language in war zones—describes the auto-differentiating nature of translation as “a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements” (6). In this way, translation is “a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Apter 6). Thus, translation lends itself to crime fiction; for both function as highly reflexive sites of transformation: both provide a reader with a heightened sense of the transformation that she is enacting on the text and that she herself embodies as a reading subject, a subject changed by reading. Crime Fiction, Auto-Differention and Translation As has been noted elsewhere (Rolls), Fredric Jameson made an enigmatic reference to crime fiction’s perceived role as the new Realism as part of his plenary lecture at “Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory”, a conference held at the University of Wollongong on 6–8 December 2012. He suggested, notably, that one might imagine an author of Scandi-Noir writing in tandem with her translator. While obvious questions of the massive international marketing machine deployed around this contemporary phenomenon come to mind, and I suspect that this is how Jameson’s comment was generally understood, it is tempting to consider this Scandinavian writing scenario in terms of Derrida’s proleptic considerations of his own translator. In this way, crime fiction’s most telling role, as one of the most widely read contemporary literary forms, is its translatability; its haunting descriptions of place (readers, we tend, perhaps precipitously, to assume, love crime fiction for its national, regional or local situatedness) are thus tensely primed for re-location, for Apter’s ‘subject re-formation’. The idea of ‘the new Realism’ of crime, and especially detective, fiction is predicated on the tightly (self-)policed rules according to which crime fiction operates. The reader appears to enter into an investigation alongside the detective, co-authoring the crime text in real (reading) time, only for authorial power to be asserted in the unveiling scene of the denouement. What masquerades as the ultimately writerly text, in Barthes’s terms, turns out to be the ultimate in transparently meaningful literature when the solution is set in stone by the detective. As such, the crime novel is far more dependent on descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life (in a given place in time) than other forms of fiction, as these provide the clues on which its intricate plot hinges. According to this understanding, crime fiction records history and transcribes national allegories. This is not only a convincing way of understanding crime fiction, but it is also an extremely powerful way of harnessing it for the purposes of cultural history. Claire Gorrara, for example, uses the development of French crime fiction plots over the course of the second half of the twentieth century to map France’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. This is the national allegory written in real time, as the nation heals and moves on, and this is crime fiction as a reaction to national allegory. My contention here, on the other hand, is that crime fiction, like translation, has at its core an inherent, and reflexive, tendency towards otherness. Indeed, this is because crime fiction, whose origins in transnational (and especially Franco-American) literary exchange have been amply mapped but not, I should argue, extrapolated to their fullest extent, is forged in translation. It is widely considered that when Edgar Allan Poe produced his seminal text “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) he created modern crime fiction. And yet, this was made possible because the text was translated into French by Charles Baudelaire and met with great success in France, far more so indeed than in its original place of authorship. Its original setting, however, was not America but Paris; its translatability as French text preceded, even summoned, its actualisation in the form of Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore, the birth of the great armchair detective, the exponent of pure, objective deduction, in the form of C. Auguste Dupin, is itself turned on its head, a priori, because Dupin, in this first Parisian short story, always already off-sets objectivity with subjectivity, ratiocination with a tactile apprehension of the scene of the crime. He even goes as far as to accuse the Parisian Prefect of Police of one-dimensional objectivity. (Dupin undoes himself, debunking the myth of his own characterisation, even as he takes to the stage.) In this way, Poe founded his crime fiction on a fundamental tension; and this tension called out to its translator so powerfully that Baudelaire claimed to be translating his own thoughts, as expressed by Poe, even before he had had a chance to think them (see Rolls and Sitbon). Thus, Poe was Parisian avant la lettre, his crime fiction a model for Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, the new voice of critical modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. If Baudelaire went on to write Paris in the form of Paris Spleen (1869), his famous collection of “little prose poems”, both as it is represented (timelessly, poetically) and as it presents itself (in real time, prosaically) at the same time, it was not only because he was spontaneously creating a new national allegory for France based on its cleaving of itself in the wake of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive programme of urbanisation in Paris in the 1800s; it was also because he was translating Poe’s fictionalisation of Paris in his new crime fiction. Crime fiction was born therefore not only simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two, in the self-différance of translation. In this way, while a strong claim can be made that modern French crime fiction is predicated on, and reacts to, the auto-differentiation (of critical modernity, of Paris versus Paris) articulated in Baudelaire’s prose poems and therefore tells the national allegory, it is also the case, and it is this aspect that is all too often overlooked, that crime fiction’s birth in Franco-American translation founded the new French national allegory. Re-imagining America in (French) Crime Fiction Pierre Bayard has done more than any other critic in recent years to debunk the authorial power of the detective in crime fiction, beginning with his re-imagining of the solution to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and continuing with that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1998 and 2008, respectively). And yet, even as he has engaged with poststructuralist re-readings of these texts, he has put in place his own solutions, elevating them away from his own initial premise of writerly engagement towards a new metaphysics of “Meaning”, be it ironically or because he has fallen prey himself to the seduction of detectival truth. This reactionary turn, or sting-lessness in the tail, reaches new heights (of irony) in the essay in which he imagines the consequences of liberating novels from their traditional owners and coupling them with new authors (Bayard, Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur?). Throughout this essay Bayard systematically prefers the terms “work” and “author” to “text” and “reader”, liberating the text not only from the shackles of traditional notions of authorship but also from the terminological reshuffling of his and others’ critical theory, while at the same time clinging to the necessity for textual meaning to stem from authorship and repackaging what is, in all but terminology, Barthes et al.’s critical theory. Caught up in the bluff and double-bluff of Bayard’s authorial redeployments is a chapter on what is generally considered the greatest work of parody of twentieth-century French crime fiction—Boris Vian’s pseudo-translation of black American author Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Shall Spit on Your Graves). The novel was a best seller in France in 1946, outstripping by far the novels of the Série Noire, whose fame and marketability were predicated on their status as “Translations from the American” and of which it appeared a brazen parody. Bayard’s decision to give credibility to Sullivan as author is at once perverse, because it is clear that he did not exist, and reactionary, because it marks a return to Vian’s original conceit. And yet, it passes for innovative, not (or at least not only) because of Bayard’s brilliance but because of the literary qualities of the original text, which, Bayard argues, must have been written in “American” in order to produce such a powerful description of American society at the time. Bayard’s analysis overlooks (or highlights, if we couch his entire project in a hermeneutics of inversion, based on the deliberate, and ironic, re-reversal of the terms “work” and “text”) two key elements of post-war French crime fiction: the novels of the Série Noire that preceded J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in late 1945 and early 1946 were all written by authors posing as Americans (Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were in fact English) and the translations were deliberately unfaithful both to the original text, which was drastically domesticated, and to any realistic depiction of America. While Anglo-Saxon French Studies has tended to overlook the latter aspect, Frank Lhomeau has highlighted the fact that the America that held sway in the French imaginary (from Liberation through to the 1960s and beyond) was a myth rather than a reality. To take this reasoning one logical, reflexive step further, or in fact less far, the object of Vian’s (highly reflexive) novel, which may better be considered a satire than a parody, can be considered not to be race relations in the United States but the French crime fiction scene in 1946, of which its pseudo-translation (which is to say, a novel not written by an American and not translated) is metonymic (see Vuaille-Barcan, Sitbon and Rolls). (For Isabelle Collombat, “pseudo-translation functions as a mise en abyme of a particular genre” [146, my translation]; this reinforces the idea of a conjunction of translation and crime fiction under the sign of reflexivity.) Re-imagined beneath this wave of colourful translations of would-be American crime novels is a new national allegory for a France emerging from the ruins of German occupation and Allied liberation. The re-imagining of France in the years immediately following the Second World War is therefore not mapped, or imagined again, by crime fiction; rather, the combination of translation and American crime fiction provide the perfect storm for re-creating a national sense of self through the filter of the Other. For what goes for the translator, goes equally for the reader. Conclusion As Johnson notes, “through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue”; and as such, “in the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration […] is played on center stage, evoking fear and pity and the illusion that all would perhaps have been well if we could simply have stayed at home” (144). This, of course, is just what had happened one hundred years earlier when Baudelaire created a new prose poetics for a new Paris. In order to re-present (both present and represent) Paris, he focused so close on it as to erase it from objective view. And in the same instance of supreme literary creativity, he masked the origins of his own translation praxis: his Paris was also Poe’s, which is to say, an American vision of Paris translated into French by an author who considered his American alter ego to have had his own thoughts in an act of what Bayard would consider anticipatory plagiarism. In this light, his decision to entitle one of the prose poems “Any where out of the world”—in English in the original—can be considered a Derridean reflection on the translation inherent in any original act of literary re-imagination. Paris, crime fiction and translation can thus all be considered privileged sites of re-imagination, which is to say, embodiments of self-différance and “original” acts of re-reading. References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Spleen de Paris. Trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1869]. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998. ———. L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008. ———. Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 69–82. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Collombat, Isabelle. “Pseudo-traduction: la mise en scène de l’altérité.” Le Langage et l’Homme 38.1 (2003): 145–56. Gorrara, Claire. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. “Taking Fidelity Philosophically.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 142–48. ———. “The Critical Difference.” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. Ed. Diana Knight. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 174–82. Lhomeau, Frank. “Le roman ‘noir’ à l’américaine.” Temps noir 4 (2000): 5–33. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1977): 439–47. Nelson, Brian. “Preface: Translation Lost and Found.” Australian Journal of French Studies 47.1 (2010): 3–7. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books, [1841]1975. 141–68. Rolls, Alistair. “Editor’s Letter: The Undecidable Lightness of Writing Crime.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.1 (2014): 3–8. Rolls, Alistair, and Clara Sitbon. “‘Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 37–53. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, Clara Sitbon, and Alistair Rolls. “Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular.” Romance Studies 32.1 (2014): 16–26. Wilson, Rita, and Leah Gerber, eds. Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012.

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; Cokie 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>. 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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>.

For many, the very idea of ‘history’ calls into question narratives of the past, distant and disconnected from our contemporary moment, and out of tune with the media-centred world of our post-2000 popular culture. This approach to history, however, is based on profound misconceptions, and does not take into account the fact that the present is history: we experience our historical moment via multiple and multi-faceted media practices, from using social media to watching movies, from watching television to consuming food. The past is, in turn, never far removed from our contemporary and everyday experiences, informing not only the way we live now, but the ways in which our futures are cemented. Ever cogniscant of this, history is changing and evolving. As Anthony Grafton put it in 2007, the function of history is “giving multiple methods and practices a place to meet, as antiquarianism intersected with ecclesiastical history, both collided with law, and all of them in turn experienced the shock of the new as travellers described unknown worlds to the east and, even more surprising, to the west” (122).There is a dictum invoked by historians to remind ourselves and others that History is, by its very nature, a construction: history is what we want it to be. As soon as we set to writing history, what we write is already in the thrall of distorting influences and culture. From the writer’s bias to the publisher’s constraints, History is always flawed. For the twenty-first century reader, our view on History is written, presented, read and critiqued, then revised and re-written, to be argued further in what can appear to be a continuous loop of publication. Within History, conflicts can be headlined by weighty semiotics like The History Wars, or by evolutions in historiography, from the simplistic dichotomy of Political vs Economic to ‘turns’ tracing the Sociological turn of the 1960s, the linguistic or cultural turn of the 1970s and 1980s and the material turn of the 2000s, or even the recent embracing of post-modern, indigenous, gender, and queer methodologies. But we hold that the culture of history itself is changing, partly through the immediacy of media and the embrace of online platforms, and partly through the ubiquitous presence of anonymous-but-informed readers, users and subscribers questioning, challenging and revising some of what has been held to be true for centuries. As Maria Grever and Sipe Stuurman and contend, “the citizens of the twenty-first century need a history that addresses their concerns as citizens of a particular nation, but also as world citizens” (3). In looking at ‘media and culture’ through the lens of ‘history’, it is possible to see and confront how History itself is changing before our eyes. We take history to be a lived-in subject. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to redress the critical balance by re-evaluating and re-visioning the notion of history in connection to media and culture. The intention is to see history as intersecting with all parts of life, in an open refusal of the often-reductive view that has long-surrounded history as an area of interest, both in and out of the academy. This critical stance answers the cultural shifts that we see intrinsic not only to history as a discipline, but also to the ways in which, in the cultural sense, history is shaped and adapted into the narrative of the everyday. The interaction of history, media, and culture evokes the principle that “in a globalizing world, an inward looking…canon” for the historical paradigm “will become less and less convincing. In the end, it might make history simply irrelevant” (Grever and Stuurman 3). The notion of history becoming irrelevant is something that, naturally, we fervently wish to avoid. The articles in this issue collectively aim to show the directions that research in history in taking in the 21st century. The approach to ‘history’ we take is, overall, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transnational, as we see history itself as an entity shifting boundaries and registers. The articles show distinctive ways in which history intersects with our media and cultural practices in the contemporary moment, as we simultaneously engage with critical exercises of re-discovery and re-evaluation, as well as indicative and diagnostic scholarly prerogatives. The issue draws strength from the points of intersection between articles, while maintaining a critical awareness of their different approaches to ‘history’, both as a critical entity and a disciplinary standpoint. After this editorial, this issue opens with a feature article by Adele Wessell, entitled “‘We Will Show the Country’: Bringing History to Life”. Here, Wessell provides an overview of the important concerns that historians are presented with as far as recording national chronicles is concerned, and the tendency over time to privilege written accounts. With a particular focus on the Australian context, Wessell considers the different and differing accounts of recording the past, and places food at the centre of the historical question, providing a tangible and cultural coordinate for the exploration of the national past, and its contemporary repercussions. Paul Ryder and Jonathan Foye’s article “Whose Speech Is It Anyway? Ownership, Authorship, and the Redfern Address” considers themes of ownership, authorship, and acknowledgement as they relate to the crafting, delivery, and reception of political speeches. In light of an ongoing debate over the authorship of the now well-known Redfern address, Ryder and Foye focus on the difficulty of identifying notions of creativity and colaboration as far as political speeches are concerned, and how this impacts on the historical and cultural relevance of political realities over time. The relationship between artistry, ownership, and memory is also the focus of Christina Chau in her article “Remediating Destroyed Human Bodies”. Chau investigates the connection between art and digital culture, by placing an empahsis on the relationship between the past and what she terms contemporaneity. In particular, Chau focuses on artists who ‘remediate’ news media and motifs within the broader popular culture scope, with an intent to monumentalise and historicise contemporary digital culture. The impact of digitisation of historical research is the focus of Rob Allen’s article, entitled “Lost and Found: The SEARCH for the Hidden and Forgotten”. Allen’s argument is foregrounded by the contention that much of the 19th century ‘disappeared’ from view in the 20th century. Considering the change in archival practices in the 21st century, Allen argues that digitisation has revolution the ways in which historical traces are accessed and re-evaluated, allowing for the re-discovery of previously (potentially) forgotten historical figures. Using the Victorian figure of John De Morgan as a primary example, this article considers the uses of digital sources to recover and reclaim the past. In “Blood on Boylston: Digital Memory and the Dramatisation of Recent History in Patriots Day”, Melanie Piper examines the movie phenomenon whereby historic events are offered as movie recreations within months of the event which they purport to re-present, asking questions like ‘when is too soon?’ when it comes to on-screen death and disaster sanitised for public viewing. Constructing the re-creation through the merging of social media representations and media files, actual footage and dramatised recreation in Patriots Day forces us to question the place of ‘crowd-sourced’ investigations, of online sense-making of events, and what Landsberg termed ‘prosthetic memory’ for mass culture. Patriots Day sits at what Piper calls “a somewhat uncomfortable intersection of fact and fiction, of docudrama and popcorn action movie”, requiring that we consider the history/media/culture nexus in such mediated dramatisations, concluding that our digital memories of the present will help make the prosthetic memories of the future. “‘The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends’: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City” is authored by the issue’s own editor, Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Here, the discussion provides an analysis of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’ as put forward in The Originals, a contemporary television series where vampires are the protagonists. Piatti-Farnell contends that, alongside New Orleans’ well-cemented reputation as tourism centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures, the historical folds of the city’s urban mythology also hold a distinctive narrative populated by vampire sightings. With this in mind, the article explores how, in The Originals, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with – and are, at times, almost inseparable from – the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms.The historical and cultural connections to urban spaces, specially in relation to specific landmark venues, continues to be the focus of attention in Ailsa Brackley du Bois’s article “Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal”. In her analysis, du Bois explores the history of the Ballarat’s Theatre Royal, and aims to take some initial critical steps towards retrieving lost knowledge from fragmented archival records and what she terms cultural silence. Taking a look at the evolving history of the Theatre itself, form its construction to its later renovations, this article specifically suggests that many forces converged to affect the venue’s own historical popularity. Ultimately, du Bois offers the beginning of an investigation into the prospects for telling of the ‘real story’ behind the rise and fall of the Ballarat’s Theatre Royal as a cultural entity.Music can stimulate, placate and induce nostalgia; it can construct what some people call a ‘soundtrack for their lives’ or it can soothe hurts and create inter-personal connections. Kris Vavasour, in “Pop Songs and Solastalgia in a Broken City” examines how explicitly local pop songs and their ability to evoke memory meets Glenn Albrecht’s ‘solastalgia’, the disaster-created homesickness in people still at home, to restore hope for post-earthquake Christchurch people. For those who lived through the seismic upheavals of 2010 and 2011, memories of culture and media which provided a level inter-personal ‘glue’ are key to understanding how they endured such trying times. Music is revealed to be more than an historic soundtrack to this process; it is one of the key components to the re-emergence of the people and city. Music is also the focus of Jack Ellis’s article, “Material History: Record Collecting in the Digital Age”, which examines the improbable death-then-rise track of vinyl records in the twenty-first century. Once consigned to music history, vinyl records and vinyl record collections have recently emerged to become cultural icons, measures of taste and the semiotic of musical engagement and even counter[digital]-culture in an oppositional narrative to the convenience and usefulness of download files. Music collectors reveal their reasons for accumulating shelves of records instead of computer files of digital downloads in a series of interviews emphasising materiality, the embedding of legacy and a gradual redefinition of media history through vinyl record ownership. The intersections between gender studies, film studies, and history are the focus of Jay Daniel Thompson and Erin Reardon’s article, entitled “‘Mommy Killed Him’: Gender, Family and History in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)”. Here, Thompson and Reardon evaluate the nuanced representations of gender in Craven's well-known film, in order to situate it within the context of the historical period in which it was produced. Taking a particular look at the impact of 1980s Reaganite politics on the narrative, Thompson and Reardon contend that the families in Craven’s film are purposefully presented as dysfunctional. Ultimately, this article argues that the kind of patriarchal family structure endorsed by Reagan is thoroughly ridiculed in Nightmare. In the final article of the issue, Kate Warner plunges into the infamous decades-long ‘History Wars’ debate between revisionists and post-revisionists examining Australia’s Indigenous narrative, to discuss four recent seminal television drama shows. The depiction of, or engagement with, Aboriginal stories and story-telling emerges as critical to the nature of who owns the narrative, who holds the power and therefore, who owns the histories. Contrasting the fantastic fictions of Glitch and Cleverman is the realist The Secret River and Redfern Now, but also pared back is the nature of Aboriginal ownership and television show direction versus the traditional colonial hegemonies, each taking on aspects of the ‘History Wars’ debate to raise new questions and to create a new view on the past. In a journal of media and culture, history transcends both aspects. Yet, as our contributors have shown, both in their breadth and depth of engagement with, and definitions of history, easy ‘pigeonholing’ or typing of history falls apart as soon as analysis begins. As several writers have noted, issues of hegemony, colonialism and post-colonialism, indigenous voices and ways of looking at our own chronicles, all combine to determine how we see the past, how we view the future, and how we live in the present. The power of the media in the digital age has changed how we engage with history; the traditional culture of history residing with academic experts who produce weighty tomes surveying the past is revealed by these media-savvy cultural historians to show the past in an entirely new light.ReferencesGrafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Grever, Maria, and Siep Stuurman. Beyond the Canon: History for the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Literary history can be viewed alternately in a perspective of continuities or discontinuities. In the former perspective, what I perversely call postmodernism is simply an extension of modernism [which is], as everyone knows, a development of symbolism, which … is itself a specialisation of romanticismand who is there to say that the romantic concept of man does not find its origin in the great European Enlightenment? Etc. In the latter perspective, however, continuities [which are] maintained on a certain level of narrative abstraction (i.e., history [or aesthetic description]) are resisted in the interests of the quiddity and discreteness of art, the space that each work or action creates around itself. – Ihab Hassan Ihab Hassan’s words, published in 1975, continue to resonate today. How should we approach art? Can an artwork ever really fully be described by its critical review, or does its description only lead to an ever multiplying succession of terms? Michel Foucault spoke of the construction of modern sexuality as being seen as the hidden, irresolvable “truth” of our subjectivity, as that secret which we must constantly speak about, and hence as an “incitement to discourse” (Foucault, History of Sexuality). Since the Romantic period, the appreciation of aesthetics has been tied to the subjectivity of the individual and to the degree an art work appeals to the individual’s sense of self: to one’s personal refinement, emotions and so on. Art might be considered part of the truth of our subjectivity which we seem to be endlessly talking about – without, however, actually ever resolving the issue of what a great art work really is (anymore than we have resolved the issue of what natural sexuality is). It is not my aim to explicate the relationship between art and sex but to re-inject a strategic understanding of discourse, as Foucault understood it, back into commonplace, contemporary aesthetic criticism. The problems in rendering into words subjective, emotional experiences and formal aesthetic criteria continue to dog criticism today. The chief hindrances to contemporary criticism remain such institutional factors as the economic function of newspapers. Given their primary function as tools for the selling of advertising space, newspapers are inherently unsuited to sustaining detailed, informed dialogue on any topic – be it international politics or aesthetics. As it is, reviews remain short, quickly written pieces squeezed into already overloaded arts pages. This does not prevent skilled, caring writers and their editorial supporters from ensuring that fine reviews are published. In the meantime, we muddle through as best we can. I argue that criticism, like art, should operate self-consciously as an incitement to discourse, to engagement, and so to further discussion, poetry, et cetera. The possibility of an endless recession of theoretical terms and subjective responses should not dissuade us. Rather, one should provisionally accept the instrumentality of aesthetic discourse provided one is able always to bear in mind the nominalism which is required to prevent the description of art from becoming an instrument of repression. This is to say, aesthetic criticism is clearly authored in order to demonstrate something: to argue a point, to make a fruitful comparison, and so on. This does not mean that criticism should be composed so as to dictate aesthetic taste to the reader. Instead, it should act as an invitation to further responses – much as the art work itself does. Foucault has described discourse – language, terminologies, metaphorical conceits and those logical and poetic structures which underpin them – as a form of technology (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and History of Sexuality). Different discursive forces arise in response to different cultural needs and contexts, including, indeed, those formulated not only by artists, but also by reviewers. As Hassan intimates, what is or is not “postmodernism”, for example, depends less on the art work itself – it is less a matter of an art work’s specific “quiddity” and its internal qualities – but is, rather, fundamentally dependent upon what one is trying to say about the piece. If one is trying to describe something novel in a work, something which relates it to a series of new or unusual forms which have become dominant within society since World War Two, then the term “postmodernism” most usefully applies. This, then, would entail breaking down the “the space that each work … creates around itself” in order to emphasise horizontal “continuities”. If, on the other hand, the critic wishes to describe the work from the perspective of historical developments, so as to trace the common features of various art works across a genealogical pattern running from Romanticism to the present day, one must de-emphasise the quiddity of the work in favour of vertical continuities. In both cases, however, the identification of common themes across various art works so as to aid in the description of wider historical or aesthetic conditions requires a certain “abstraction” of the qualities of the aesthetic works in question. The “postmodernism”, or any other quality, of a single art work thus remains in the eye of the beholder. No art work is definitively “postmodern” as such. It is only “postmodern” inasmuch as this description aids one in understanding a certain aspect of the piece and its relationship to other objects of analysis. In short, the more either an art work or its critical review elides full descriptive explication, the more useful reflections which might be voiced in its wake. What then is the instrumental purpose of the arts review as a genre of writing? For liberal humanist critics such as Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom, the role of the critic is straight forward and authoritative. Great art is said to be imbued with the spirit of humanity; with the very essence of our common subjectivity itself. Critics in this mode seek the truth of art and once it has been found, they generally construct it as unified, cohesive and of great value to all of humanity. The authors of the various avant-garde manifestoes which arose in Europe from the fin de siècle period onwards significantly complicated this ideal of universal value by arguing that such aesthetic values were necessarily abstract and so were not immediately visible within the content of the work per se. Such values were rather often present in the art work’s form and expression. Surrealism, Futurism, Supremacism, the Bauhaus and the other movements were founded upon the contention that these avant-garde art works revealed fundamental truths about the essence of human subjectivity: the imperious power of the dream at the heart of our emotional and psychic life, the geometric principles of colour and shape which provide the language for all experience of the sublime, and so on. The critic was still obliged to identify greatness and to isolate and disseminate those pieces of art which revealed the hidden truth of our shared human experience. Few influential art movements did not, in fact, have a chief theoretician to promote their ideals to the world, be it Ezra Pound and Leavis as the explicators of the works of T.S. Eliot, Martin Esslin for Beckett, or the artist her or himself, such as choreographers Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham, both of whom described in considerable detail their own methodologies to various scribes. The great challenge presented in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Hassan and others, however, is to abandon such a sense of universal aesthetic and philosophical value. Like their fellow travellers within the New Left and soixante huit-ièmes (the agitators and cultural critics of 1968 Paris), these critics contend that the idea of a universal human subjectivity is problematic at best, if not a discursive fiction, which has been used to justify repression, colonialism, the unequal institutional hierarchies of bourgeois democratic systems, and so on. Art does not therefore speak of universal human truths. It is rather – like aesthetic criticism itself – a discursive product whose value should be considered instrumentally. The kind of a critical relationship which I am proposing here might provisionally be classified as discursive or archaeological criticism (in the Foucauldian sense of tracing discursive relationships and their distribution within any given cross-section or strata of cultural life). The role of the critic in such a situation is not one of acknowledging great art. Rather, the critic’s function becomes highly strategic, with interpretations and opinions regarding art works acting as invitations to engagement, consideration and, hence, also to rejection. From the point of view of the audience, too, the critic’s role is one of utility. If a critical description prompts useful, interesting or pleasurable reflections in the reader, then the review has been effective. If it has not, it has no role to play. The response to criticism thus becomes as subjective as the response to the art work itself. Similarly, just as Marcel Duchamp’s act of inverting a urinal and calling it art showed that anyone could be an artist provided they adopted a suitably creative vision of the objects which surrounded them, so anyone and everyone is a legitimate critic of any art work addressed to him or her as an audience. The institutional power accorded to critics by merit of the publications to which they are attached should not obfuscate the fact that anyone has the moral right to venture a critical judgement. It is not actually logically possible to be “right” or “wrong” in attributing qualities to an art work (although I have had artists assert the contrary to me). I like noise art, for example, and find much to stimulate my intellect and my affect in the chaotic feedback characteristic of the work of Merzbow and others. Many others however simply find such sounds to constitute unpleasant noise. Neither commentator is “right”. Both views co-exist. What is important is how these ideas are expressed, what propositions are marshalled to support either position, and how internally cohesive are the arguments supplied by supporters of either proposition. The merit of any particular critical intervention is therefore strictly formal or expressive, lying in its rhetorical construction, rather than in the subjective content of the criticism itself, per se. Clearly, such discursive criticism is of little value in describing works devised according to either an unequivocally liberal humanist or modernist avant-garde perspective. Aesthetic criticism authored in this spirit will not identify the universal, timeless truths of the work, nor will it act as an authoritative barometer of aesthetic value. By the same token though, a recognition of pluralism and instrumentality does not necessarily entail the rejection of categories of value altogether. Such a technique of aesthetic analysis functions primarily in the realm of superficial discursive qualities and formal features, rather than subterranean essences. It is in this sense both anti-Romantic and anti-Platonic. Discursive analysis has its own categories of truth and evaluation. Similarities between works, influences amongst artists and generic or affective precedents become the primary objects of analysis. Such a form of criticism is, in this sense, directly in accord with a similarly self-reflexive, historicised approach to art making itself. Where artists are consciously seeking to engage with their predecessors or peers, to find ways of situating their own work through the development of ideas visible in other cultural objects and historic aesthetic works, then the creation of art becomes itself a form of practical criticism or praxis. The distinction between criticism and its object is, therefore, one of formal expression, not one of nature or essence. Both practices engage with similar materials through a process of reflection (Marshall, “Vertigo”). Having described in philosophical and critical terms what constitutes an unfettered, democratic and strategic model of discursive criticism, it is perhaps useful to close with a more pragmatic description of how I myself attempt to proceed in authoring such criticism and, so, offer at least one possible (and, by definition, subjective) model for discursive criticism. Given that discursive analysis itself developed out of linguistic theory and Saussure’s discussion of the structural nature of signification, it is no surprise that the primary methodology underlying discursive analysis remains that of semiotics: namely how systems of representation and meaning mutually reinforce and support each other, and how they fail to do so. As a critic viewing an art work, it is, therefore, always my first goal to attempt to identify what it is that the artist appears to be trying to do in mounting a production. Is the art work intended as a cultural critique, a political protest, an avant-garde statement, a work of pure escapism, or some other kind of project – and hence one which can be judged according to the generic forms and values associated with such a style in comparison with those by other artists who work in this field? Having determined or intuited this, several related but nominally distinct critical reflections follow. Firstly, how effectively is this intent underpinning the art work achieved, how internally consistent are the tools, forms and themes utilised within the production, and do the affective and historic resonances evoked by the materials employed therein cohere into a logical (or a deliberately fragmented) whole? Secondly, how valid or aesthetically interesting is such a project in the first place, irrespective of whether it was successfully achieved or not? In short, how does the artist’s work compare with its own apparent generic rules, precedents and peers, and is the idea behind the work a contextually valid one or not? The questions of value which inevitably come into these judgements must be weighed according to explicit arguments regarding context, history and genre. It is the discursive transparency of the critique which enables readers to mentally contest the author. Implicitly transcendental models of universal emotional or aesthetic responses should not be invoked. Works of art should, therefore, be judged according to their own manifest terms, and, so, according to the values which appear to govern the relationships which organise materials within the art work. They should also, however, be viewed from a position definitively outside the work, placing the overall concept and its implicit, underlying theses within the context of other precedents, cultural values, political considerations and so on. In other words, one should attempt to heed Hassan’s caution that all art works may be seen both from the perspective of historico-genealogical continuities, as well as according to their own unique, self-defining characteristics and intentions. At the same time, the critical framework of the review itself – while remaining potentially dense and complex – should be as apparent to the reader as possible. The kind of criticism which I author is, therefore, based on a combination of art-historical, generic and socio-cultural comparisons. Critics are clearly able to elaborate more parallels between various artistic and cultural activities than many of their peers in the audience simply because it is the profession of the former to be as familiar with as wide a range of art-historical, cultural and political materials as is possible. This does not, however, make the opinions of the critic “correct”, it merely makes them more potentially dense. Other audiences nevertheless make their own connections, while spectators remain free to state that the particular parallels identified by the critic were not, to their minds, as significant as the critic would contend. The quantity of knowledge from which the critic can select does not verify the accuracy of his or her observations. It rather enables the potential richness of the description. In short, it is high time critics gave up all pretensions to closing off discourse by describing aesthetic works. On the contrary, arts reviewing, like arts production itself, should be seen as an invitation to further discourse, as a gift offered to those who might want it, rather than a Leavisite or Bloom-esque bludgeon to instruct the insensitive masses as to what is supposed to subjectively enlighten and uplift them. It is this sense of engagement – between critic, artist and audience – which provides the truly poetic quality to arts criticism, allowing readers to think creatively in their own right through their own interaction with a collaborative process of rumination on aesthetics and culture. In this way, artists, audiences and critics come to occupy the same terrain, exchanging views and constructing a community of shared ideas, debate and ever-multiplying discursive forms. Ideally, written criticism would come to occupy the same level of authority as an argument between an audience member and a critic at the bar following the staging of a production. I admit myself that even my best written compositions rarely achieve the level of playful interaction which such an environment often provokes. I nevertheless continue to strive for such a form of discursive exchange and bibulous poetry. References Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1903-27, published as 2 series. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1972. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. ———. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992. Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Hassan, Ihab. “Joyce, Beckett and the Postmodern Imagination.” Triquarterly 32.4 (1975): 192ff. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Dominant of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Leavis, F.R. F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents. Eds. Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Malevich, Kazimir. In Penny Guggenheim, ed. Art of This Century – Drawings – Photographs – Sculpture – Collages. New York: Art Aid, 1942. Marshall, Jonathan. “Documents in Australian Postmodern Dance: Two Interviews with Lucy Guerin,” in Adrian Kiernander, ed. Dance and Physical Theatre, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 41 (October 2002): 102-33. ———. “Operatic Tradition and Ambivalence in Chamber Made Opera’s Recital (Chesworth, Horton, Noonan),” in Keith Gallasch and Laura Ginters, eds. Music Theatre in Australia, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 45 (October 2004): 72-96. ———. “Vertigo: Between the Word and the Act,” Independent Performance Forums, series of essays commissioned by Not Yet It’s Difficult theatre company and published in RealTime Australia 35 (2000): 10. Merzbow. Venereology. Audio recording. USA: Relapse, 1994. Richards, Alison, Geoffrey Milne, et al., eds. Pearls before Swine: Australian Theatre Criticism, special edition of Meajin 53.3 (Spring 1994). Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. by Barbara Wright. London: Calder, 1992. Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Ed. Melissa Harris. New York: Aperture, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Marshall, Jonathan. "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>. APA Style Marshall, J. (Oct. 2005) "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. 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New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

It was always based on a teenage love story between the two kids. One is a sniffer and one is not. It was designed for Central Australia because we do write these kids off there. Not only in town, where the headlines for the newspapers every second day is about ‘the problem,’ ‘the teenager problem of kids wandering the streets’ and ‘why don’t we send them back to their communities’ and that sort of stuff. Then there’s the other side of it. Elders in Aboriginal communities have been taught that kids who sniff get brain damage, so as soon as they see a kid sniffing they think ‘well they’re rubbish now, they’re brain damaged.’ So the elders are writing these kids off as well, as in ‘they are brain damaged so they’re no use now, they’ll be in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.’ This is not true, it’s just information for elders that hasn’t been given to them. That is the world I was working with. I wanted to show two incredibly beautiful children who have fought all their lives just to breathe and how incredibly strong they are and how we should be celebrating them and backing them up. I wanted to show that to Central Australia, and if the rest of Australia or the world get involved that’s fantastic. (Thornton in interview)Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah won the hearts of Australians as well as a bag of awards — and rightly so. It is a breathtaking film that, as review after review will tell you, is about the bravery, hopelessness, optimism and struggles of two Indigenous youths. In telling this story, the film extends, inverts and challenges notions of waste: wasted youths, wasted memory, wasted history, wasted opportunities, getting wasted and wasted voices. The narrative and the film as a cultural object raise questions about being discarded and “the inescapable fact that the experience of catastrophe in the past century can only be articulated from its remains, our history sifted from among these storied deposits.” (Neville and Villeneuve 2). The purpose of this paper is to examine reaction to the film, and where this reaction has positioned the film in Australian filmmaking history. In reading the reception of the film, I want to consider the film’s contribution to dialogical cultural representations by applying Marcia Langton’s idea of intersubjectivity.In his review, Sean Gorman argues thatThe main reason for the film’s importance is it enables white Australians who cannot be bothered reading books or engaging with Indigenous Australians in any way (other than watching them play football perhaps) the smallest sliver of a world that they have no idea about. The danger however in an engagement by settler society with a film like Samson and Delilah is that the potential shock of it may be too great, as the world which it portrays is, for many, an unknown Australia. Hence, for the settler filmgoer, the issues that the film discusses may be just too hard, too unreal, and their reaction will be limited to perhaps a brief bout of anger or astonishment followed by indifference. (81.1)It is this “engagement by settler society” that I wish to consider: how the voices that we hear speaking about the film are shifting attention from the ‘Other’ to more dialogical cultural representations, that is, non-Indigenous Australia’s emerging awareness of what has previously been wasted, discarded and positioned as valueless. I find Gorman’s surmise of white Australia’s shock with a world they know nothing about, and their potential power to return to a state of indifference about it, to be an interesting notion. Colonisation has created the world that Samson and Delilah live in, and the white community is as involved as the Indigenous one in the struggles of Samson and Delilah. If “settler” society is unaware, that unawareness comes from a history of non-Indigenous power that denies, excludes, and ignores. For this reason, Samson and Delilah is a dialogical cultural representation: it forces a space where the mainstream doesn’t just critique the Aborigine, but their own identity and involvement in the construction of that critique.Wasted VoicesWaste is a subjective notion. Items that some discard and perceive as valueless can be of importance to others, and then it also becomes a waste not to acknowledge or use that item. Rather than only focusing on the concept of “waste” as items or materials that are abandoned, I wish to consider the value in what is wasted. Centring my discussion of ‘waste’ on Thornton’s film provides the opportunity to view a wasteland of dispossession from another cultural and social perspective. Reaction to the film has constructed what could be perceived as an exceptional moment of engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices in dialogic intercultural dialogue. By revisiting early examples of ethnographic collaboration, and re-examining contemporary reactions to Samson and Delilah, I hope to forge a space for intervention in Australian film criticism that focuses on how ‘non-Aboriginality’ depends on ‘Aboriginality’ in a vast wasteland of colonial dispossession and appropriation.Many of the reviews of Thornton’s film (Buckmaster; Collins; Davis; Gorman; Hall; Isaac; Ravier; Redwood; Rennie; Simpson) pay attention to the emotional reaction of non-Indigenous viewers. Langton states that historically non-Indigenous audiences know ‘the Aborigine’ through non-Indigenous representations and monologues about Aboriginality: “In film, as in other media, there is a dense history of racist, distorted and often offensive representation of Aboriginal people” (24). The power to define has meant that ethnographic discourses in the early days of colonisation established their need to record Indigenous peoples, knowledges and traditions before they ‘wasted away.’ At the 1966 Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area, Stanley Hawes recounts how Ian Dunlop, an Australian documentary filmmaker, commented that “someone ought to film the aborigines of the Western Desert before it was too late. They had already almost all disappeared or gone to live on Mission stations” (69). This popular belief was one of the main motivations for research on Indigenous peoples and led to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow,” which maintained that since Aborigines were a dying race, they should be allowed to all die out peacefully (Chandra-Shekeran 120). It was only the ‘real’ Aborigine that was valued: the mission Black, the urban Black, the assimilated Black, was a waste (Cowlishaw 108). These representations of Aboriginality depended on non-Indigenous people speaking about Aboriginality to non-Indigenous people. Yet, the impetus to speak, as well as what was being spoken about, and the knowledge being discussed and used, relied on Indigenous voices and presences. When Australia made its “important contribution to ethnographic films of its Aborigines” (McCarthy 81), it could not have done so without the involvement of Indigenous peoples. In her work on intersubjectivity, Langton describes “Aboriginality” as a “social thing” that is continually remade through dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation. She describes three broad categories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity: when Aboriginal people interact with other Aboriginal people; when non-Aboriginal people stereotype, iconise, and mythologise Aboriginal people without any Aboriginal contact; and when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in dialogue (81). Since W. Baldwin Spencer’s first ethnographic film, made between 1901 and 1912, which recorded the customs of the Aranda and neighbouring Central Australian tribes (McCarthy 80), the development of Australian cinema depended on these categories of intersubjectivity. While the success of Samson and Delilah could be interpreted as opening mainstream eyes to the waste that Indigenous communities have experienced since colonisation — wasted knowledge, wasted youths, wasted communities — it could also signify that what was once perceived by dominant non-Indigenous society as trash is now viewed as treasure. Much like the dot paintings which Delilah and her nana paint in exchange for a few bucks, and which the white man then sells for thousands of dollars, Aboriginal stories come to us out of context and filtered through appropriation and misinterpretation.Beyond its undeniable worth as a piece of top-notch filmmaking, Samson and Delilah’s value also resides in its ability to share with a wide audience, and in a language we can all understand, a largely untold story steeped in the painful truth of this country’s bloody history. (Ravier)In reading the many reviews of Samson and Delilah, it is apparent there is an underlying notion of such a story being secret, and that mainstream Australia chose to engage with the film’s dialogical representation because it was sharing this secret. When Ravier states that Aboriginal stories are distorted by appropriation and misinterpretation, I would add that such stories are examples of Langton’s second category of intersubjectivity: they reveal more about the processes of non-Indigenous constructions of ‘the Aborigine’ and the need to stereotype, iconise and mythologise. These processes have usually involved judgements about what is to be retained as ‘valuable’ in Indigenous cultures and knowledges, and what can be discarded — in the same way that the film’s characters Samson and Delilah are discarded. The secret that Samson and Delilah is sharing with white Australia has never been a secret: it is that non-Indigenous Australia chooses what it wants to see or hear. Wasted SilencesIn 1976 Michael Edols directed and produced Floating about the Mowanjum communities experiences of colonisation, mission life and resistance. That same year Alessandro Cavadini directed and Carolyn Strachan produced Protected, a dramatised documentary about life on the Queensland Aboriginal reserve of Palm Island — “a dumping ground for unwanted persons or those deemed to be in need of ‘protection’” (Treole 38). Phillip Noyce’s Backroads, a story about the hardships facing a young man from a reserve in outback New South Wales, was released in 1977. In 1979, Essie Coffey produced and directed My Survival as an Aboriginal, where she documented her community’s struggles living under white domination. Two Laws, a feature film made by four of the language groups around Borroloola in 1981, examines the communities’ histories of massacre, dispossession and institutionalisation. These are just some of many films that have dealt with the ‘secrets’ about Indigenous peoples. In more recent times the work of Noyce, Rolf de Heer, Stephen Johnson, Iven Sen, Rachel Perkins and Romaine Moreton, to name only a few, have inspired mainstream engagement with films representing Indigenous experiences and knowledges. “We live in a world in which, increasingly, people learn of their own and other cultures and histories through a range of visual media — film, television, and video,” writes Faye Ginsburg (5). Changing understandings of culture and representation means that there appears to be a shift away from the “monologic, observational and privileged Western gaze” towards more dialogic, reflexive and imaginative mediation. Perhaps Samson and Delilah’s success is partly due to its contribution to social action through compelling the non-Indigenous viewer to “revise our comfortable and taken for granted narrative conventions that fetishise the text and reify ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference.’ Instead, we — as producers, audiences, and ethnographers — are challenged to comprehend the multiple ways that media operate as a site where culture is produced, contested, mediated and continually re-imagined” (Ginsburg 14). In his review, Tom Redwood writes about the filmLike life in the desert, everything is kept to a minimum here and nothing is wasted. ... Perhaps it took an Indigenous filmmaker from Alice Springs to do this, to lead the way in reinstating meaningfulness and honesty as core values in Australian cinema. But, whatever the case, Thornton's Indigenous heritage won't make his difficult vision any easier for local audiences to swallow. Most Australians aren't used to this degree of seriousness at the movies and though many here will embrace Samson and Delilah, there will no doubt also be a minority who, unable to reject the film as a cultural curiosity, will resist its uncompromising nature with cries of 'pessimism!' or even 'reverse-racism!’ (28-29)Perhaps the film’s success has to do with the way the story is told? — “everything kept to a minimum” and “nothing is wasted.” In attempts to construct Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity in previous representations perhaps language, words, English got in the way of communication? For mainstream white Australian society’s engagement in dialogic representations, for Indigenous voices to speak and be heard, for non-Indigenous monologues to be challenged, perhaps silence was called for? As the reviews for the film have emphasised, non-Indigenous reactions contribute to the dialogic nature of the film, its story, as well as its positioning as a site of cultural meaning, social relations, and power. Yet even while critiquing constructions of Aboriginality, non-Aboriginality has historically remained uncritiqued—non-Aboriginal endorsement and reaction is discussed, but what this reaction and engagement, or lack of engagement (whether because of ignorance, unawareness, or racism) reveals is not. That is, non-Aboriginality has not had to critique the power it has to continue to remain ignorant of stories about wasted Indigenous lives. Thornton’s film appears to have disrupted this form of non-engagement.With the emergence of Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers, ethnographic films have been reconceptualised in terms of aesthetics, cultural observations and epistemological processes. By re-exploring the history of ethnographic film making and shifting attention from constructions of the ‘other’ to reception by the mainstream, past films, past representations of colonisation, and past dialogues will not be wasted. With the focus on constructing Aboriginality, the cultural value of non-Aboriginality has remained unquestioned and invisible. By re-examining the reactions of mainstream Australians over the last one hundred years in light of the success of Samson and Delilah, cultural and historical questions about ‘the Aborigine’ can be reframed so that the influence Indigenous discourses have in Australian nation-building will be more apparent. The reception of Samson and Delilah signifies the transformational power in wasted voices, wasted dialogues and the wasted opportunities to listen. Wasted DialoguesFelicity Collins argues that certain “cinematic events that address Indigenous-settler relations do have the capacity to galvanise public attention, under certain conditions” (65). Collins states that after recent historical events, mainstream response to Aboriginal deprivation and otherness has evoked greater awareness of “anti-colonial politics of subjectivity” (65). The concern here is with mainstream Australia dismantling generations of colonialist representations and objectifications of the ‘other.’ What also needs to be re-examined is the paradox and polemic of how reaction to Aboriginal dispossession and deprivation is perceived. Non-Indigenous reaction remains a powerful framework for understanding, viewing and positioning Indigenous presence and representation — the power to see or not to see, to hear or to ignore. Collins argues that Samson and Delilah, along with Australia (Luhrmann, 2009) and First Australians (Perkins, 2008), are national events in Australian screen culture and that post-apology films “reframe a familiar iconography so that what is lost or ignored in the incessant flow of media temporality is precisely what invites an affective and ethical response in cinematic spaces” (75).It is the notion of reframing what is lost or ignored to evoke “ethical responses” that captures my attention; to shift the gaze from Aboriginal subjectivity, momentarily, to non-Aboriginal subjectivity and examine how choosing to discard or ignore narratives of violence and suffering needs to be critiqued as much as the film, documentary or representation of Indigenality. Perhaps then we can start to engage in dialogues of intersubjectivity rather than monologues about Aboriginality.I made [Samson and Delilah] for my mob but I made sure that it can work with a wider audience as well, and it’s just been incredible that it’s been completely embraced by a much wider audience. It’s interesting because as soon as you knock down that black wall between Aboriginals and white Australia, a film like this does become an Australian film and an Australian story. Not an Aboriginal story but a story about Australians, in a sense. It’s just as much a white story as it is a black one when you get to that position. (Thornton in interview)When we “get to that position” described by Thornton, intercultural and intersubjective dialogue allows both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality to co-exist. When a powerful story of Indigenous experiences and representations becomes perceived as an Australian story, it provides a space for what has historically been ignored and rendered invisible to become visible. It offers a different cultural lens for all Australians to question and critique notions of value and waste, to re-assess what had been relegated to the wasteland by ethnographic editing and Westernised labels. Ever since Spencer, Melies, Abbie and Elkin decided to retain an image of Aboriginality on film, which they did with specific purposes and embedded values, it has been ‘the Aborigine’ that has been dissected and discussed. It would be a waste not to open this historiography up to include mainstream reaction, or lack of reaction, in the development of cultural and cinematic critique. A wasteland is often perceived as a dumping ground, but by re-visiting that space and unearthing, new possibilities are discovered in that wasteland, and more complex strategies for intersubjectivity are produced. At the centre of Samson and Delilah is the poverty and loss that Indigenous communities experience on a daily basis. The experiences endured by the main characters are not new or recent ones and whether cinematic reception of them produces guilt, pity, sympathy, empathy, fear or defensiveness, it is the very potential to be able to react that needs to be critiqued. As Williamson Chang points out, the “wasteland paradigm is invisible to those embedded in its structure” (852). By looking more closely at white society’s responses in order to discern more clearly if they are motivated by feelings that their wealth—whether material, cultural or social—or their sense of belonging is being challenged or reinforced then ruling values and epistemologies are challenged and dialogic negotiations engaged. If dominant non-Indigenous society has the power to classify Indigenous narratives and representation as either garbage or something of value, then colonialist structures remain intact. If they have the self-reflexive power to question their own response to Indigenous narratives and representations, then perhaps more anti-colonial discourses emerge. Notions of value and waste are tied to cultural hierarchies, and it is through questioning how a dominant culture determines value that processes of transformation and mediation take place and the intersubjective dialogue sparked by Samson and Delilah can continueIn her review of Samson and Delilah, Therese Davis suggests that the film brings people closer to truthfulness, forcing the audience to engage with that realism: “those of us ‘outside’ of the community looking in can come to know ourselves differently through the new languages of this film, both cultural and cinematic. Reformulating the space of the national from an ‘insider,’ Aboriginal community-based perspective, the film positions its spectators, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in a shared space, a space that allows for new forms of attachment, involvement and self-knowledge, new lines of communication.” Davis goes on to caution that while the film is groundbreaking, the reviews situating the film as what Australian cinema should be need to be mindful of feeding “notions of anti-diversity, which “is an old debate in Australian Cinema Studies, but in this instance anti-diversity is doubly problematic because it also runs the risk of narrowly defining Indigenous cinema.” The danger, historically, is that anything Indigenous, has always been narrowly defined by the mainstream and yes, to continue to limit Indigenous work in any medium is colonising and problematic. However, rather than just caution against this reaction, I am suggesting that reaction itself be critiqued. While currently contemporary mainstream response to Samson and Delilah is one of adoration, is the centre from which it comes the same centre which less than fifty years ago critiqued Indigenous Australians as a savage, noble, and/or dying race wasting away? Davis writes that the film constructs a new “relation” in Australian cinema but that it should not be used as a marker against which “all new (and old) Indigenous cinema is measured.” This concern resembles, in part, my concern that until recently mainstream society has constructed their own markers of Aboriginal cultural authenticity, deciding what is to be valued and what can be discarded. I agree with Davis’s caution, yet I cannot easily untangle the notion of ‘measuring.’ As a profound Australian film, certainly cinematic criticism will use it as a signifier of ‘quality.’ But by locating it singularly in the category of Indigenous cinema, the anti-colonial and discursive Indigenous discourses the film deploys and evokes are limited to the margins of Australian film and film critique once more. After considering the idea of measuring, and asking who would be conducting this process of measuring, my fear is that the gaze returns to ‘the Aborigine’ and the power to react remains solely, and invisibly, with the mainstream. Certainly it would be a waste to position the film in such a way that limits other Indigenous filmmakers’ processes, experiences and representations. I see no problem with forcing non-Indigenous filmmakers, audiences and perceptions to have to ‘measure’ up as a result of the film. It would be yet another waste if they didn’t, and Samson and Delilah was relegated to being simply a great ‘Indigenous Australian film,’ instead of a great Australian film that challenges, inverts and re-negotiates the construction of both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality. By examining reaction to the film, and not just reading the film itself, discussions of dialogical cultural representation can include non-Aboriginality as well as Aboriginality. Films like this are designed to create a dialogue and I’m happy if someone doesn’t like the film and they tell me why, because we’re creating dialogue. We’re talking about this stuff and taking a step forward. That’s important. (Thornton)The dialogue opened up by the success of Thornton’s beautiful film is one that also explores non-Aboriginality. If we waste the opportunity that Samson and Delilah provides, then Australia’s ongoing cinematic history will remain a wasteland, and many more Indigenous voices, stories, and experiences will continue to be wasted.ReferencesBuckmaster, Luke. “Interview with Warwick Thornton”. Cinetology 12 May 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/12/interview-with-warwick-thornton-writerdirector-of-samson-delilah›.———. “Samson and Delilah Review: A Seminal Indigenous Drama of Gradual and Menacing Beauty”. Cinetology 6 May 2009. 14 June 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/06/samson-delilah-film-review-a-seminal-indigenous-drama-of-gradual-and-menacing-beauty›.Chang, Williamson, B. C. “The ‘Wasteland’ in the Western Exploitation of ‘Race’ and the Environment”. University of Colorado Law Review 849 (1992): 849-870.Chandra-Shekeran, Sangeetha. “Challenging the Fiction of the Nation in the ‘Reconciliation’ Texts of Mabo and Bringing Them Home”. The Australian Feminist Law Journal 11 (1998): 107-133.Collins, Felicity. “After the Apology: Reframing Violence and Suffering in First Australians, Australia and Samson and Delilah”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24.3 (2010): 65-77.Cowlishaw, Gillian, K. “Censoring Race in ‘Post-Colonial’ Anthropology”. Critique of Anthropology 20.2 (2000): 101-123. Davis, Therese. “Love and Marginality in Samson and Delilah”. Senses of Cinema 57 (2009). 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/09/51/samson-and-delilah.html›. Ginsburg, Faye. “Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic”. Anthropology Today 10.2 (1994): 5-15.Gorman, Sean. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. History Australia 6.3 (2009): 81.1-81.2.Hall, Sandra. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. Sydney Morning Herald. 7 May 2009. Hawes, Stanley. “Official Government Production”. Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area. Canberra: Australian National Advisory Committee, 1966. 62-71.Isaac, Bruce. “Screening ‘Australia’: Samson and Delilah”. Screen Education 54 (2009): 12-17. Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television...: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.McCarthy, F. D “Ethnographic Research Films” Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area Australian National Advisory Committee (1966): 80-85.Neville, Brian, and Johanne Villeneuve. Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. Albany: State U of New York P., 2002.Ravier, Matt. “Review: Samson and Delilah”. In Film Australia. 2009. 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.infilm.com.au/?p=802›.Redwood, Tom. “Warwick Thornton and Kath Shelper on Making Samson and Delilah”. Metro 160 (2009): 31.Rennie, Ellie. “Samson and Delilah under the Stars in Alice Springs”. Crikey 27 Apr. 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹ http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/27/samson-and-delilah-under-the-stars-in-alice-springs/›.Samson and Delilah. Dir. Warwick Thornton. Footprint Films, 2009. Treole, Victoria. Australian Independent Film. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1982.

This variable describes what kind of concept of culture underlies the cultural coverage at a certain point of time or across time. The variable dissects the concept of culture into cultural forms that are being journalistically covered. It presupposes that each article predominantly focuses on one cultural genre or discipline, such as literature, music, or film, which is the case in most articles in the cultural beat that are written according to cultural journalists’ areas of specialization. By identifying the cultural forms covered, the variable delivers an answer to the question of what kind of culture has been covered, or what kind of culture has been represented. Forms of culture are sometimes also called artistic or cultural disciplines (Jaakkola, 2015) or cultural genres (Purhonen et al., 2019), and cultural classification (Janssen et al., 2011) or cultural hierarchy (Schmutz, 2009). The level of detail varies from study to study, according to the need of knowledge, with some scholars tracing forms of subculture (Schmutz et al., 2010), while others just identify the overall development of major cultural forms (Purhonen et al., 2019; Jaakkola, 2015a). The concepts of culture can roughly be defined as being dominated by high cultural, popular cultural, or everyday cultural forms (Kristensen, 2019). While most culture sections in newspapers are dominated by high culture, and the question is rather about which disciplines, in the operationalization it is not always easy to draw lines between high and popular forms in the postmodern cultural landscape where boundaries are being blurred. Nevertheless, the major forms of culture in the journalistic operationalization of culture are literature, classical music, theatre, and fine arts. As certain forms of culture – such as classical music and opera – are focused on classical high culture, and other forms – such as popular music and comics – represent popular forms, distribution of coverage according to cultural forms may indicate changes in the cultural concept. Field of application/theoretical foundation The question of the concept of culture is a standard question in content analyses on arts and cultural journalism in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, posed by a number of studies conducted in different geographical areas and often with a comparative intent (e.g., Szántó et al., 2004; Janssen, 1999; Reus & Harden, 2005; Janssen et al., 2008; Larsen, 2008; Kõnno et al., 2012; Jaakkola, 2015a, 2015b; Verboord & Janssen, 2015; Purhonen et al., 2019; Widholm et al., 2019). The essence of culture has been theorized in cultural studies, predominantly by Raymond Williams (e.g., 2011), and sociologists of art (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). In studying journalistic coverage of arts and culture, the concept of culture reveals the anatomy of coverage and whether the content is targeting a broader audience (inclusive concept of culture) or a narrow audience (exclusive or elitist concept of culture). A prevalent motivation to study the ontological dimension of cultural coverage is also to trace cultural change, which means that the concept of culture is longitudinally studied (Purhonen et al., 2019). References/combination with other methods of data collection Concept of culture often occurs as a variable to trace cultural change. The variable is typically coupled with other variables, mainly with representational means, i.e., the journalistic genre (Jaakkola, 2015), event type (Stegert, 1998), or author gender (Schmutz, 2009; Jaakkola, 2015b). Quantitative content analyses may also be complemented with qualitative analyses (Purhonen et al., 2019). Sample operationalization Cultural forms are separated according to the production structure (journalists and reviewers specializing in one cultural form typically indicate an increase of coverage for that cultural form). At a general level, the concept of culture can be divided into the following cultural forms: literature, music – which is, according to the newsroom specialization typically roughly categorized into classical and popular music – visual arts, theatre, dance, film, design, architecture and built environment, media, comics, cultural politics, cultural history, arts education, and other. Subcategories can be separated according to the interest and level of knowledge. The variable needs to be sensitive towards local features in journalism and culture. Example study Jaakkola (2015b) Information about Jaakkola, 2015 Author: Maarit Jaakkola Research question/research interest: Examination of the cultural concept across time in culture sections of daily newspapers Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat) Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008) Info about variable Variable name/definition: Concept of culture Unit of analysis: Article/text item Values: Cultural form Description 1. Fiction literature Fiction books: fictional genres such as poetry, literary novels, thrillers, detective novels, children’s literature, etc. 2. Non-fiction literature Non-fiction books: non-fictional genres such as textbooks, memoirs, encyclopedias, etc. 3. Classical music Music of more high-cultural character, such as symphonic music, chamber music, opera, etc. 4. Popular music Music of more popular character, such as pop, rock, hip-hop, folk music, etc. 5. Visual arts Fine arts: painting, drawing, graphical art, sculpture, media art, photography, etc. 6. Theatre Scene art, including musicals (if not treated as music, i.e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 7. Dance Scene art, including ballet (if not treated as music, .e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 8. Film Cinema: fiction, documentary, experimental film, etc. 9. Design Design of artefacts, jewelry, fashion, interiors, graphics, etc. 10. Architecture Design, aesthetics, and planning of built environment 11. Media Television, journalism, Internet, games, etc. 12. Comics Illustrated periodicals 13. Cultural politics Policies, politics, and administration concerning arts and culture in general 14. Cultural history Historical issues and phenomena 15. Education Educational issues concerning different cultural disciplines 16. Other Miscellaneous minor categories, e.g., lifestyle issues (celebrity, gossip, everyday cultural issues), and larger categories developed from within the material can be separated into values of their own Scale: nominal Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders) References Jaakkola, M. (2015a). The contested autonomy of arts and journalism: Change and continuity in the dual professionalism of cultural journalism. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Jaakkola, M. (2015b). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402. Janssen, S. (1999). Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965–1990. Poetics 26(5–6), 329–348. Janssen, S., Kuipers, G., & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 719–740. Janssen, S., Verboord, M., & Kuipers, G. (2011). Comparing cultural classification: High and popular arts in European and U.S. elite newspapers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63(51), 139–168. Kõnno, A., Aljas, A., Lõhmus, M., & Kõuts, R. (2012). The centrality of culture in the 20th century Estonian press: A longitudinal study in comparison with Finland and Russia. Nordicom Review, 33(2), 103–117. Kristensen, N. N. (2019). Arts, culture and entertainment coverage. In T. P. Vos & F. Hanusch (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies. Wiley-Blackwell. Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Meridian Books. Larsen, L. O. (2008). Forskyvninger. Kulturdekningen i norske dagsaviser 1964–2005 [Displacements: Cultural coverage in Norwegian dailies 1964–2005]. In K. Knapskog & L.O. Larsen (Eds.), Kulturjournalistikk: pressen og den kulturelle offentligheten (pp. 283–329). Scandinavian Academic Press. Purhonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Karademir Hazir, I., Lauronen, T., Rodríguez, C. F., & Gronow, J. (2019). Enter culture, exit arts? The transformation of cultural hierarchies in European newspaper culture sections, 1960–2010. Routledge. Reus, G., & Harden, L. (2005). Politische ”Kultur”: Eine Längsschnittanalyse des Zeitungsfeuilletons von 1983 bis 2003 [Political ‘culture’: A longitudinal analysis of culture pages, 1983–2003]. Publizistik, 50(2), 153–172. Schmutz, V. (2009). Social and symbolic boundaries in newspaper coverage of music, 1955–2005: Gender and genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Poetics, 37(4), 298–314. Schmutz, V., van Venrooij, A., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2010). Change and continuity in newspaper coverage of popular music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Popular Music and Society, 33(4), 505–515. Stegert, G. (1998). Feuilleton für alle: Strategien im Kulturjournalismus der Presse [Feuilleton for all: Strategies in cultural journalism of the daily press]. Max Niemeyer Verlag. Szántó, A., Levy, D. S., & Tyndall, A. (Eds.). (2004). Reporting the arts II: News coverage of arts and culture in America. National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP). Verboord, M., & Janssen, J. (2015). Arts journalism and its packaging in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1955–2005. Journalism Practice, 9(6), 829–852. Widholm, A., Riegert, K., & Roosvall, A. (2019). Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades. Journalism. Advance online publication August, 6. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919866077 Williams, R. (2011). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Routledge. (Original work published 1976).

Me? "I" am everywhere. The 'self' permeates contemporary culture. Through capitalist individualism and conservative politics, 'self' must be considered first above the needs of the group - "looking after no. 1". In therapeutic, religious and consumerist discourses of self-improvement, self-help or self-actualisation, 'self' is obscured; an entity which needs to be sought and found, changed or accommodated, an entity which one needs to become "in touch with". Within these permutations "self" carries the assumption of its own existence, as either a stable, unchanging entity or as a contextually sensitive and dynamic identity. We invited submissions on the broad subject of "self" and were overwhelmed by the range and ambition of responses tendered. As a result, the "Self" issue of M/C contains a Feature Article and three sub-sections: 1. Performances and the Public Self, 2. The Self and the Physical, and 3. Representing Selves, Consuming Selves. We are very pleased to have Michael Clyne as the feature writer for this issue. "Saving Us From Them -- The Discourse of Exclusion on Asylum Seekers" is a timely and relevant critique of the rhetoric currently being adopted by Australian political leaders and the media around asylum seekers. Clyne discusses the negative construction of asylum seekers through this public discourse, particularly focussing on various events such as the "children overboard" affair. The use of such terms as "queue jumpers" and "border protection" are examined to reveal an exclusionary and damaging discourse which both reflects and is enacted in public attitudes and ultimately political policy. The first of our sections, "Performance and the Public Self" investigates manifestations of self across film, television, theatre and writing. Sandy Carmago, in "'Mind the Gap': The Multi-Protagonist Film Genre, Soap Opera, and the Emotive Blockbuster" explores the self in American cinema, and more particularly, in "multi-protagonist" or "emotive blockbuster" films, using the example of Magnolia. Carmago argues that although these films represent very different selves to those in mainstream (single-protagonist) action blockbusters, principally via their use of multiple protagonists, ultimately "[t]he emotive blockbuster supports rather than critiques the view of the self as isolated, solipsistic, and focused on personal rather than social distress." "Performing the Self", by Deidre Heddon, surveys performances of self, focusing on performance artists. Counter to critical claims that such autobiographical performances are solipsistic, Heddon seeks to unveil why such criticisms are so commonly levelled at performances of self, using autobiographical criticism and questions of performativity to offer alternative readings. Heddon reveals the politics and complexities of self-performativity through an exploration of personas, multiple selves and self-parody. In "Modernity and the Self: Explorations of the (Non-) Self-determining Subject in South Korean TV Dramas", Angel Lin explores the cultural constructions of self/self-determining subject in popular South Korean television programmes. Lin argues that the programmes create spaces for the contestation of contemporary notions of self, particularly the conflicts between traditional culture and the influences of Western notions of self. "What is Real? Where Fact Ends and Fiction Begins in the Writing of Paul Theroux" is Andie Miller's examination of Paul Theroux's construction of truth and self within his travel writings, particularly Fresh-Air Fiend and My Secret History. Miller describes Theroux's ability to perplex his readers by mixing fact within fiction and fantasy with non-fiction, which then influences the manner in which he is described within reviews and comments on his own public self. The first section concludes with Mark Peterson's "Choosing the Wasteland: The Social Construction of Self as Viewer in the U.S.". In this piece, Peterson attempts to resolve the contradiction between the high level of television consumption in the U.S. and the criticism of television content in individual and public discourse. Peterson suggests that the term "veging out" and its associated discourse provides a window into this paradox by allowing American consumers to construct themselves as "sensible, choice-making persons" whilst also watching large amounts of television. The second section of articles, "The Self and the Physical" revisits the mind/body dichotomy which has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years. This section begins with Paula Gardner's "The Perpetually Sick Self: The Cultural Promotion and Self-Management of Mood Illness". In this article she investigates the cultural promotion of a 'script' that assumes sick moods are possible, encouraging the self-assessment of risk and self-management of dysfunctional mood. Gardner suggests that this form of self assessment has helped to create a new, adjustable subject. Continuing the theme of self health management, Nadine Henley, in her article "The Healthy vs the Empty Self: Protective vs Paradoxical Behaviour", looks at behaviours, such as smoking, and the effectiveness of health promotions based on models which falsely assume that people are motivated to protect themselves from harm. Henley uses Cushman's concept of the hungry, empty self to explain why some people are more susceptible to cravings than others. Kerry Kid brings us back to the self's sickness in "Called to Self-care, or to Efface Self? Self-interest and Self-splitting in the Diagnostic Experience of Depression". She examines one of the primary disorders of self, clinical depression. She suggests that depression is being seen more as a "a trivial, socially manageable adjunct to the human condition of being", resulting in this condition and its drug-focussed becoming normalised. Kid is interested in the dilemma of the mind/body divide and how that affects the self/diagnosis and treatment of depressive disorders. In Derek Wallace's " 'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" the issue of the link between the physical and cerebral is again examined. Wallace succinctly links the writings of philosophers and neuroscientists on 'self', explicating the emerging view that self is "a biologically generated but illusory construction, an effect of the operation of what are called 'neural correlates of consciousness' ". Wallace supplements this view with a term he coins 'verbal correlates of consciousness' which takes into account much of the recent post-structuralist work on self. The third section of articles, "Representing Selves, Consuming Selves" traverses issues such as self-reflexivity, the socially constructed self, self-identification, consumption and photographic selves. Matt Adams, in "Ambiguity: The Reflexive Self & Alternatives" examines the attention given to reflexivity in recent theoretical accounts of contemporary selfhood, as an "increasingly central organising phenomenon in being a self." Focusing on Anthony Giddens in particular, Adams critically explores this interest in self-reflexivity. He argues that although such accounts reveal important aspects of modern self-identity, they neglect "many areas of experience relevant to the contemporary self - tradition, culture and concepts of fate, the unconscious and emotions". Adams suggests that selves are far more complex and "ambiguous" than Giddens and others suggest. Moving from contemporary selves to Victorian selves -- in "Portrait of the Self: Victorian Technologies of Identity Invention" Gabrielle Dean uses the 19th century daguerreotype to provide a captivating context for examining notions of self. Dean investigates how the photograph affects notions of self – particularly notions of authorship, objectivity, truthfulness and the public self. As Dean suggests, "[w]hat photography mummifies, distorts and murders, among other things, is the sense that the reality of the self resides in the body, the corporeal and temporal boundaries of personhood." The conception of death is irrevocably connected to questions of self. Back in the 21st century, Lelia Green begins her article "Who is Being Helped When We Help Our Self?" by revisiting the continuing dilemma of whether self-deception is possible. Green then examines the plethora of self help literature now available at most bookshops, which she links to the need to cater for "our sense of accelerating change". The final two articles in this section explore questions of self, identity and autonomy. Simone Pettigrew, in "Consumption and the Self-Concept", considers the notion of self via the self that is reflected in "consumption decisions". Pettigrew reviews the research on consumer behaviour that suggests consumer autonomy in consumption decisions. She argues that this research is "simplistic and fails to appreciate the extent to which culture influences individuals' perceptions of the desirability of different 'ways to be'; certain objects are required to communicate particular selves. In "Conflicting Concepts of Self and The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival" Ianto Ware uses the Michigan Womym's Music Festival as a context to explore the difficult socio-biological constructions of gendered selves. Ware explores the gender/identity politics inherent within notions of "collective selves" and assumptions of shared identity. In problematising the continuous creation of new social identities, Ware argues that new approaches are needed for addressing and communicating identities as fluid entities. What this collection of articles succeeds in doing is to demonstrate that the self is multitudinous and changing, along with the various stakeholders invested in these selves. Just as philosophers, social scientists, behavioural and medical scientists have been investigating the existence and significance of individual consciousness, self-perception, self-promotion and other notions of "the self" for centuries, the research included in this feature demonstrates the continuing need to do so. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Douglas, Kate and Meakins, Felicity. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Editorial.html &gt. Chicago Style Douglas, Kate and Meakins, Felicity, "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Editorial.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Douglas, Kate and Meakins, Felicity. (2002) Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Editorial.html &gt ([your date of access]).

Area Studies and Study Abroad in the 21st Century The future now belongs to societies that organize themselves for learning. - Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker, Thinking for a Living, xiii Few today would argue with the conviction that nearly every phase of our daily lives is shaped and informed by global societies, corporations, events and ideas. More than ever before, it is possible to claim that we are increasingly aware of the dynamic power and penetrating effects of global flows on information, technology, the sciences, the arts, the humanities, and languages. Borderless, spaceless and timeless, such sources of knowledge, it appears, are effortlessly digested and disseminated without clocks, calendars, or physical limitations. It is, of course, a mistake to believe that packages of “instant” knowledge that appear to wing their way at megahertz speeds in and through our earthly lives account for all or nearly all that there is to know—or, more importantly, to learn—about our communities, regions and the globe itself. On the contrary: the “knowing” about how to live, to work, to prosper, or to understand ourselves and those around us is not what educators mean when they speak of intellectual achievement and practical understanding. It is the “learning” about us, our societies and our global knowledge that lies at the heart of the international educator’s life work, and it is the learning that is the most controversial aspect of education. The act of “learning,” in fact, is less objective and more subjective, is less passive and more active, and is less superficial and more profound in each of our lives. By definition, a responsible learner is one who takes on the intellectual challenge and the social and personal obligation to leave this globe a better place for those who follow, who assumes the life work of influencing the lives of others, and who is committed to making the best of every opportunity both within the reach and beyond the vision of the mind’s eye. Study abroad has traditionally been viewed as a time of seeing and viewing, however passively, the differences and similarities of other peoples, societies and cultures. The period of knowing about what others do or say can occur at any time during one’s life; however, the “knowing” of studying abroad is accomplished in the college years prior to the accumulated knowledge about practical learning and living. In this respect, study abroad has been seen as an experience which may or may not invest the students in greater or lesser insights about the peoples, societies or cultures around them. Further, when study abroad is bound up with travel or movement from place to place, it can become a passive act, so much so that travel rather than learning becomes the goal of the study abroad experience. Simply put, the more that one travels, the more, it is argued, one learns. Furthermore, while seen as desirable for “classroom learning,” some would say that no amount of academic preparation appears to be useful in the enterprise of the travel experience, since so many experiences are unpredictable, individualized and, in some cases, arbitrary. From the perspective of study abroad, it might be said that the gods of area studies no longer completely fulfill our students’ needs, while the gods of global studies have not yet fulfilled their promises. Janus-like, international educators look in one direction at a still highly intense and valued picture of local cultures and identities, and in another direction toward an increasingly common culture, economy and society. The former appears to celebrate the differences and “uncommonness” of the human experience while the latter smoothes over the differences to underscore the commonalities and sameness of our contemporary world. The choice appears to be between the particular and the universal, the local and the global. Academic preparations, such as area studies programs, appear to be unnecessary for the individualized forms of learning, such as study abroad. Indeed, since an area studies preparation may raise or strengthen stereotypical perceptions of the overseas peoples, societies and cultures, it has been argued that it best be left aside. In this context, students are viewed as a tabula rasa on which new discoveries from living and studying overseas leave an imprint or impression. It seems that sending as many students as possible in as many directions as possible has become the dominant study abroad objective. Thus, “whole world” presentations and documentation often rely on the “other” as the learning objective with little or no attempt to discriminate or distinguish the levels of learning that such “whole world” immersion entails. In recent times, additional concerns about liability, health, safety and comfort levels have been added to the “pre-departure” orientations and training programs. The “student as self-learner” continues to be viewed and treated as a “customer knowledge-consumer” within both U.S. private and public colleges and universities. In the age of “globalization,” it is the conviction of the editors of Frontiers that knowledge consumption is only a small aspect of the 21st century international educators’ arsenal. More importantly, it will be argued in this special issue on area studies and Study Abroad that the intellectual development of the U.S. undergraduate needs to be enhanced with skills of self-learning and transdisciplinary perspectives on local and regional cultures and languages. The authors contributing to this special thematic issue of Frontiers have been asked to bring their state-of-the-art thinking on area studies to bear on the key question confronting study abroad: How does specialized understanding of geographical and cultural areas of the world enhance and strengthen undergraduate learning on and beyond our campuses? In other words, in what ways do area studies inform overseas learning through the activity of study abroad? The variety of responses demonstrates two principal ways in which area studies has begun to reformulate its goals and strategies. First, area studies reaffirms a commitment to local and regional comprehensive research and teaching, and redefines its mission in terms of the need to come to grips with local knowledge and specific social and cultural practices within a globalized world. Second, area studies specialists question long-held definitions of concepts, including those of “geographical area” and “globalization,” in order to maximize contributions to U.S. undergraduate learning. David Ludden begins our issue with a review of the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation’s understanding of the transition in area studies from the Sputnik era to the globalization era. Ludden notes the faculty dilemma in working in an “area.” He points out the political interests of the Cold War for public funding of such specialized academic skills, skills which, whether funded by the government or not, were and continue to be defined by the scholar first and then by finances. Drawing on his own experience at the South Asia Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Ludden takes the reader through the intellectual rationale for area studies, and how that rationale is being redefined in favor of stronger area studies in the present globalization era. Gregory Kulacki’s study of China and the Chinese experience points accurately to one approach to defining area studies; that is, in terms of the peoples and cultures studied. In a sense, Kulacki makes it clear that Chinese studies is “legitimate” and has authority as long as it reflects the Chinese themselves, their experiences and lives. Ann Curthoys, on the other hand, notes the growing importance of defining Australians and Australian studies not only in terms of the changing experiences of contemporary Australia, but also in terms of the demands of non-Australians, who ask for more precision in defining Australians, their history, society and cultures. Richard Beach and George Sherman take on a more difficult matter, at least from the viewpoint of U.S. faculty and students. Canada is rarely seen as a study abroad site for U.S. students, not only because of its geographical position but also for its cultural and historical proximity. The overall U.S. view, albeit unflattering, is that Canada and Canadians are very much like the U.S. and Americans, so why study in Canada? Beach and Sherman argue that history, languages, and borders do make a difference, both physically as well as culturally. Using the argument of the previous area studies specialists, they are interested in the ways that Canadians have shaped and informed their cultural and social identities in the teeth of U.S. economic and political domination in the region. The implications of globalization are, perhaps, more immediately evident in the Canadian case than in any other world region. U.S. students would do well to observe the processes of adaptation and acculturation first-hand by studying and living in Canada. James Petras gives us a broader vista of regional adaptation to the economic and political forces of globalization with his essay on Latin America. Indeed, Latin America has a dynamic similar to that of Canada due to its physical, cultural and historical proximity to the U.S. It would be a mistake to see Latin America only in terms of the north-south regional dynamics, since Europe, Asia and Africa have also shaped both past and present structures and institutions within that region in ways far more dramatic than has the United States. Study abroad, Petras reminds us, is an excellent way of learning directly about Latin American societies, cultures and politics from Latin Americans themselves, a learning that may be widely different from the official U.S. diplomatic and corporate perspectives. Finally, the very familiar world regions, such as England, offer in some cases more challenges to the U.S. undergraduate than might be expected. Jane Edwards looks at Britain and all that U.S. students may or may not know about that culture and society. The study of Britain lends itself, Edwards argues, to more than the usual challenges, due to the preconceived notions that U.S. students bring with them to, say, London. Understanding the “European-ness” of Britain and its historic relationship with continental Western Europe will justify the need to see Britain as less familiar and more complex, thus necessitating the need to study, visit and live in parts of Britain and Western Europe. In this case, the area does define the country, its identity and culture in a historical interplay of social, cultural and economic forces. David Lloyd, Philip Khoury and Russell Bova invite the reader to return to large regional perspectives through African, Middle Eastern and Russian area studies. David Lloyd presents an analysis of the broad and immediate contexts of African studies. While recognizing the difficulty of establishing consistently causal links between African studies and study abroad in Africa, he delineates the significance of local, experience-based study for the development of collaborative African studies research. Lloyd argues that the benefits of study abroad in Africa to African studies belie the relatively small number of students involved. Further, assessment for funding and other purposes needs to utilize criteria that take into account the challenges of on-site study in Africa and the depth of post-study abroad participation not just in African studies per se, but in other related areas as well. Considering the recent past of Middle East studies, Philip Khoury charts its response to post-Cold War criticism. He illustrates new directions the field is taking towards including different geographic areas, and new emphasis in organizational priorities, noting the importance of funding for providing first-hand contact for students in Middle Eastern studies with scholars from the Middle East. Khoury assesses the impact of recent historical and political events in the area on Middle Eastern studies, and looks toward more inclusive research efforts. Russell Bova examines another region that has undergone considerable political, social and economic change in the 20th century. Having moved from empire to soviet socialist states and now to a confederation of nation states, Russia and, naturally, Russian area studies, offer an excellent example of local and regional complexities both in the nomenclature of the region and in the changes in Russian studies programs. Bova illustrates the need to understand the specific dynamics of local communities in their relationship to larger administrative units such as provinces, states and national capitals. In referring to the “double transition” of contemporary Russia, Bova reminds us that globalization is both a grass roots and elite process with many unlikely “bedfellows” that is also changing more rapidly each decade than had been the case fifty years ago. Finally, Richard Falk and Nancy Kanach collaborate to discuss the ways in which globalization and study abroad are emerging in the post-Cold War period. The sudden shifts of economic and political power make our world more fragile and more difficult to comprehend without considering the “computer gap” that is rapidly leaving whole communities and even nations in a more uneven relationship with the power brokers than ever before. The need to reflect with care and precision through area studies is complemented by the additional pressing need to study, see and learn outside of the U.S. Globalization means promoting study abroad and reaffirming the strengths of local and regional studies. Taken together, these essays invite international educators to reconsider notions of learning before, during and after study abroad. The writers view study abroad as an opportunity for social and intellectual engagement with other peoples and with oneself. The essays point to a variety of ways of intellectually preparing our students for their initial encounters with sets of real-life global experiences. Reflecting on such engagement and encounters allows students to begin to formulate, with increasing sophistication, specific and general concepts about individual differences, local and regional commonalities, and the global transformations of our present era. In light of the current area studies debates, we might also reconsider approaches to pre-departure preparations, create onsite projects, and reorganize the overseas curricula of study abroad programs themselves. In particular, students can continue to benefit from area and global studies programs back on the home campus upon their return, where they can enter effectively into scholarly debates and continue the learning and personal growth that began while they were abroad. Frontiers welcomes comments and suggestions for future special issues. We see ourselves and our field of international education in greater need of close cooperation with our faculty colleagues both in terms of defining the work of international learning, and in terms of formulating and designing international or global programs. We thus invite our readers to see Frontiers as a forum for such academic exchanges, and promise that Frontiers will respond to articles, essays, book reviews and reviews of resources for study abroad with collegial interest and enthusiasm. We wish to thank especially Brian Whalen, Rhoda Borcherding and our other colleagues on the Editorial Board for their support, encouragement and assistance in completing this special issue. We are particularly pleased with the authors and their willingness to listen to our requests and comments. Thomas Ricks, Villanova University Katharine Krebs, SUNY Binghamton Michael Monahan, Macalester College Suggestions for Further Reading Altbach, Philip G. and Patti McGill Peterson, eds. Higher Education in the 21st Century: Global Challenge and National Response. IIE Research Report Number 29. Annapolis, MD: IIE Books, 1999. This slim volume focuses on principal topics for colleges and universities to consider both locally and globally. Philip Altbach and Todd Davis set the tone of the volume with their “notes for an international dialogue on higher education.” Stressing the need for practical education, the authors also raise issues about the role of technology, the increase in “internationally mobile students,” the global role of graduate education, privatization of higher education, committed faculty and the threats of “managerialized” universities. The eight responses to the opening themes address specific issues for China, India, Africa and South Africa, Latin America, Japan and Europe. The work is a very good discussion text for international educators and their area studies faculty colleagues, and also provides a theoretical basis for the design and development of overseas programs. Stephen R. Graubard, ed. “Education Yesterday, Education Tomorrow.” Daedalus. Vol. 127, No. 4 (Fall, 1998). The eleven authors of this issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences build off the Fall 1995 issue of Daedalus and its topic of “American Education: Still Separate, Still Unequal.” While neither accepting nor rejecting the thrust of A Nation at Risk, the authors look both at what has occurred over the past three decades, and at what is on the horizon for the next decade. In stressing reforms of systems and innovative ways of learning, the authors’ discussions invite the international educator to address a variety of ways in which students learn and to challenge the system in which they thrive. WWW. NAFSA.ORG/SECUSSA.WHYSTUDY In 1989, NAFSA and COUNCIL created the Whole World Committee (WWC). Initially chaired by John Sommers and now chaired by Mick Vandenberg, the WWC set out to find ways by which U.S. students could and would choose non-European overseas sites for a semester of study and learning. One of the tasks that the WWC accomplished was the creation of four area study essays on Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East. Each essay, entitled “Why Study in …,” addresses basic fears and stereotyping of the non-European world regions. The essays then focus on benefits, health and safety, “getting started,” housing, and practical learning in each of these regions. In newly-attached longer versions, the essays also have a bibliography and more informative texts. The shorter versions were published serially in Transitions Abroad. NAFSA has added two additional important essays to this website, on “Class and Study Abroad” and “An African-American in South Africa.” Overall, the readers of Frontiers will be well-advised to access the articles at the website and consider using all the essays in their pre-departure orientation training, faculty area studies discussion groups, and in welcome-back sessions for returning students. Richard Falk. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999. The thesis of Richard Falk’s critique is that “predatory globalization’ has eroded, if not altogether broken, the former social contract that was forged between state and society during the last century or so” (p. 3). The breaking of that contract resulted from the state’s “deference to the discipline of global capital” and the neglect of the common good. Falk argues that only the “massing of strong transnational social pressures on the states of the world could alter the political equation to the point where the state could sufficiently recover its autonomy in relation to the world economy.” He demonstrates the emergence of a new kind of transnational politics referred to as “globalization-from-below.” In restoring “global civil society,” this new politics will need to move forward with the project of cosmopolitan democracy, including the protection of human rights. For the international educator, creating overseas programs that allow for a better understanding of the interconnectedness of regional and global levels is an admirable goal. More important, however, are those programs that offer U.S. undergraduates insights into “world order priorities” such as global poverty, protection of the planet, the sources of transnational violence, and “responsible sovereignty” in ways rarely found in traditional classroom learning on our campuses. Mark Tessler, Jodi Nachtwey and Anne Banda. Eds. Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. This edited work addresses a wide range of issues involved in the “rational choice” versus area studies debate that is so well elucidated by David Ludden in the opening article of our special issue. Looking at the “area studies controversy” from the perspective of political scientists, the editors’ Introduction underscores questions that we international educators need to address ourselves. It is valuable to wonder about the “uses and abuses” of area studies in planning our overseas programs, or discussing the “internationalization” of our curricula. It is also critical to understand the Eurocentric and overly-simplistic approaches of the social science “rational choice” models. While agreeing that both area studies and the social science theories and methodologies are necessary for a global understanding, the present work places such questions within the context of the Middle East as a stimulus and a model for increasing the value of research about any country or region.

Nearly 50 years on from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1971), contemporary society finds itself navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This era has been described as the convergence of digitisation, robotics, artificial intelligence, globalisation—and speed (Johannessen). As such, temporality is taking on a turbulent and elusive edge. In the previous century, Toffler highlighted that technological change accelerated perceptions of time, and he predicted that by the 21st century, people would find it “increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterises our time”, where change would come about “with waves of ever accelerating speed and unprecedented impact” (18). While Toffler could not have predicted the exact nature and detail of the specificities of day-to-day life in 2019, we suggest Toffler’s characterisation marks an insightful ‘jumping off’ point for further introspection. With Toffler’s concerns in mind, this issue of M/C Journal is interested in multiple ways that digital media influences and expresses conceptions of temporality in this historical period, the final weeks of 2019. On the basis of the pieces that comprise this issue, we take this concern further to politicise the temporal figurations of media, which we propose permeate all aspects of contemporary experience. Theoretically, this position pays homage to the work performed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin more than two decades ago. In 1996, Bolter and Grusin ruminated on the “the wire”, a fictional device that was the central focus of the film Strange Days (1995), a media gadget that could mediate experience from one subject to another, “pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex” (311). For Bolter and Grusin, ‘the wire’ epitomised contemporary culture’s movement toward virtual reality, “with its goal of unmediated visual and aural experience” and they suggested that the film provided a critique of the historical mode “in which digital technologies are proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them” (313). For us, perhaps even more urgently, the wire epitomises the colonisation, infiltration and permeation of the production of temporal layers through media systems and devices into the subject’s direct experience. The wire symbolises, among many things, a simulation of the terrain of time according to the Jorge Luis Borges fable, that is, one-for-one.Contingent upon new shifts, and the academic literature which has sought to critique them thus far, in this editorial, we raise the contention that the technologies and operations of power brought about through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and its media apparatus, have exposed the subject to a multiplicity of timescapes. In doing so, these configurations have finally colonised subjective experience of time and temporality.Consequently, we have specifically featured a broad selection of articles that explore and discuss the presence of online, mobile, or streamed media as the primary means through which culture understands, expresses, and communicates the world, and ideas around temporality. The articles featured herein explore the ways in which constructs of time organise (and are organised by) other constructs such as; neoliberalism (Bianchino), relaxation (Pont), clocks (Cambpell), surveillance, biopower, narrative (Glitsos), monetisation (Grandinetti), memorialising (Wishart), time travel (Michael), utopias and dystopias (Herb). Through the spectrum of topics, we hope to elucidate to the reader the ways in which digital culture performs and generates ontological shifts that rewrite the relationship between media, time, and experience.ContemporaneityA key concern for us in this issue is the idea of ‘contemporaneity,’ which has been discussed more recently in art theory and criticism by Terry Smith, and Peter Osborne, amongst others. Both Smith and Osborne use the term to articulate the effects of contemporary globalisation, transnationalism, and post-conceptual art. Smith reminds us that in contemporary society there isthe insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities accompanied by the failure of all candidates that seek to provide the overriding temporal framework – be it modern, historical, spiritual, evolutionary, geological, scientific, globalizing, planetary. (196)As a result, artists are negotiating and critiquing multiple intersecting and contradictory time codes that pervade contemporary society in order to grapple with contemporaneity today. Yet, concerns with overlayed temporalities enter our everyday more and more, as explored through Justin Grandinetti’s piece, “A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality”, in which he interrogates mobile streaming practices and the ways in which new devices seek out every possible moment that might be monetised and ‘made productive.’Grandinetti’s concern, like the others featured in this issue, attends to the notion of time as evasive, contradictory and antonymous while forming a sense of urgency around the changing present, and also reconciling a multiplicity of time codes at play through technology today. The present is immediately written and archived through news media live feeds, GPS tracking and bio data in apps used for fitness and entertainment amongst others, while the pace of national television, print media, and local radio is folded through our daily experiences. Consequently, we’re interested in the multiple, and sometimes incompatible temporalities that emerge through the varied ways in which digital media is used to express, explore, and communicate in the world today beyond the arenas of contemporary art and art history that Smith and Osborne are primarily concerned with. ExperienceExperience is key. Experience may in fact be the key that unlocks these following conversations about time and the subject, after all, time is nothing if not experiential. Empirically, we might claim that, time is “conceived as the intervals during which events occur” (Toffler 21). However, of course one can only be if one is being in time. Through Bergson we might say that the individual’s perception of time manifests “rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time … . To each moment of our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and of all environing matter that is ‘simultaneous’ with it” (205). Time is the platform through which experience of consciousness is mediated, thus the varying manipulations of time through media apparatuses are therefore inextricable with our lived ‘everyday’.E.P. Thompson might call this our “time-sense”, a kind of “inward notation of time” (58), however this rationalisation of time is amplified and complicated by digital media, as warned by Campbell in this issue. Campbell explores the performativity of publicly writing the self on social media that commodifies experience. An inward notion of time therefore becomes inverted and publicly performed through digital media, which is a key source of anxiety and control for individuals. In Toffler’s estimation, even by as early as the 1970s the technoscience of Western culture had “released a totally new social force” and he contends that this had reshaped the collective psyche witha stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we “feel” the world around us. We no longer “feel” life as men [sic] did in the past. And this is the ultimate difference, the distinction that separates the truly contemporary man [sic] from all others. (17)While Toffler was referring to a different technological context, he serves as a reminder that digital media amplifies pre-existing effects of technology. Therefore, while autofiction and the public writing of the self is not necessarily new, it is nevertheless key to contemporary feelings of acceleration and the temporal vernacular of contemporaneity – one that exacerbates the experiences of acceleration, inertia, and how we ‘feel’ the present and our presence in the world.In this issue we also wish to note the ways in which digital culture, and perhaps in particular new media platforms and narratives that permeate our homes, appear to be directing the Western “time-sense” (Thompson 80) away from metaphors constructed through the linear trope of ‘rivers’ or ‘streams’ and toward the more complex arrangements that we suggest are more suited to metaphors of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’, as Laura Glitsos elucidates in her piece “From Rivers to Confetti: Reconfigurations of Time through New Media Landscapes”.As just one example, we might think of the multiplicity of ‘peculiar times’ built upon each other in the production, distribution, consumption and convergence of so many levels of digital media. In one sense, we might approach ‘peculiar times’ as the peculiarity of temporality in any given context. However, in another sense, we might also recognise the layering of standardisation which is then peculiar to each of the modes of production, consumption, and distribution (as laid out by Althusser and Balibar). As just one example, in the context of streaming services, we find the “flattening of historical frames” (Kaplan 144) in the scrolling back and forward on social media timelines (Powell 2). So perhaps our peculiar time speaks of the collapsing between ontological boundaries of past, present, and future—a kind of contemporaneity that splits between the peculiarities of production and consumption of digital media.StandardisationHistoriographies of time-sense in the Western tradition have been covered by thinkers as diverse as E.P. Thompson, Graeme Davidson, Bernard Stiegler, and Henri Lefebvre. While it is not our aim to repeat those narratives here, we concede some markers are crucial to note in order to set the context for our selected pieces. Beginning in the early- to mid- middle ages in Europe, up until the spread of clocks in the 14th century, time was largely related to processes, tasks or stages of light during the day, and time does still continues to exist in this way for some communities (Thompson 58). During this era, and of even back to the third century BCE, there were time-keeping technologies which could measure smaller increments of the day, such as the water-clock, the sun-dial, and the hour-glass, but everyday activities for the working people were largely regulated by natural or circadian rhythms (Thompson). It is perhaps these rhythms which served to shape the ‘inward notation of time’, in Thompson’s words, through the discourses of nature, that is through the language of streams and rivers—or ‘flows’.The 13th century saw the advent of mechanical time-keeping technology utilising what is called a “verge escapement mechanism”, that is, a “feedback regulator that controls the speed of a mechanical clock” (Headrick 42). About a century later, coupled with the emergence of puritanism, Thompson tells us that we start to see a shift in the construction of time which more and more depends on the synchronisation of labour (Thompson 70). Even so, working rhythms remain fairly irregular, still more suited to what Thompson describes as “a natural human rhythm” (71). This changes suddenly in the 19th century when, with the explosion of the Industrial Age, we witness the dominance of factory-time and, of course, the adoption and standardisation of railway-time across Britain, Europe, India and North America (Schivelbusch). The trend toward standardisation continues into the mid-20th century with what George Ritzer has famously called “McDonaldization” (2008). Thus, through the blanketing nature of 20th century “industrial capitalism” (Thompson 80), everyday experience became predicated on standardisation. Thompson tells us that these “changes in manufacturing technique … demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time-routines in society” (80). For Thompson, the “technological conditioning” of “time-sense” ushers in the model of “time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation” (80). This historical point is central to Giacomo Bianchino’s argument in “Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital”, in his discussion of the fundamental nature of capitalism in shaping time-sense. However, what we suggest is that this theme of ‘time-sense’ as shaped by the broader political economy of media is found within each of the pieces in the issue.A discussion of standardisation is problematic, however, in the wider conceptualisation of time as elusive, multi-dynamic and fractured. Surely, standardisation should at least come with the ability of certainty, in some respects. However, this is the paradox of the digital and new media age: That standardisation is both arbitrary and, in echo of Balibar and Althusser, ‘peculiar’ to an endless layering of separate time-streams. It is, perhaps, the jumping between them, which has become a necessary function of living in the digital age, that produces the sense of fracture, the loss of standard.This issue of M/C Journal explores the various ways in which the constellation of current media practices that are online, offline, embodied, and networked, collectively inform and express concepts of time. The feature article "With This Body, I Subtract Myself from Neoliberalised Time: Sub-Habituality & Relaxation after Deleuze", written by Antonia Pont, keenly asks how relaxation might be used to evade neoliberal machinations around organising time, efficiency, and productivity, all of which endanger a diversity of temporalities. While all media have their own unique limitations and affordances regarding influencing and expressing relationships to time, they are also impacted by current perceptions of uncertainty and neoliberal agendas that underlie the working relationships between people, the media that they engage in, and representations of the world.The feelings of inertia expressed by Toffler nearly 50 years ago has not only been accelerated through technological expansion, but by a layering of multiple time codes which reflect the wide range of media practices that permeate the contemporary vernacular. In 2019, concepts from the current post-Internet stage are beginning to emerge and we are finding that digital media fragments as much as it connects and unites. An ‘inward notion of time’ becomes brokered through automated processes, issues around surveillance, affect, standardisation, norms, nostalgia, and the minutiae of digital time.ReferencesAlthusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: NBL, 1970.Ansell-Pearson, Keith, John Ó Maoilearca, and Melissa McMahon. Henri Bergson: Key Writings. New York: Continuum, 2002.Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311-358.Davison, Graeme. The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993.Headrick, M.V. “Origin and Evolution of the Anchor Clock Escapement.” IEEE Control Systems 22.2 (2002): 41-52.Johannessen, Jon-Arild. Automation, Innovation and Economic Crisis: Surviving the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Milton: Routledge, 2018.Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.Powell, Helen. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Los Angeles: Pine Forge P, 2008.Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: U of California P, 2014.Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967): 56-97.Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. London: Bodley Head, 1970.

IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.

In a field of study as well-established as the Gothic, it is surprising how much contention there is over precisely what that term refers to. Is Gothic a genre, for example, or a mode? Should it be only applicable to literary and film texts that deal with tropes of haunting and trauma set in a gloomy atmosphere, or might it meaningfully be applied to other cultural forms of production, such as music or animation? Can television shows aimed at children be considered Gothic? What about food? When is something “Gothic” and when is it “horror”? Is there even a difference? The Gothic as a phenomenon is commonly identified as beginning with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was followed by Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), the romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Nineteenth-century Gothic literature was characterised by “penny dreadfuls” and novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Frequently dismissed as sensational and escapist, the Gothic has experienced a critical revival in recent decades, beginning with the feminist revisionism of the 1970s by critics such as Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. With the appearance of studies such as David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980), Gothic literature became a reputable field of scholarly research, with critics identifying suburban Gothic, imperial Gothic, postcolonial Gothic and numerous national Gothics, including Irish Gothic and the Gothic of the American South. Furthermore, as this special edition on Gothic shows, the Gothic is by no means limited to literature, with film, television, animation and music all partaking of the Gothic inflection. Indeed, it would be unwise to negate the ways in which the Gothic has developed to find fertile ground beyond the bounds of literature. In our media-centred twenty-first century, the Gothic has colonised different forms of expression, where the impact left by literary works, that were historically the centre of the Gothic itself, is all but a legacy. Film, in particular, has a close connection to the Gothic, where the works of, for instance, Tim Burton, have shown the representative potential of the Gothic mode; the visual medium of film, of course, has a certain experiential immediacy that marries successfully with the dark aesthetics of the Gothic, and its connections to representing cultural anxieties and desires (Botting). The analysis of Gothic cinema, in its various and extremely international incarnations, has now established itself as a distinct area of academic research, where prominent Gothic scholars such as Ken Gelder—with the recent publication of his New Vampire Cinema (2012)—continue to lead the way to advance Gothic scholarship outside of the traditional bounds of the literary.As far as cinema is concerned, one cannot negate the interconnections, both aesthetic and conceptual, between traditional Gothic representation and horror. Jerrold Hogle has clearly identified the mutation and transformation of the Gothic from a narrative solely based on “terror”, to one that incorporates elements of “horror” (Hogle 3). While the separation between the two has a long-standing history—and there is no denying that both the aesthetics and the politics of horror and the Gothic can be fundamentally different—one has to be attuned to the fact that, in our contemporary moment, the two often tend to merge and intersect, often forming hybrid visions of the Gothic, with cinematic examples such as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) playing testament to this. Indeed, the newly formed representations of “Gothic Horror” and “Gothic Terror” alerts us to the mutable and malleable nature of the Gothic itself, an adaptable mode that is always contextually based. Film is not, however, the only non-literary medium that has incorporated elements of the Gothic over the years. Other visual representations of the Gothic abound in the worlds of television, animation, comics and graphic novels. One must only think here of the multiple examples of recent television series that have found fruitful connections with both the psychologically haunting aspects of Gothic terror, and the gory and grisly visual evocations of Gothic horror: the list is long and diverse, and includes Dexter (2006-2013), Hannibal (2013-), and Penny Dreadful (2014-), to mention but a few. The animation front —in its multiple in carnations —has similarly been entangled with Gothic tropes and concerns, a valid interconnection that is visible both in cinematic and television examples, from The Corpse Bride (2005) to Coraline (2009) and Frankenweeinie (2012). Comics and graphics also have a long-standing tradition of exploiting the dark aesthetics of the Gothic mode, and its sensationalist connections to horror; the instances from this list pervade the contemporary media scope, and feature the inclusion of Gothicised ambiences and characters in both singular graphic novels and continuous comics —such as the famous Arkham Asylum (1989) in the ever-popular Batman franchise. The inclusion of these multi-media examples here is only representative, and it is an almost prosaic accent in a list of Gothicised media that extends to great bounds, and also includes the worlds of games and music. The scholarship, for its part, has not failed to pick up on the transformations and metamorphoses that the Gothic mode has undergone in recent years. The place of both Gothic horror and Gothic terror in a multi-media context has been critically evaluated in detail, and continues to attract academic attention, as the development of the multi-genre and multi-medium journey of the Gothic unfolds. Indeed, this emphasis is now so widespread that a certain canonicity has developed for the study of the Gothic in media such as television, extending the reach of Gothic Studies into the wider popular culture scope. Critical texts that have recently focused on identifying the Gothic in media beyond not only literature, but also film, include Helen Wheatley’s Gothic Television (2007), John C. Tibbetts’ The Gothic Imagination: Conversation of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media (2011), and Julia Round’s Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014). Critics often suggest that the Gothic returns at moments of particular cultural crisis, and if this is true, it seems as if we are in such a moment ourselves. Popular television shows such as True Blood and The Walking Dead, books such as the Twilight series, and the death-obsessed musical stylings of Lana Del Ray all point to the pertinence of the Gothic in contemporary culture, as does the amount of submissions received for this edition of M/C Journal, which explore a wide range of Gothic texts. Timothy Jones’ featured essay “The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out” suggests that although scholarly approaches to the Gothic tend to adopt the methodologies used to approach literary texts and applied them to Gothic texts, yielding readings that are more-or-less congruous with readings of other sorts of literature, the Gothic can be considered as something that tells us about more than simply ourselves and the world we live in. For Jones, the fact that the Gothic is a production of popular culture as much as “highbrow” literature suggests there is something else happening with the way popular Gothic texts function. What if, Jones asks, the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? Jones uses this approach to suggest that texts such as Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a time. Wheatley’s novel is explored by Jones as a venue for readerly play, apart from the more substantial and “serious” concerns that occupy most literary criticism. Samantha Jane Lindop’s essay foregrounds the debt David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive owes to J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) thus adding to studies of the film that have noted Lynch’s intertextual references to classic cinema such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Lindop explores not just the striking similarity between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive in terms of character and plot, but also the way that each text is profoundly concerned with the uncanny. Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s contribution, “What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext” is similarly interested in the intertextuality of the Gothic mode, noting that since its inception this has taken many and varied incarnations, from simple references and allusions to more complicated uses of style and plot organisation. Piatti-Farnell suggests it is unwise to reduce the Gothic text to a simple master narrative, but that within its re-elaborations and re-interpretations, interconnections do appear, forming “the Gothic intertext”. While the Gothic has traditionally found fertile ground in works of literature, other contemporary media, such as animation, have offered the Gothic an opportunity for growth and adaptation. Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls is explored by Piatti-Farnell as a visual text providing an example of intersecting monstrous creatures and interconnected narrative structures that reveal the presence of a dense and intertextual Gothic network. Those interlacings are connected to the wider cultural framework and occupy an important part in unravelling the insidious aspects of human nature, from the difficulties of finding “oneself” to the loneliness of the everyday. Issues relating to identity also feature in Patrick Usmar’s “Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?”, which further highlights the presence of the Gothic in a wide range of contemporary media forms. Usmar explores the music videos of Del Rey, which he describes as Pop Gothic, and that advance themes of consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze. Jen Craig’s “The Agitated Shell: Thinspiration and the Gothic Experience of Eating Disorders” similarly focuses on contemporary media and gender identity, problematising these issues by exploring the highly charged topic of “thinspiration” web sites. Hannah Irwin’s contribution also focuses on female experience. “Not of this earth: Jack the Ripper and the development of Gothic Whitechapel” focuses on the murder of five women who were the victims of an assailant commonly referred to by the epithet “Jack the Ripper”. Irwin discusses how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as “Ripperature”. The subject of the Gothic space is also taken up by Donna Brien’s “Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway.” This essay explores the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. Furthering our understanding of the Australian Gothic is Patrick West’s contribution “Towards a Politics & Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and its Reception by American Film Critics.” West argues that many films of the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as Gothic and that international reviews of such films tended to overlook the importance of the Australian landscape, which functions less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. Bruno Starrs’ “Writing My Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic” is dedicated to illuminating a new genre of creative writing: that of the “Aboriginal Fantastic”. Starrs’ novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is part of this emerging genre of writing that is worthy of further academic interrogation. Similarly concerned with the supernatural, Erin Mercer’s contribution “‘A Deluge of Shrieking Unreason’: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction” explores the absence of ghosts and vampires in contemporary Gothic produced in New Zealand, arguing that this is largely a result of a colonial Gothic tradition utilising Maori ghosts that complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. Although there is no reason why the Gothic must include supernatural elements, it is an enduring feature that is taken up by Jessica Balanzategui in “‘You Have a Secret that You Don’t Want To Tell Me’: The Child as Trauma in Spanish and American Horror Film.” This essay explores the uncanny child character and how such children act as an embodiment of trauma. Sarah Baker’s “The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion” focuses on the figure of the zombie as it appears in the television show The Walking Dead, which Baker argues is a way of exploring themes of decay, particularly of family and society. The essays contained in this special Gothic edition of M/C Journal highlight the continuing importance of the Gothic mode in contemporary culture and how that mode is constantly evolving into new forms and manifestations. The multi-faceted nature of the Gothic in our contemporary popular culture moment is accurately signalled by the various media on which the essays focus, from television to literature, animation, music, and film. The place occupied by the Gothic beyond representational forms, and into the realms of cultural practice, is also signalled, an important shift within the bounds of Gothic Studies which is bound to initiate fascinating debates. The transformations of the Gothic in media and culture are, therefore, also surveyed, so to continue the ongoing critical conversation on not only the place of the Gothic in contemporary narratives, but also its duplicitous, malleable, and often slippery nature. It is our hope that the essays here stimulate further discussion about the Gothic and we will hope, and look forward, to hearing from you. References Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Hogle, Jerrold. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture”. The Cambridge Companion of Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1-20.

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.Shaping the City: Environmental ImaginariesIn a sense, the flâneur is the product of a utopian imaginary of the city. According to Shields, Walter Benjamin used the flâneur as a literary device to make sense of the changing modern city of Paris: The flâneur is a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing ‘social spatialisation’ of everyday social and economic relations which in the nineteenth century increasingly extended the world of the average person further and further to include rival mass tourism destinations linked by railroad, news of other European powers and distant colonies. This expanding spatialization took the form of economic realities such as changing labour markets and commodity prices and social encounters with strangers and foreigners which impinged on the life world of Europeans. (Fancy Footwork 67)Through his writing, these new spaces and inhabitants were made familiar again to those that lived there. In consequence, the flâneur was seen as a heroic figure who approached the city like a wilderness to be studied and tamed:Even to early 20th-century sociologists the flâneur was a heroic everyman—masculine, controlled and as in tune with his environment as James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican braves were in their native forests. Anticipating the hardboiled hero of the detective novel, the flâneur pursued clues to the truth of the metropolis, attempting to think through its historical specificity, to inhabit it, even as the truth of empire and commodity capitalism was hidden from him. (Shields Flanerie 210)In this way, the flâneur was a stabilising force, categorising and therefore ordering the city. However, flânerie was also a transgressive act as the walker engaged in eccentric and idle wandering against the usual purposeful walking practices of the time (Coates). Drawing on this aspect, flânerie has increasingly been employed in the humanities and social sciences as a practice of resistance as Jamie Coates has shown. This makes the flâneur, albeit in a refigured form, a useful tool for transgressing strict socio-ecological conventions that affect the contemporary city.Marginalised groups are usually the most impacted by the strict control and ordering of contemporary urban spaces in response to utopian imaginaries of who and what belong. Marginalised people are discouraged and excluded from living in particular areas of the city through urban policy and commercial practices (Shaw 7). Likewise, certain non-human others, like birds, are allowed to inhabit our cities while those that don’t fit ideal urban imaginaries, like bats or snakes, are controlled, excluded or killed (Low). Defensive architecture, CCTV, and audio deterrents are often employed in cities to control public spaces. In London, the spiked corridor of a shop entrance designed to keep homeless people from sleeping there (Andreou; Borromeo) mirrors the spiked ledges that keep pigeons from resting on buildings (observed 2012/2014). On the Gold Coast youths are deterred from loitering in public spaces with classical music (observed 2013–17), while in Brisbane predatory bird calls are played near outdoor restaurants to discourage ibis from pestering customers (Hinchliffe and Begley). In contrast, bright lights, calming music and inviting scents are used to welcome orderly consumers into shopping centres while certain kinds of plants are cultivated in urban parks and gardens to attract acceptable wildlife like butterflies and lorikeets (Wilson; Low). These ways of managing public spaces are built on utopian conceptions of the city as a “civilising” force—a place of order, consumption and safety.As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is important to re-examine these conceptions of urban environments and the assemblage of environmental imaginaries that interact and continue to shape understandings of and attitudes towards human and non-human nature. The network of goods, people and natural entities that feed into and support the city mean that imaginaries shaped in urban areas influence both urban and surrounding peoples and ecologies (Braun). Local ecologies also become threatened as urban structures and processes continue to encompass more of the world’s populations and locales, often displacing and damaging entangled natural/cultural entities in the process. Furthermore, conceptions and attitudes shaped in the city often feed into global systems and as such can have far reaching implications for the way local ecologies are governed, built, and managed. There has already been much research, including work by Lawrence Buell and Ursula Heise, on the contribution that art and literature can make to the development of environmental imaginaries, whether intentional or unintentional, and resulting in both positive and negative associations with urban inhabitants (Yusoff and Gabrys; Buell; Heise). Imaginaries might be understood as social constructs through which we make sense of the world and through which we determine cultural and personal values, attitudes and beliefs. According to Neimanis et al., environmental imaginaries help us to make sense of the way physical environments shape “one’s sense of social belonging” as well as how we “formulate—and enact—our values and attitudes towards ‘nature’” (5). These environmental imaginaries underlie urban structures and work to determine which aspects of the city are valued, who is welcomed into the city, and who is excluded from participation in urban systems and processes. The development of new narrative imaginaries can question some of the underlying assumptions about who or what belongs in the city and how we might settle conflicts in ecologically diverse communities. The reimagined flâneur then might be employed to transgress traditional notions of belonging in the city and replace this with a sense of “becoming” in relation with the myriad of others inhabiting the city (Haraway The Trouble). Like the Benjaminian flâneur, the postmodern version enacts a similar transgressive walking practice. However, the postmodern flâneur serves to resist dominant narratives, with a “greater focus on the tactile and grounded qualities of walking” than the traditional flâneur—and, as opposed to the lone detached wanderer, postmodern flâneur engage in a network of social relationships and may even wander in groups (Coates 32). By employing the notion of the postmodern flâneur, writers might find ways to address problematic urban imaginaries and question dominant narratives about who should and should not inhabit the city. Building on this and in reference to Haraway (Cyborgs), the notion of a cyborg flâneur might take this resistance one step further, not only seeking to counter the dominant social narratives that control urban spaces but also resisting anthropocentric notions of the city. Where the traditional flâneur walked a pet tortoise on a leash, the cyborg flâneur walks with a companion species (Shields Fancy Footwork; Haraway Companion Species). The distinction is subtle. The traditional flâneur walks a pet, an object of display that showcases the eccentric status of the owner. The cyborg flâneur walks in mutual enjoyment with a companion (perhaps a domestic companion, perhaps not); their path negotiated together, tracked, and mapped via GPS. The two acts may at first appear the same, but the difference is in the relationship between the human, non-human, and the multi-modal spaces they occupy. As Coates argues, not everyone who walks is a flâneur and similarly, not everyone who engages in relational walking is a cyborg flâneur. Rather a cyborg flâneur enacts a deliberate practice of walking in relation with naturecultures to transgress boundaries between human and non-human, cultural and natural, and the virtual, material and imagined spaces that make up a place.The Posthuman City: Cyborgs, Hybrids, and EntanglementsIn developing new environmental imaginaries, posthuman conceptions of the city can be drawn upon to readdress urban space as complex, questioning utopian notions of the city particularly as they relate to the exclusion of certain others, and allowing for diverse socio-ecological communities. The posthuman city might be understood in opposition to anthropocentric notions where the non-human is seen as something separate to culture and in need of management and control within the human sphere of the city. Instead, the posthuman city is a complex entanglement of hybrid non-human, cultural and technological entities (Braun; Haraway Companion Species). The flâneur who experiences the city through a posthuman lens acknowledges the human as already embodied and embedded in the non-human world. Key to re-imagining the city is recognising the myriad ways in which non-human nature also acts upon us and influences decisions on how we live in cities (Schliephake 140). This constitutes a “becoming-with each other”, in Haraway’s terms, which recognises the interdependency of urban inhabitants (The Trouble 3). In re-considering the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture rather than a colonisation of nature by culture, the agency of non-humans to contribute to the construction of cities and indeed environmental imaginaries must be acknowledged. Living in the posthuman city requires us humans to engage with the city on multiple levels as we navigate the virtual, corporeal, and imagined spaces that make up the contemporary urban experience. The virtual city is made up of narratives projected through media productions such as tourism campaigns, informational plaques, site markers, and images on Google map locations, all of which privilege certain understandings of the city. Virtual narratives serve to define the city through a network of historical and spatially determined locales. Closely bound up with the virtual is the imagined city that draws on urban ideals, potential developments, mythical or alternative versions of particular cities as well as literary interpretations of cities. These narratives are overlaid on the places that we engage with in our everyday lived experiences. Embodied encounters with the city serve to reinforce or counteract certain virtual and imagined versions while imagined and virtual narratives enhance locales by placing current experience within a temporal narrative that extends into the past as well as the future. Walking the City: The Cyber/Cyborg FlâneurThe notion of the cyber flâneur emerged in the twenty-first century from the practices of idly surfing the Internet, which in many ways has become an extension of the cityscape. In the contemporary world where we exist in both physical and digital spaces, the cyber flâneur (and indeed its cousin the virtual flâneur) have been employed to make sense of new digital sites of connection, voyeurism, and consumption. Metaphors that evoke the city have often been used to describe the experience of the digital including “chat rooms”, “cyber space”, and “home pages” while new notions of digital tourism, the rise of online shopping, and meeting apps have become substitutes for engaging with the physical sites of cities such as shopping malls, pubs, and attractions. The flâneur and cyberflâneur have helped to make sense of the complexities and chaos of urban life so that it might become more palatable to the inhabitants, reducing anxieties about safety and disorder. However, as with the concept of the flâneur, implicit in the cyberflâneur is a reinforcement of traditional urban hierarchies and social structures. This categorising has also worked to solidify notions of who belongs and who does not. Therefore, as Debra Benita Shaw argues, the cyberflâneur is not able to represent the complexities of “how we inhabit and experience the hybrid spaces of contemporary cities” (3). Here, Shaw suggests that Haraway’s cyborg might be used to interrupt settled boundaries and to reimagine the urban walking figure. In both Shaw and Shields (Flanerie), the cyborg is invoked as a solution to the problematic figure of the flâneur. While Shaw presents these figures in opposition and proposes that the flâneur be laid to rest as the cyborg takes its place, I argue that the idea of the flâneur may still have some use, particularly when applied to new multi-modal narratives. As Shields demonstrates, the cyborg operates in the virtual space of simulation rather than at the material level (217). Instead of setting up an opposition between the cyborg and flâneur, these figures might be merged to bring the cyborg into being through the material practice of flânerie, while refiguring the flâneur as posthuman. The traditional flâneur sought to define space, but the cyborg flâneur might be seen to perform space in relation to an entangled natural/cultural community. By drawing on this notion of the cyborg, it becomes possible to circumvent some of the traditional associations with the urban walking figure and imagine a new kind of flâneur, one that walks the streets as an act to complicate rather than compartmentalise urban space. As we emerge into a post-truth world where facts and fictions blur, creative practitioners can find opportunities to forge new ways of knowing, and new ways of connecting with the city through the cyborg flâneur. The development of new literary imaginaries can reconstruct natural/cultural relationships and propose alternative ways of living in a posthuman and multispecies community. The rise of smart-phone apps like Story City provides cyborg flâneurs with the ability to create digital narratives overlaid on real places and has the potential to encourage real connections with urban environments. While these apps are by no means the only activity that a cyborg flâneur might participate in, they offer the writer a platform to engage audiences in a purposeful and transgressive practice of cyborg flânerie. Such narratives produced through cyborg flânerie would conflate virtual, corporeal, and imagined experiences of the city and allow for new environmental imaginaries to be created in situ. The “readers” of these narratives can also become cyborg flâneurs as the traditional urban wanderer is combined with the virtual and imagined space of the contemporary city. As opposed to wandering the virtual city online, readers are encouraged to physically walk the city and engage with the narrative in situ. For example, in one narrative, readers are directed to walk a trail along the Brisbane river or through the CBD to chase a sea monster (Wilkins and Diskett). The reader can choose different pre-set paths which influence the outcome of each story and embed the story in a physical location. In this way, the narrative is layered onto the real streets and spaces of the cityscape. As the reader is directed to walk particular routes through the city, the narratives which unfold are also partly constructed by the natural/cultural entities which make up those locales establishing a narrative practice which engages with the urban on a posthuman level. The murky water of the Brisbane River could easily conceal monsters. Occasional sightings of crocodiles (Hall), fish that leap from the water, and shadows cast by rippling waves as the City Cat moves across the surface impact the experience of the story (observed 2016–2017). Potential exists to capitalise on this narrative form and develop new environmental imaginaries that pay attention to the city as a posthuman place. For example, a narrative might direct the reader’s attention to the networks of water that hydrate people and animals, allow transportation, and remove wastes from the city. People may also be directed to explore their senses within place, be encouraged to participate in sensory gardens, or respond to features of the city in new ways. The cyborg flâneur might be employed in much the same way as the flâneur, to help the “reader” make sense of the posthuman city, where boundaries are shifted, and increasing rates of social and ecological change are transforming contemporary urban sites and structures. Shields asks whether the cyborg might also act as “a stabilising figure amidst the collapse of dualisms, polluted categories, transgressive hybrids, and unstable fluidity” (Flanerie 211). As opposed to the traditional flâneur however, this “stabilising” figure doesn’t sort urban inhabitants into discrete categories but maps the many relations between organisms and technologies, fictions and realities, and the human and non-human. The cyborg flâneur allows for other kinds of “reading” of the city to take place—including those by women, families, and non-Western inhabitants. As opposed to the nineteenth century reader-flâneur, those who read the city through the Story City app are also participants in the making of the story, co-constructing the narrative along with the author and locale. I would argue this participation is a key feature of the cyborg flâneur narrative along with the transience of the narratives which may alter and eventually expire as urban structures and environments change. Not all those who engage with these narratives will necessarily enact a posthuman understanding and not all writers of these narratives will do so as cyborg flâneurs. Nevertheless, platforms such as Story City provide writers with an opportunity to engage participants to question dominant narratives of the city and to reimagine themselves within a multispecies community. In addition, by bringing readers into contact with the human and non-human entities that make up the city, there is potential for real relationships to be established. Through new digital platforms such as apps, writers can develop new environmental imaginaries that question urban ideals including conceptions about who belongs in the city and who does not. The notion of the cyborg is a useful concept through which to reimagine the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture, and to reimagine the flâneur as performer who becomes part of the posthuman city as they walk the streets. This article provides one example of cyborg flânerie in smart-phone apps like Story City that allow writers to construct new urban imaginaries, bring the virtual and imagined city into the physical spaces of the urban environment, and can act to re-place the reader in diverse socio-ecological communities. The reader then becomes both product and constructer of urban space, a cyborg flâneur in the cyborg city. This conversation raises further questions about the cyborg flâneur, including: how might cyborg flânerie be enacted in other spaces (rural, virtual, more-than-human)? What other platforms and narrative forms might cyborg flâneurs use to share their posthuman narratives? How might cyborg flânerie operate in other cities, other cultures and when adopted by marginalised groups? In answering these questions, the potential and limitations of the cyborg flâneur might be refined. The hope is that one day the notion of a cyborg flâneur will no longer necessary as the posthuman city becomes a space of negotiation rather than exclusion. ReferencesAndreou, Alex. “Anti-Homeless Spikes: ‘Sleeping Rough Opened My Eyes to the City’s Barbed Cruelty.’” The Guardian 19 Feb. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile>.Borromeo, Leah. “These Anti-Homeless Spikes Are Brutal. We Need to Get Rid of Them.” The Guardian 23 Jul. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/anti-homeless-spikes-inhumane-defensive-architecture>.Braun, Bruce. “Environmental Issues: Writing a More-than-Human Urban Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 29.5 (2005): 635–50. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41.Hall, Peter. “Crocodiles Spotted in Queensland: A Brief History of Sightings and Captures in the Southeast.” The Courier Mail 4 Jan. 2017. 20 Aug. 2017 <http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crocodiles-spotted-in-queensland-a-brief-history-of-sightings-and-captures-in-the-southeast/news-story/5fbb2d44bf3537b8a6d1f6c8613e2789>.Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.———. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Oxon: Routledge, 1991.Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Hinchliffe, Jessica, and Terri Begley. “Brisbane’s Angry Birds: Recordings No Deterrent for Nosey Ibis at South Bank.” ABC News 2 Jun. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-06/recorded-bird-noise-not-detering-south-banks-angry-birds/6065610>.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. London: Penguin, 2002.Neimanis, Astrid, Cecilia Asberg, and Suzi Hayes. “Posthumanist Imaginaries.” Research Handbook on Climate Governance. Eds. K. Bäckstrand and E. Lövbrand. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015. 480–90.Schliephake, Christopher. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.Shaw, Debra Benita. “Streets for Cyborgs: The Electronic Flâneur and the Posthuman City.” Space and Culture 18.3 (2015): 230–42.Shields, Rob. “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie.” The Flâneur. Ed. Keith Tester. London: Routledge, 2014. 61–80.———. “Flânerie for Cyborgs.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 209–20.Yusoff, Kathryn, and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2.4 (2011): 516–34.Wilkins, Kim, and Joseph Diskett. 9 Fathom Deep. Brisbane: Story City, 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.

SCULLY: I said, I got the lab to rush the results of the Szczesny autopsy, if you're interested.MULDER: I heard you, Scully.SCULLY: And Szczesny did indeed drown, but not as the result of the inhalation of ectoplasm as you so vehemently suggested.MULDER: Well, what else could she possibly have drowned in?SCULLY: Margarita mix, upchucked with about 40 ounces of Corcovado Gold tequila which, as it turns out, she and her friends rapidly consumed in the woods while trying to reenact the Blair Witch Project.MULDER: Well, I think that demands a little deeper investigation, don't you?SCULLY: No, I don't.— The X-Files, “All Things” (0717) IntroductionMikel J. Koven argues that “The X-Files [1993-2002, films 2005, 2010, revived 2016-2018] was the American television series that defined the zeitgeist of the 1990s” (337) by tapping into “pre-millenium paranoia and the collapse of traditional beliefs” (338). In each episode, “True Believer” and FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his partner, the skeptical and rational Dr Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), travel through a post-Cold War American landscape that is manifesting varying levels of anxiety about the century to come. The series is preoccupied with a series of questions that have, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, come to be answered fairly definitively. Have aliens visited Earth? (Well, if you believe a team of Harvard scientists, maybe [see Freeman], but there is no evidence of alien colonisation just yet.) Does the US government have its citizens’ best interests at heart? (In its current incarnation, no.) Will climate change have monstrous consequences? (Yes, we’re seeing them.) What do we do about the shady forces operating in post-Soviet Union Russia? (God knows, but they seem to be doing a good job of changing the shape of “democracy” in an increasing number of countries.)These broader socio-political aspects of The X-Files have been explored in a number of studies (see Koven; Moses; Wildermuth). In this article, I focus in more closely on some of the ways in which the character of Scully can be read as a complex engagement with a particularly 1990s version of third-wave feminism. I suggest that the type of feminism embodied in the character of Scully taps into the zeitgeist of the 1990s, a decade characterised not only by a growing media-driven “backlash” against feminism (see Faludi), but also by emergent third wave of feminism driven by movements such as “Riot Grrrl” (centred on openly feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear) and the various, and often contested, feminisms endorsed by a new generation of writers like Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, and even Katie Roiphe. Part of Scully’s longevity as a feminist icon can be attributed to the fact that while she is not without her own contradictions and complexities, she emerged from a televisual landscape dominated by particularly insipid representations of professional women. Scully, with her combination of lively wit and serious scientific mind, represented a radical imagining of professional femininity in the 1990s.Working against the Backlash: Scully and the Power of ProfessionalismBy the late 1980s, the political gains made by the second-wave feminism in the 1960s and early 1970s had come increasingly under fire in a “backlash” that “worked to revoke the gains made by the feminist movement” (Genz and Brabon 53). L.S. Kim argues this backlash is reflected in the fact that while strong female characters had always been a feature of US television (e.g. Mary Tyler Moore), in the 1990s televisual landscape feminism was often made popular in a type of “postfeminist discourse in which it is acceptable to be pro-woman but not to be feminist” (319). The quintessential example of this trend was David E. Kelley’s series about a Boston lawyer, Ally McBeal (1997-2002), in which McBeal’s primary dilemma is presented as being that she has “too many choices, too much freedom, and too much desire” which leads to “never-ending searching and even to depression and dysfunction” (Kim 319). McBeal’s professional success never seems to compensate for her various romantic disappointments and these remain the focal point of Kelley’s series.Part of what sets Scully apart from a character like McBeal is her unerring professionalism, and her strong commitment to equality in her relationship with Mulder. Scully displays none of McBeal’s neuroses, and she is unapologetically feminist in her disposition. She also understands implicitly the pivotal role she plays in the partnership at the heart of the X-Files. Scully is, then, a capable, professional woman who not only remains professional at all times, but who also works as a powerful grounding force to her partner’s more outlandish approaches and theories. As series creator Chris Carter has been forced to concede on numerous occasions, without the rational and practical figure of Scully in the morgue to (usually) prove and (sometimes) disprove Mulder’s theories, The X-Files as we know them would cease to exist. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, in order to best understand Scully as a character, one needs to recognise the significance of the relationship between Scully and Mulder that lies at the heart of the series. The sheer force of Scully’s professionalism, and its resistance to being conscripted straightforwardly into a traditional romantic plot, becomes an important contributor to the powerful sexual tension between Mulder and Scully that came to define the series. Scully also, as critics and commentators were quick to point out, takes on the traditionally masculine role of skeptical scientist on the series, with Mulder positioned in the typically feminine role of intuitive “believer” (in, among other things, aliens, Chupacabra, big foot, and psychic powers). There are, of course, problems with this approach, but for now it is enough to simply point out that this positioning of Mulder and Scully is an important feature of the internal structure of The X-Files and speaks to an awareness of, and desire to challenge, the traditional association of women with intuition and men with rationality. Indeed, Linda Badley points out that the relationship between the two agents is “remarkably egalitarian, challenging traditional gender roles as portrayed on television” (63).Scully and Mulder’s relationship, a relationship that is at once personal and professional, is also grounded in genuine equality and respect. Mulder never undermines Scully, he (occasionally) knows when to bow to her superior scientific reasoning, and his eventual love for his partner is based in his understanding that Scully’s skepticism offers the perfect counterpart to his openness to the paranormal. In fact, one might say that Mulder, at least in part, falls in love with Scully’s professionalism and with her commitment to scientific reasoning. Mulder admits as much himself in the film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998): “as difficult and frustrating as it’s been sometimes, your goddamn strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over. You kept me honest. You made me a whole person.” In this calculation, Scully is not only Mulder’s equal, she is his missing piece. While she might sometimes grumble about merely playing Watson to Mulder’s Holmes (see “Fight Club” [0720]), Scully’s role is much more important than this, and Mulder (and the viewer) knows it.In the context of the televisual landscape of the 1990s, this representation of Scully as a character who is every bit as intelligent and as integral to the action of the series as her male partner, was incredibly powerful. It marked Scully as a third-wave feminist character in an era dominated by women who seemed to conform to the kind of problematic post-feminism embodied by Ally McBeal. In a recent interview, Gillian Anderson acknowledged the significant role Scully played in opening up possibilities for the representation of women on television in the 1990s. She observed, “a lot of women felt that they saw something recognisable for the first time [in Scully and] there were a lot of young women whose eyes were opened to feeling like they were finally represented in some way on television” (Anderson in Idato n.p.) Many women saw themselves in this character, and there can be little doubt The X-Files spearheaded a shift towards a more representative approach to the writing of female roles in US television in which layered and complex characters such as Scully became the norm rather than the exception. Rosalind Gill, for example, notes that “quality television” has “evolved since the 1990s into a site of rich and complex representations of gender including Homeland, Veep, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Transparent, and The Good Wife” (620).One of the other pervasive positive effects associated with the character of Scully is that she functioned, and indeed continues to function, as a role model for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). A recent report commissioned by 21st Century Fox, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and J. Walter Thompson Intelligence found that “Scully’s media depiction of a high-achieving woman in STEM asked a generation of girls and women to imagine new professional options… Scully also influenced a generation of young women to study and pursue careers in STEM” (3). Although this report is not entirely impartial (21th Century Fox owns The X-Files), it found that “among women who are familiar with Scully’s character, 91% say she is a role model for girls and women” (5). This finding tallies with those of a variety of earlier online observers who noticed Scully had become a touchstone character “who inspired an entire generation of young women to pursue medical, scientific, and law enforcement degrees as positions” (Consalvi). To an extent not seen before in the history of television, Scully became an important role model for young women in the STEM professions. Scully’s fictional professionalism helped to create a new generation of real-life female STEM professionals.But it is worth remembering that in other respects, Scully is a complicated feminist heroine. This is largely because The X-Files’ production team’s own feminist credentials were often less-than-inspiring. The series was created by a man, and was written and directed predominantly by men in all of its various filmic and televisual incarnations. As Anderson herself pointed out on her Twitter feed for 29 June 2017, of the 207 episodes of X-Files produced, only 2 were directed by women (fig. 1). Famously, when the X-Files began in the early 1990s, Anderson was paid far less than her co-star Duchovny and was even asked to stand behind him on camera. The actor agitated successfully for equal pay after three years in the role, and for the right to stand beside her televisual partner, rather than behind him, even if, somewhat astonishingly, Twenty First Century Fox also offered Anderson less than Duchovny to reprise her famous role in 2016. (Anderson eventually received equal pay for equal billing.)Fig. 1: Gillian Anderson tweet, 29 June 2017.It ought to be remembered, then, that Scully’s feminism is predominantly a construction of men, overlaid with the undoubted feminine empowerment brought to the role by Anderson. As far back as 1998, Linda Badley noticed that for Scully/Anderson “the transference of ‘feminist’ characteristics between character and star is unusually strong—to the extent that a discussion of one must refer to the other. And Anderson/Scully is instantly recognisable as an icon of popular feminism” (62). But in more recent years, Anderson has made even clearer her own feminist leanings. She has done this through the publication (with Jennifer Nadel) of the explicitly feminist We: The Uplifting Manuel for Women Seeking Happiness (2017); by taking up more explicitly feminist roles, such as that of Stella Gibson in the acclaimed BBC series The Fall (2013-present); and through her Twitter feed. The significance of Anderson’s online feminist presence is highlighted by Lauren Modery, who notes: “the next time you’re having a day where you’re not sure if you’re being the best feminist you can be, just ask yourself “what would Gillian Anderson do?” and go to her Twitter account” (Modery). Scully’s 1990s Feminism in a Twenty-First Century ContextFor much of the series, Scully’s feminism can be viewed as a form of the “New Feminism” that Stephanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon associate with the late 1990s and with Natasha Walter’s book The New Feminism (1998). This “New Feminism” attempts to break from second-wave feminism by decoupling the personal from the political (64). Badley, for example, points out that Scully’s feminism is strictly based on individual empowerment: “rather than challenge patriarchy directly or join forces with women activists, Scully channels her anger/ambition into fitting into the system” (70). But equally, Scully’s feminism could be seen as a prototype of the kind of “neo-liberal” feminism that theorists such as Angela McRobbie associate with the present moment, a feminism which “discards the older, welfarist and collectivist feminism of the past, in favour of individualist striving” (4). Certainly, over the course of the 25 years, The X-Files has been in existence, we have seen little evidence that Scully has female friends (or indeed, that she interacts with anyone much outside of Mulder and her family).When other women do enter the picture, such as when Mulder’s one-time lover and co-founder of the X-Files, Diana Fowley appears in the fifth season of the series (see “The End” [0520]), Scully is often positioned in an antagonistic relationship with them. In this context, it is notable that “All Things,” a seventh-season episode directed and written by Anderson, places Scully’s interaction with Colleen Azar, a woman from the American Taoist Healing Centre, at the centre of the narrative. Azar’s exhortations to Scully to “slow down” are presented as the wise words of a female ally in this episode, and Scully does well to heed them. This episode, consciously I think, works as a counter to the more typical representation of Scully as being in competition with women for Mulder’s interest, evident in episodes like “Alpha” (0616) and “Syzygy” (0313). In this respect, Anderson appears to be aligning Scully with a feminism that is much more inclusive than it appears in other, male-written, episodes.From the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, one of the more problematic elements The X-Files has to do with its representation of sex and sexuality. Sex, in the world of The X-Files, is very 1990s in orientation. In fact, it echoes the way in which sex operated in the Clinton impeachment: denial, denial, denial, even in the face of clear evidence it took place. We see this most obviously in “All Things,” which begins with a shot of Scully getting dressed in front of a mirror, that pans to a shot of an undressed Mulder in bed. This opening seems to suggest the two had spent the night together, but nothing overtly sexual actually takes place in the episode. Indeed, any sexual activity that ever takes place in the X-Files happens off camera, but it is nonetheless worth pointing out that while the equally solitary Mulder is repeatedly characterised in the series by his porn fetish, Scully’s sexuality is repeatedly denied or diminished in the series. Moreover, any overt expression of Scully’s sexuality (such as in “Milagro,” [0618] where she falls for a writer living next door to Mulder) typically ends badly, with Scully placed in peril by her sexual desires.Scully’s continued presence in the twenty-first century, however, means that while her character is rooted in what we might call a “1990s feminist disposition” (she prides herself on being a “woman in a man’s world”; she demonstrates little interest in stereotypically feminine pursuits such as shopping or make up; her focus is on work, rather than romance), she has also been allowed the room to grow and develop. Perhaps most notably, the 2018 Scully is allowed to embrace her sexuality. Sexual activity still appears off screen, of course, but in “Plus One” (1103), we see her actively pursue sex with Mulder (twice!), while her vibrator makes an unapologetic cameo appearance in “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” (1107). Given that we live in a decade saturated in sexual imagery, it makes no sense for 2018 Scully to be as chaste and buttoned up as she was in the 1990s.Finally, in a series in which the wild speculation of the conspiracy theories is almost always true, Scully’s feminist commitment to rationality, science and the power of logic might appear to be undermined at every turn. Badley, for example, reminds us that while Scully may “have medicine and the law on her side ... Mulder’s vision is validated by Chris Carter, as the prologue to nearly every episode reminds us” (67). This is highlighted in “Field Trip” (0621) when Scully wonders, “Mulder, can’t you just for once, just ... for the novelty of it, come up with the simplest explanation, the most logical one instead of automatically jumping to UFOs or Bigfoot or…” Mulder simply counters with:Scully, in six years, how … how often have I been wrong? No seriously, I mean, every time I bring you a case we go through this perfunctory dance. You tell me that I’m not being scientifically rigorous and that I’m off my nut, and then in the end who turns out to be right like 98.95 of the time? I just think I’ve ... earned the benefit of the doubt here.Interestingly enough, however, it is Scully who solves the mystery at the heart of this particular episode of X-Files—Mulder and Scully are indeed trapped inside a giant fungus, being slowly digested by its gooey secretions.And while Mulder’s viewpoint is most often endorsed in the series, the chaos of the Trump administration illustrates perfectly the dangers behind the valorisation of the irrational over the rational. In a decade in which rationality itself is coming under increasing threat—by “fake news”; through a hostility towards the science of climate change; in the desire to wind back further the gains of the feminist movement—we need to remember the importance of the strong and abiding relationship between rationality and feminism. This is a relationship that goes at least as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-1797) Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is at the heart of the feminist gothic writings of women like Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This commitment to the power of rationality lives on in the character of Dana Scully.Conclusion: Scully as Twenty-First-Century Feminist IconI have argued throughout this article that there are limitations of the kind of feminism embodied in Scully, but it is clear that she has come to represent a type of woman who refuses to let men dictate her behaviour, and who maintains her professionalism even under the most difficult of circumstances. A host of Scully memes now circulating on the web celebrate the character’s competence, intelligence, and compassion (figs. 2, 3, and 4). The character of Scully now exists far beyond the confines of the television screen and the imaginations of her predominantly male authors. Scully’s continuing relevance to twenty-first century feminists is reflected in this meme recently placed by Anderson on her Twitter account in response to the allegations of sexual misconduct directed at US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh (fig. 5). Rarely have the 1990s seemed so relevant to the present moment.Fig. 2: Scully meme, Meme Generator.Fig. 3: Rustnsplinters, “Scully Motivational.” Deviant Art.Fig. 4: E.H. Redlum, “Scully: Meme Style.” Deviant Art.Fig. 5: Gillian Anderson tweet.ReferencesBadley, Linda. “Scully Hits the Glass Ceiling: Postmodernism, Postfeminism, Posthumanism, and The X-Files.” Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television. Ed. Elyce Rae Helford. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 61-90.Consalvi, Sydney. “The Scully Effect Continues: How The X-Files’ Dana Scully Changed Television Forever.” Odyssey. 9 Aug. 2016. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theodysseyonline.com/scully-effect>.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. London: Vintage, 1991.Freeman, David. “Scientists Say Mysterious ‘Oumuamua’ Object Could Be an Alien Spacecraft: Harvard Researchers Raise the Possibility That It’s a Probe Sent by Extraterrestrials.” NBCNews.com. 6 Nov. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-say-mysterious-oumuamua-object-could-be-alien-spacecraft-ncna931381>.Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009.Gill, Rosalind. “Post-Postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 610-30.Idato, Michael. “Gillian Anderson on Why She’s Closing The X-Files after 25 Years.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 15 Jan. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/times-up-gillian-anderson-on-why-shes-closing-the-xfiles-after-25-years-20180115-h0iapf.html>.Kim, L.S. “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television.” Television and New Media 2.4 (Nov. 2001): 319-334.Koven, Mikel J. “The X-Files.” Essential Cult TV Reader. Ed. David Lavery. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010. 337-343.McRobbie, Angela. “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times.” Australian Feminist Studies 30:83 (2015): 3-20.Modery, Lauren. “Gillian Anderson Is the Feminist Twitter Hero We Need Right Now.” Birth. Movies. Death. 25 Jan. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2018/01/25/gillian-anderson-is-the-feminist-twitter-hero-we-need-right-now>.Moses, Michael Valdez. “Kingdom of Darkness: Autonomy and Conspiracy in The X-Files and Millenium.” The Philosophy of TV Noir. Eds. Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble. Lexington: U. of Kentucky P., 2008. 203-228.21stCentury Fox, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and J. Walter Thompson Intelligence. The ‘Scully Effect’: I Want to Believe… in STEM. 2018. <https://impact.21cf.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/03/ScullyEffectReport_21CF_1-1.pdf>.Wildermuth, Mark E. Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State: 1958-Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.X-Files: Fight the Future. Dir. Rob Bowman. Perf. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. 20th Century Fox. 1998.

As a scholarly discourse, transmedia storytelling relies heavily on conservative constructions of authorship that laud corporate architects and patriarchs such as George Lucas and J.J. Abrams as exemplars of “the creator.” This piece argues that transmedia theory works to construct patriarchal ideals of individual authorship to the detriment of alternative conceptions of transmediality, storyworlds, and authorship. The genesis for this piece was our struggle to find a transmedia storyworld that we were both familiar with, that also qualifies as “legitimate” transmedia in the eyes of our prospective scholarly readers. After trying to wrangle our various interests, fandoms, and areas of expertise into harmony, we realized we were exerting more effort in this process of validating stories as transmedia than actually examining how stories spread across various platforms, how they make meanings, and what kinds of pleasures they offer audiences. Authorship is a definitive criterion of transmedia storytelling theory; it is also an academic red herring. We were initially interested in investigating the possible overdeterminations between the healthcare industry and Breaking Bad (2008-2013). The series revolves around a high school chemistry teacher who launches a successful meth empire as a way to pay for his cancer treatments that a dysfunctional US healthcare industry refuses to fund. We wondered if the success of the series and the timely debates on healthcare raised in its reception prompted any PR response from or discussion among US health insurers. However, our concern was that this dynamic among medical and media industries would not qualify as transmedia because these exchanges were not authored by Vince Gilligan or any of the credited creators of Breaking Bad. Yet, why shouldn’t such interfaces between the “real world” and media fiction count as part of the transmedia story that is Breaking Bad? Most stories are, in some shape or form, transmedia stories at this stage, and transmedia theory acknowledges there is a long history to this kind of practice (Freeman). Let’s dispense with restrictive definitions of transmediality and turn attention to how storytelling behaves in a digital era, that is, the processes of creating, disseminating and amending stories across many different media, the meanings and forms such media and communications produce, and the pleasures they offer audiences.Can we think about how health insurance companies responded to Breaking Bad in terms of transmedia storytelling? Defining Transmedia Storytelling via AuthorshipThe scholarly concern with defining transmedia storytelling via a strong focus on authorship has traced slight distinctions between seriality, franchising, adaptation and transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling;” Johnson, “Media Franchising”). However, the theoretical discourse on authorship itself and these discussions of the tensions between forms are underwritten by a gendered bias. Indeed, the very concept of transmediality may be a gendered backlash against the rising prominence of seriality as a historically feminised mode of storytelling, associated with television and serial novels.Even with the move towards traditionally lowbrow, feminized forms of trans-serial narrative, the majority of academic and popular criticism of transmedia storytelling reproduces and reinstates narratives of male-centred, individual authorship that are historically descended from theorizations of the auteur. Auteur theory, which is still considered a legitimate analytical framework today, emerged in postwar theorizations of Hollywood film by French critics, most prominently in the journal Cahiers du Cinema, and at the nascence of film theory as a field (Cook). Auteur theory surfaced as a way to conceptualise aesthetic variation and value within the Fordist model of the Hollywood studio system (Cook). Directors were identified as the ultimate author or “creative source” if a film sufficiently fitted a paradigm of consistent “vision” across their oeuvre, and they were thus seen as artists challenging the commercialism of the studio system (Cook). In this way, classical auteur theory draws a dichotomy between art and authorship on one side and commerce and corporations on the other, strongly valorising the former for its existence within an industrial context dominated by the latter. In recent decades, auteurist notions have spread from film scholarship to pervade popular discourses of media authorship. Even though transmedia production inherently disrupts notions of authorship by diffusing the act of creation over many different media platforms and texts, much of the scholarship disproportionately chooses to vex over authorship in a manner reminiscent of classical auteur theory.In scholarly terms, a chief distinction between serial storytelling and transmedia storytelling lies in how authorship is constructed in relation to the text: serial storytelling has long been understood as relying on distributed authorship (Hilmes), but transmedia storytelling reveres the individual mastermind, or the master architect who plans and disseminates the storyworld across platforms. Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is multifaceted and includes, “the systematic dispersal of multiple textual elements across many channels, which reflects the synergies of media conglomeration, based on complex story-worlds, and coordinated authorial design of integrated elements” (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling”). Jenkins is perhaps the most pivotal figure in developing transmedia studies in the humanities to date and a key reference point for most scholars working in this subfield.A key limitation of Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is its emphasis on authorship, which persists in wider scholarship on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins focuses on the nature of authorship as a key characteristic of transmedia productions that distinguishes them from other kinds of intertextual and serial stories:Because transmedia storytelling requires a high degree of coordination across the different media sectors, it has so far worked best either in independent projects where the same artist shapes the story across all of the media involved or in projects where strong collaboration (or co-creation) is encouraged across the different divisions of the same company. (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling”)Since the texts under discussion are commonly large in their scale, budget, and the number of people employed, it is reductive to credit particular individuals for this work and implicitly dismiss the authorial contributions of many others. Elaborating on the foundation set by Jenkins, Matthew Freeman uses Foucauldian concepts to describe two “author-functions” focused on the role of an author in defining the transmedia text itself and in marketing it (Freeman 36-38). Scott, Evans, Hills, and Hadas similarly view authorial branding as a symbolic industrial strategy significant to transmedia storytelling. Interestingly, M.J. Clarke identifies the ways transmedia television texts invite audiences to imagine a central mastermind, but also thwart and defer this impulse. Ultimately, Freeman argues that identifiable and consistent authorship is a defining characteristic of transmedia storytelling (Freeman 37), and Suzanne Scott argues that transmedia storytelling has “intensified the author’s function” from previous eras (47).Industry definitions of transmediality similarly position authorship as central to transmedia storytelling, and Jenkins’ definition has also been widely mobilised in industry discussions (Jenkins, “Transmedia” 202). This is unsurprising, because defining authorial roles has significant monetary value in terms of remuneration and copyright. In speaking to the Producers Guild of America, Jeff Gomez enumerated eight defining characteristics of transmedia production, the very first of which is, “Content is originated by one or a very few visionaries” (PGA Blog). Gomez’s talk was part of an industry-driven bid to have “Transmedia Producer” recognised by the trade associations as a legitimate and significant role; Gomez was successful and is now recognised as a transmedia producer. Nevertheless, his talk of “visionaries” not only situates authorship as central to transmedia production, but constructs authorship in very conservative, almost hagiographical terms. Indeed, Leora Hadas analyses the function of Joss Whedon’s authorship of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2013-) as a branding mechanism and argues that authors are becoming increasingly visible brands associated with transmedia stories.Such a discourse of authorship constructs individual figures as artists and masterminds, in an idealised manner that has been strongly critiqued in the wake of poststructuralism. It even recalls tired scholarly endeavours of divining authorial intention. Unsurprisingly, the figures valorised for their transmedia authorship are predominantly men; the scholarly emphasis on authorship thus reinforces the biases of media industries. Further, it idolises these figures at the expense of unacknowledged and under-celebrated female writers, directors and producers, as well as those creative workers labouring “below the line” in areas like production design, art direction, and special effects. Far from critiquing the biases of industry, academic discourse legitimises and lauds them.We hope that scholarship on transmedia storytelling might instead work to open up discourses of creation, production, authorship, and collaboration. For a story to qualify as transmedia is it even necessary to have an identifiable author? Transmedia texts and storyworlds can be genuinely collaborative or authorless creations, in which the harmony of various creators’ intentions may be unnecessary or even undesirable. Further, industry and academics alike often overlook examples of transmedia storytelling that might be considered “lowbrow.” For example, transmedia definitions should include Antonella the Uncensored Reviewer, a relatively small-scale, forty-something, plus size, YouTube channel producer whose persona is dispersed across multiple formats including beauty product reviews, letter writing, as well as interactive sex advice live casts. What happens when we blur the categories of author, celebrity, brand, and narrative in scholarship? We argue that these roles are substantially blurred in media industries in which authors like J.J. Abrams share the limelight with their stars as well as their corporate affiliations, and all “brands” are sutured to the storyworld text. These various actors all shape and are shaped by the narrative worlds they produce in an author-storyworld nexus, in which authorship includes all people working to produce the storyworld as well as the corporation funding it. Authorship never exists inside the limits of a single, male mind. Rather it is a field of relations among various players and stakeholders. While there is value in delineating between these roles for purposes of analysis and scholarly discussion, we should acknowledge that in the media industry, the roles of various stakeholders are increasingly porous.The current academic discourse of transmedia storytelling reconstructs old social biases and hierarchies in contexts where they might be most vulnerable to breakdown. Scott argues that,despite their potential to demystify and democratize authorship between producers and consumers, transmedia stories tend to reinforce boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘unauthorized’ forms of narrative expansion through the construction of a single author/textual authority figure. (44)Significantly, we suggest that it is the theorisation of transmedia storytelling that reinforces (or in fact constructs anew) an idealised author figure.The gendered dimension of the scholarly distinction between serialised (or trans-serial) and transmedial storytelling builds on a long history in the arts and the academy alike. In fact, an important precursor of transmedia narratives is the serialized novel of the Victorian era. The literature of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe was published in serial form and among the most widely read of the Victorian era in Western culture (Easley; Flint 21; Hilmes). Yet, these novels are rarely given proportional credit in what is popularly taught as the Western literary canon. The serial storytelling endemic to television as a medium has similarly been historically dismissed and marginalized as lowbrow and feminine (at least until the recent emergence of notions of the industrial role of the “showrunner” and the critical concept of “quality television”). Joanne Morreale outlines how trans-serial television examples, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, which spread their storyworlds across a number of different television programs, offer important precursors to today’s transmedia franchises (Morreale). In television’s nascent years, the anthology plays of the 1940s and 50s, which were discrete, unconnected hour-length stories, were heralded as cutting-edge, artistic and highbrow while serial narrative forms like the soap opera were denigrated (Boddy 80-92). Crucially, these anthology plays were largely created by and aimed at males, whereas soap operas were often created by and targeted to female audiences. The gendered terms in which various genres and modes of storytelling are discussed have implications for the value assigned to them in criticism, scholarship and culture more broadly (Hilmes; Kuhn; Johnson, “Devaluing”). Transmedia theory, as a scholarly discourse, betrays similarly gendered leanings as early television criticism, in valorising forms of transmedia narration that favour a single, male-bodied, and all-powerful author or corporation, such as George Lucas, Jim Henson or Marvel Comics.George Lucas is often depicted in scholarly and popular discourses as a headstrong transmedia auteur, as in the South Park episode ‘The China Problem’ (2008)A Circle of Men: Fans, Creators, Stories and TheoristsInterestingly, scholarly discourse on transmedia even betrays these gendered biases when exploring the engagement and activity of audiences in relation to transmedia texts. Despite the definitional emphasis on authorship, fan cultures have been a substantial topic of investigation in scholarly studies of transmedia storytelling, with many scholars elevating fans to the status of author, exploring the apparent blurring of these boundaries, and recasting the terms of these relationships (Scott; Dena; Pearson; Stein). Most notably, substantial scholarly attention has traced how transmedia texts cultivate a masculinized, “nerdy” fan culture that identifies with the male-bodied, all-powerful author or corporation (Brooker, Star Wars, Using; Jenkins, Convergence). Whether idealising the role of the creators or audiences, transmedia theory reinforces gendered hierarchies. Star Wars (1977-) is a pivotal corporate transmedia franchise that significantly shaped the convergent trajectory of media industries in the 20th century. As such it is also an anchor point for transmedia scholarship, much of which lauds and legitimates the creative work of fans. However, in focusing so heavily on the macho power struggle between George Lucas and Star Wars fans for authorial control over the storyworld, scholarship unwittingly reinstates Lucas’s status as sole creator rather than treating Star Wars’ authorship as inherently diffuse and porous.Recent fan activity surrounding animated adult science-fiction sitcom Rick and Morty (2013-) further demonstrates the macho culture of transmedia fandom in practice and its fascination with male authors. The animated series follows the intergalactic misadventures of a scientific genius and his grandson. Inspired by a seemingly inconsequential joke on the show, some of its fans began to fetishize a particular, limited-edition fast food sauce. When McDonalds, the actual owner of that sauce, cashed in by promoting the return of its Szechuan Sauce, a macho culture within the show’s fandom reached its zenith in the forms of hostile behaviour at McDonalds restaurants and online (Alexander and Kuchera). Rick and Morty fandom also built a misogynist reputation for its angry responses to the show’s efforts to hire a writer’s room that gave equal representation to women. Rick and Morty trolls doggedly harassed a few of the show’s female writers through 2017 and went so far as to post their private information online (Barsanti). Such gender politics of fan cultures have been the subject of much scholarly attention (Johnson, “Fan-tagonism”), not least in the many conversations hosted on Jenkins’ blog. Gendered performances and readings of fan activity are instrumental in defining and legitimating some texts as transmedia and some creators as masterminds, not only within fandoms but also in the scholarly discourse.When McDonalds promoted the return of their Szechuan Sauce, in response to its mention in the story world of animated sci-fi sitcom Rick and Morty, they contributed to transmedia storytelling.Both Rick and Morty and Star Wars are examples of how masculinist fan cultures, stubborn allegiances to male authorship, and definitions of transmedia converge both in academia and popular culture. While Rick and Morty is, in reality, partly female-authored, much of its media image is still anchored to its two male “creators,” Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. Particularly in the context of #MeToo feminism, one wonders how much female authorship has been elided from existing storyworlds and, furthermore, what alternative examples of transmedia narration are exempt from current definitions of transmediality.The individual creator is a social construction of scholarship and popular discourse. This imaginary creator bears little relation to the conditions of creation and production of transmedia storyworlds, which are almost always team written and collectively authored. Further, the focus on writing itself elides the significant contributions of many creators such as those in production design (Bevan). Beyond that, what creative credit do focus groups deserve in shaping transmedia stories and their multi-layered, multi-platformed reaches? Is authorship, or even credit, really the concept we, as scholars, want to invest in when studying these forms of narration and mediation?At more symbolic levels, the seemingly exhaustless popular and scholarly appetite for male-bodied authorship persists within storyworlds themselves. The transmedia examples popularly and academically heralded as “seminal” centre on patrimony, patrilineage, and inheritance (i.e. Star Wars [1977-] and The Lord of the Rings [1937-]). Of course, Harry Potter (2001-2009) is an outlier as the celebrification of J.K. Rowling provides a strong example of credited female authorship. However, this example plays out many of the same issues, albeit the franchise is attached to a woman, in that it precludes many of the other creative minds who have helped shape Harry Potter’s world. How many more billions of dollars need we invest in men writing about the mysteries of how other men spread their genetic material across fictional universes? Moreover, transmedia studies remains dominated by academic men geeking out about how fan men geek out about how male creators write about mostly male characters in stories about … men. There are other stories waiting to be told and studied through the practices and theories of transmedia. These stories might be gender-inclusive and collective in ways that challenge traditional notions of authorship, control, rights, origin, and property.Obsession with male authorship, control, rights, origin, paternity and property is recognisible in scholarship on transmedia storytelling, and also symbolically in many of the most heralded examples of transmedia storytelling, such as the Star Wars saga.Prompting Broader DiscussionThis piece urges the development of broader understandings of transmedia storytelling. A range of media scholarship has already begun this work. Jonathan Gray’s book on paratexts offers an important pathway for such scholarship by legitimating ancillary texts, like posters and trailers, that uniquely straddle promotional and feature content platforms (Gray). A wave of scholars productively explores transmedia storytelling with a focus on storyworlds (Scolari; Harvey), often through the lens of narratology (Ryan; Ryan and Thon). Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman have drawn together a media archaeological approach and a focus on transmedia characters in an innovative way. We hope to see greater proliferation of focuses and perspectives for the study of transmedia storytelling, including investigations that connect fictional and non-fictional worlds and stories, and a more inclusive variety of life experiences.Conversely, new scholarship on media authorship provides fresh directions, models, methods, and concepts for examining the complexity and messiness of this topic. A growing body of scholarship on the functions of media branding is also productive for reconceptualising notions of authorship in transmedia storytelling (Bourdaa; Dehry Kurtz and Bourdaa). Most notably, A Companion to Media Authorship edited by Gray and Derek Johnson productively interrogates relationships between creative processes, collaborative practices, production cultures, industrial structures, legal frameworks, and theoretical approaches around media authorship. Its case studies begin the work of reimagining of the role of authorship in transmedia, and pave the way for further developments (Burnett; Gordon; Hilmes; Stein). In particular, Matt Hills’s case study of how “counter-authorship” was negotiated on Torchwood (2006-2011) opens up new ways of thinking about multiple authorship and the variety of experiences, contributions, credits, and relationships this encompasses. Johnson’s Media Franchising addresses authorship in a complex way through a focus on social interactions, without making it a defining feature of the form; it would be significant to see a similar scholarly treatment of transmedia. At the very least, scholarly attention might turn its focus away from the very patriarchal activity of discussing definitions among a coterie and, instead, study the process of spreadability of male-centred transmedia storyworlds (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). Given that transmedia is not historically unique to the digital age, scholars might instead study how spreadability changes with the emergence of digitality and convergence, rather than pontificating on definitions of adaptation versus transmedia and cinema versus media.We urge transmedia scholars to distance their work from the malignant gender politics endemic to the media industries and particularly global Hollywood. The confluence of gendered agendas in both academia and media industries works to reinforce patriarchal hierarchies. The humanities should offer independent analysis and critique of how media industries and products function, and should highlight opportunities for conceiving of, creating, and treating such media practices and texts in new ways. As such, it is problematic that discourses on transmedia commonly neglect the distinction between what defines transmediality and what constitutes good examples of transmedia. This blurs the boundaries between description and prescription, taxonomy and hierarchy, analysis and evaluation, and definition and taste. Such discourses blinker us to what we might consider to be transmedia, but also to what examples of “good” transmedia storytelling might look like.Transmedia theory focuses disproportionately on authorship. This restricts a comprehensive understanding of transmedia storytelling, limits the lenses we bring to it, obstructs the ways we evaluate transmedia stories, and impedes how we imagine the possibilities for both media and storytelling. Stories have always been transmedial. What changes with the inception of transmedia theory is that men can claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries. It is questionable whether authorship is important to transmedia, in which creation is most often collective, loosely planned (at best) and diffused across many people, skill sets, and sectors. While Jenkins’s work has been pivotal in the development of transmedia theory, this is a ripe moment for the diversification of theoretical paradigms for understanding stories in the digital era.ReferencesAlexander, Julia, and Ben Kuchera. “How a Rick and Morty Joke Led to a McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce Controversy.” Polygon 4 Apr. 2017. <https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/12/16464374/rick-and-morty-mcdonalds-szechuan-sauce>.Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Barsanti, Sami. “Dan Harmon Is Pissed at Rick and Morty Fans Harassing Female Writers.” The AV Club 21 Sep. 2017. <https://www.avclub.com/dan-harmon-is-pissed-at-rick-and-morty-fans-for-harassi-1818628816>.Bevan, Alex. “Nostalgia for Pre-Digital Media in Mad Men.” Television & New Media 14.6 (2013): 546-559.Boddy, William. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “This Is Not Marketing. 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Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. Consequently, this paper has analysed the use of the term “pig” and has used it as a springboard for the analysis of some aspects of the novel together with different theoretical definitions and concepts. Acknowledgements A version of this paper was given at the International Congress Food for Thought, hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in February 2010. References Allen, Bryan J. Information Flow and Innovation Diffusion in the East Sepic District, Papua New Guinea. PhD diss. Australian National University, Australia. 1976. Berridge, Edward. Lives of the Saints. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995. C., Michael. “Toward a sound theory of Australian Grunge fiction.” [Weblog entry] Eurhythmania. 5 Mar. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010 http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/toward-sound-theory-of-australian.html. Ettler, Justine. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995. Healey, Christopher J. “Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: A Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology.” Ethnology 24 (1985): 153-65. Holman, Jeanine. “Bound Feet.” Bound Feet: The History of a Curious, Erotic Custom. Ed. Joseph Rupp 2010. 11 Aug. 2010. http://www.josephrupp.com/history.html. Jaivin, Linda. Eat Me. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995. Khoo, Tseen. “Selling Sexotica: Oriental Grunge and Suburbia in Lillian Ngs’ Swallowing Clouds.” Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australian. Ed. Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jaqueline Lo. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. 164-72. Khoo, Tseen; Danau Tanu, and Tien. "Re: Of pigs and porks” 5-9 Aug. 1997. Asian- Australian Discussion List Digest numbers 1447-1450. Apr. 2010 . Kim, Seung-Og. “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China.” Current Anthopology 35.2 (Apr. 1994): 119-141. McGahan, Andrew. Praise. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. McGahan, Andrew. 1988. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995. Mendes, Clare. Drift Street. 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The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Brien, Donna Lee. “Looking at Death with Writers’ Eyes: Developing Protocols for Utilising Roadside Memorials in Creative Writing Classes.” Roadside Memorials. Ed. Jennifer Clark. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2006. 208–216. Campbell, Elaine. “Public Sphere as Assemblage: The Cultural Politics of Roadside Memorialization.” The British Journal of Sociology 64.3 (2013): 526–547. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. 43 BC. Trans. C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1903. Clark, Jennifer. “But Statistics Don’t Ride Skateboards, They Don’t Have Nicknames Like ‘Champ’: Personalising the Road Dead with Roadside Memorials.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Cohen, Erik. “Roadside Memorials in Northeastern Thailand.” OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 66.4 (2012–13): 343–363. Connolly, John F., Anne Cullen, and Orfhlaith McTigue. “Single Road Traffic Deaths: Accident or Suicide?” Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 16.2 (1995): 85–89. Cornack [Coroner]. Transcript of Proceedings. In The Matter of an Inquest into the Cause and Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Jason John Zupp. Towoomba, Qld.: Coroners Court. 12 Oct. 2007. Davies, Douglas. “Locating Hope: The Dynamics of Memorial Sites.” 6th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. York, UK: University of York, 2002. Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government [DITRDLG]. Road Deaths Australia: 2007 Statistical Summary. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Duwe, Grant. “Body-count Journalism: The Presentation of Mass Murder in the News Media.” Homicide Studies 4 (2000): 364–399. Elder, Bruce. Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788. Sydney: New Holland, 1998. Erdos, Renee. “Leichhardt, Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (1813-1848).” Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1967. Everett, Holly. Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. Austin: Texas UP, 2002. Excell, Gerri. “Roadside Memorials in the UK.” Unpublished MA thesis. Reading: University of Reading, 2004. ———. “Contemporary Deathscapes: A Comparative Analysis of the Material Culture of Roadside Memorials in the US, Australia and the UK.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter V.4 (1955): 49–52. Grider, Sylvia. “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore (5 Oct. 2001). Haider, Amna. “War Trauma and Gothic Landscapes of Dispossession and Dislocation in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.” Gothic Studies 14.2 (2012): 55–73. Hall, Stephen S. Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2003. Hartig, Kate V., and Kevin M. Dunn. “Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Australian Geographical Studies 36 (1998): 5–20. Hockey, Jenny, and Janet Draper. “Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity, (Dis)embodiment and the Life Course.” Body & Society 11.2 (2005): 41–57. Online version: 1–25. Jones, Ian, and Kaye McColl. (2006) “Highway Tragedy.” Goondiwindi Argus 9 Jun. 2006. Kiernan, Stephen P. “The Transformation of Death in America.” Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make. Eds. Nan Bauer-Maglin, and Donna Perry. Rutgers University: Rutgers UP, 2010. 163–182. Klaassens, M., P.D. Groote, and F.M. Vanclay. “Expressions of Private Mourning in Public Space: The Evolving Structure of Spontaneous and Permanent Roadside Memorials in the Netherlands.” Death Studies 37.2 (2013): 145–171. Ladd, Brian. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Leichhardt, Ludwig. Journal of an Overland Expedition of Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, A Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles during the Years 1844–1845. London, T & W Boone, 1847. Facsimile ed. Sydney: Macarthur Press, n.d. Lowe, Tim. “Roadside Memorials in South Eastern Australia.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. MacConville, Una. “Roadside Memorials.” Bath, UK: Centre for Death & Society, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, 2007. Macintyre, Stuart. “The Making of the Australian Working Class: An Historiographical Survey.” Historical Studies 18.71 (1978): 233–253. Mollinson, James, and Nicholas Bonham. Tucker. South Melbourne: Macmillan Company of Australia, and Australian National Gallery, 1982. Morell, Virginia. “Mournful Creatures.” Lapham’s Quarterly 6.4 (2013): 200–208. Nelson, Victoria. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Harvard University: Harvard UP, 2012. “Pathways through Grief.” 1st National Conference on Bereavement in a Healthcare Setting. Dundee, 1–2 Sep. 2008. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “Words from the Culinary Crypt: Reading the Recipe as a Haunted/Haunting Text.” M/C Journal 16.3 (2013). Queensland Police. “Fatal Traffic Incident, Goondiwindi [Media Advisory].” 27 Apr. 2005. ———. “Fatal Truck Accident, Taroom.” Media release. 11 Dec. 2005. ———. “Double Fatality, Goondiwindi.” Media release. 5 Jun. 2006. Richter, E. D., P. Barach, E. Ben-Michael, and T. Berman. “Death and Injury from Motor Vehicle Crashes: A Public Health Failure, Not an Achievement.” Injury Prevention 7 (2001): 176–178. 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This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

For those seeking a diversion from the drudgery of work there are a number of websites offering to take you away. Consider the case of wasteaminute.com. On the site there is everything from flash video games, soft-core pornography and animated nudity, to puzzles and parlour games like poker. In addition, the site offers links to video clips grouped in categories such as “funny,” “accidents,” or “strange.” With its bright yellow bubble letters and elementary design, wasteaminute will never win any Webby awards. It is also unlikely to be part of a lucrative initial public offering for its owner, a web marketing company based in Lexington, Kentucky. The internet ratings company Alexa gives wasteaminute a ranking of 5,880,401 when it comes to the most popular sites online over the last three months, quite some way behind sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Windows Live.Wasteaminute is not unique. There exists a group of websites, a micro-genre of sorts, that go out of their way to offer momentary escape from the more serious work at hand, with a similar menu of offerings. These include sites with names such as ishouldbeworking.com, i-am-bored.com, boredatwork.com, and drivenbyboredom.com. These web destinations represent only the most overtly named time-wasting opportunities. Video sharing sites like YouTube or France’s DailyMotion, personalised home pages like iGoogle, and the range of applications available on mobile devices offer similar opportunities for escape. Wasteaminute inspired me to think about the relationship between digital media technologies and waste. In one sense, the site’s offerings remind us of the Internet’s capacity to re-purpose old media forms from earlier phases in the digital revolution, like the retro video game PacMan, or from aspects of print culture, like crosswords (Bolter and Grusin; Straw). For my purposes, though, wasteaminute permits the opportunity to meditate, albeit briefly, on the ways media facilitate wasting time at work, particularly for those working in white- and no-collar work environments. In contemporary work environments work activity and wasteful activity exist on the same platform. With a click of a mouse or a keyboard shortcut, work and diversion can be easily interchanged on the screen, an experience of computing I know intimately from first-hand experience. The blurring of lines between work and waste has accompanied the extension of the ‘working day,’ a concept once tethered to the standardised work-week associated with modernity. Now people working in a range of professions take work out of the office and find themselves working in cafes, on public transportation, and at times once reserved for leisure, like weekends (Basso). In response to the indeterminate nature of when and where we are at work, the mainstream media routinely report about the wasteful use of computer technology for non-work purposes. Stories such as a recent one in the Washington Post which claimed that increased employee use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter led to decreased productivity at work have become quite common in traditional media outlets (Casciato). Media technologies have always offered the prospect of making office work more efficient or the means for management to exercise control over employees. However, those same technologies have also served as the platforms on which one can engage in dilatory acts, stealing time from behind the boss’s back. I suggest stealing time at work may well be a “tactic,” in the sense used by Michel de Certeau, as a means to resist the rules and regulations that structure work and the working life. However, I also consider it to be a tactic in a different sense: websites and other digital applications offer users the means to take time back, in the form of ‘quick hits,’ providing immediate visual or narrative pleasures, or through interfaces which make the time-wasting look like work (Wagman). Reading sites like wasteaminute as examples of ‘office entertainment,’ reminds us of the importance of workers as audiences for web content. An analysis of a few case studies also reveals how the forms of address of these sites themselves recognise and capitalise on an understanding of the rhythms of the working day, as well as those elements of contemporary office culture characterised by interruption, monotony and surveillance. Work, Media, Waste A mass of literature documents the transformations of work brought on by industrialisation and urbanisation. A recent biography of Franz Kafka outlines the rigors imposed upon the writer while working as an insurance agent: his first contract stipulated that “no employee has the right to keep any objects other than those belonging to the office under lock in the desk and files assigned for its use” (Murray 66). Siegfried Kracauer’s collection of writings on salaried workers in Germany in the 1930s argues that mass entertainment offers distractions that inhibit social change. Such restrictions and inducements are exemplary of the attempts to make work succumb to managerial regimes which are intended to maximise productivity and minimise waste, and to establish a division between ‘company time’ and ‘free time’. One does not have to be an industrial sociologist to know the efforts of Frederick W. Taylor, and the disciplines of “scientific management” in the early twentieth century which were based on the idea of making work more efficient, or of the workplace sociology scholarship from the 1950s that drew attention to the ways that office work can be monotonous or de-personalising (Friedmann; Mills; Whyte). Historian JoAnne Yates has documented the ways those transformations, and what she calls an accompanying “philosophy of system and efficiency,” have been made possible through information and communication technologies, from the typewriter to carbon paper (107). Yates evokes the work of James Carey in identifying these developments, for example, the locating of workers in orderly locations such as offices, as spatial in nature. The changing meaning of work, particularly white-collar or bureaucratic labour in an age of precarious employment and neo-liberal economic regimes, and aggressive administrative “auditing technologies,” has subjected employees to more strenuous regimes of surveillance to ensure employee compliance and to protect against waste of company resources (Power). As Andrew Ross notes, after a deep period of self-criticism over the drudgery of work in North American settings in the 1960s, the subsequent years saw a re-thinking of the meaning of work, one that gradually traded greater work flexibility and self-management for more assertive forms of workplace control (9). As Ross notes, this too has changed, an after-effect of “the shareholder revolution,” which forced companies to deliver short-term profitability to its investors at any social cost. With so much at stake, Ross explains, the freedom of employees assumed a lower priority within corporate cultures, and “the introduction of information technologies in the workplace of the new capitalism resulted in the intensified surveillance of employees” (12). Others, like Dale Bradley, have drawn attention to the ways that the design of the office itself has always concerned itself with the bureaucratic and disciplinary control of bodies in space (77). The move away from physical workspaces such as ‘the pen’ to the cubicle and now from the cubicle to the virtual office is for Bradley a move from “construction” to “connection.” This spatial shift in the way in which control over employees is exercised is symbolic of the liquid forms in which bodies are now “integrated with flows of money, culture, knowledge, and power” in the post-industrial global economies of the twenty-first century. As Christena Nippert-Eng points out, receiving office space was seen as a marker of trust, since it provided employees with a sense of privacy to carry out affairs—both of a professional or of a personal matter—out of earshot of others. Privacy means a lot of things, she points out, including “a relative lack of accountability for our immediate whereabouts and actions” (163). Yet those same modalities of control which characterise communication technologies in workspaces may also serve as the platforms for people to waste time while working. In other words, wasteful practices utilize the same technology that is used to regulate and manage time spent in the workplace. The telephone has permitted efficient communication between units in an office building or between the office and outside, but ‘personal business’ can also be conducted on the same line. Radio stations offer ‘easy listening’ formats, providing unobtrusive music so as not to disturb work settings. However, they can easily be tuned to other stations for breaking news, live sports events, or other matters having to do with the outside world. Photocopiers and fax machines facilitate the reproduction and dissemination of communication regardless of whether it is it work or non-work related. The same, of course, is true for computerised applications. Companies may encourage their employees to use Facebook or Twitter to reach out to potential clients or customers, but those same applications may be used for personal social networking as well. Since the activities of work and play can now be found on the same platform, employers routinely remind their employees that their surfing activities, along with their e-mails and company documents, will be recorded on the company server, itself subject to auditing and review whenever the company sees fit. Employees must be careful to practice image management, in order to ensure that contradictory evidence does not appear online when they call in sick to the office. Over time the dynamics of e-mail and Internet etiquette have changed in response to such developments. Those most aware of the distractive and professionally destructive features of downloading a funny or comedic e-mail attachment have come to adopt the acronym “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work). Even those of us who don’t worry about those things are well aware that the cache and “history” function of web browsers threaten to reveal the extent to which our time online is spent in unproductive ways. Many companies and public institutions, for example libraries, have taken things one step further by filtering out access to websites that may be peripheral to the primary work at hand.At the same time contemporary workplace settings have sought to mix both work and play, or better yet to use play in the service of work, to make “work” more enjoyable for its workers. Professional development seminars, team-building exercises, company softball games, or group outings are examples intended to build morale and loyalty to the company among workers. Some companies offer their employees access to gyms, to game rooms, and to big screen TVs, in return for long and arduous—indeed, punishing—hours of time at the office (Dyer-Witheford and Sherman; Ross). In this manner, acts of not working are reconfigured as a form of work, or at least as a productive experience for the company at large. Such perks are offered with an assumption of personal self-discipline, a feature of what Nippert-Eng characterises as the “discretionary workplace” (154). Of course, this also comes with an expectation that workers will stay close to the office, and to their work. As Sarah Sharma recently argued in this journal, such thinking is part of the way that late capitalism constructs “innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space.” At the same time, however, there are plenty of moments of gentle resistance, in which the same machines of control and depersonalisation can be customised, and where individual expressions find their own platforms. A photo essay by Anna McCarthy in the Journal of Visual Culture records the inspirational messages and other personalised objects with which workers adorn their computers and work stations. McCarthy’s photographs represent the way people express themselves in relation to their work, making it a “place where workplace politics and power relations play out, often quite visibly” (McCarthy 214). Screen SecretsIf McCarthy’s photo essay illustrates the overt ways in which people bring personal expression or gentle resistance to anodyne workplaces, there are also a series of other ‘screen acts’ that create opportunities to waste time in ways that are disguised as work. During the Olympics and US college basketball playoffs, both American broadcast networks CBS and NBC offered a “boss button,” a graphic link that a user could immediately click “if the boss was coming by” that transformed the screen to something was associated with the culture of work, such as a spreadsheet. Other purveyors of networked time-wasting make use of the spreadsheet to mask distraction. The website cantyouseeimbored turns a spreadsheet into a game of “Breakout!” while other sites, like Spreadtweet, convert your Twitter updates into the form of a spreadsheet. Such boss buttons and screen interfaces that mimic work are the presentday avatars of the “panic button,” a graphic image found at the bottom of websites back in the days of Web 1.0. A click of the panic button transported users away from an offending website and towards something more legitimate, like Yahoo! Even if it is unlikely that boss keys actually convince one’s superiors that one is really working—clicking to a spreadsheet only makes sense for a worker who might be expected to be working on those kinds of documents—they are an index of how notions of personal space and privacy play out in the digitalised workplace. David Kiely, an employee at an Australian investment bank, experienced this first hand when he opened an e-mail attachment sent to him by his co-workers featuring a scantily-clad model (Cuneo and Barrett). Unfortunately for Kiely, at the time he opened the attachment his computer screen was visible in the background of a network television interview with another of the bank’s employees. Kiely’s inauspicious click (which made his the subject of an investigation by his employees) continues to circulate on the Internet, and it spawned a number of articles highlighting the precarious nature of work in a digitalised environment where what might seem to be private can suddenly become very public, and thus able to be disseminated without restraint. At the same time, the public appetite for Kiely’s story indicates that not working at work, and using the Internet to do it, represents a mode of media consumption that is familiar to many of us, even if it is only the servers on the company computer that can account for how much time we spend doing it. Community attitudes towards time spent unproductively online reminds us that waste carries with it a range of negative signifiers. We talk about wasting time in terms of theft, “stealing time,” or even more dramatically as “killing time.” The popular construction of television as the “boob tube” distinguishes it from more ‘productive’ activities, like spending time with family, or exercise, or involvement in one’s community. The message is simple: life is too short to be “wasted” on such ephemera. If this kind of language is less familiar in the digital age, the discourse of ‘distraction’ is more prevalent. Yet, instead of judging distraction a negative symptom of the digital age, perhaps we should reinterpret wasting time as the worker’s attempt to assert some agency in an increasingly controlled workplace. ReferencesBasso, Pietro. Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso, 2003. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.Bradley, Dale. “Dimensions Vary: Technology, Space, and Power in the 20th Century Office”. Topia 11 (2004): 67-82.Casciato, Paul. “Facebook and Other Social Media Cost UK Billions”. Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2010. 11 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR2010080503951.html›.Cuneo, Clementine, and David Barrett. “Was Banker Set Up Over Saucy Miranda”. The Daily Telegraph 4 Feb. 2010. 21 May 2010 ‹http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/was-banker-set-up-over-saucy-miranda/story-e6frewz0-1225826576571›.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of California P. 1988.Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Zena Sharman. "The Political Economy of Canada's Video and Computer Game Industry”. Canadian Journal of Communication 30.2 (2005). 1 May 2010 ‹http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1575/1728›.Friedmann, Georges. Industrial Society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Masses. London: Verso, 1998.McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. ———. “Geekospheres: Visual Culture and Material Culture at Work”. Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2004): 213-21.Mills, C. Wright. White Collar. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951. Murray, Nicholas. Kafka: A Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Newman, Michael. “Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video”. First Monday 13.5 (2008). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2102/1962›.Nippert-Eng, Christena. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1996.Power, Michael. The Audit Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Ross, Andrew. No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Sharma, Sarah. “The Great American Staycation and the Risk of Stillness”. M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). 11 May 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/122›. Straw, Will. “Embedded Memories”. Residual Media Ed. Charles Acland. U. of Minnesota P., 2007. 3-15.Whyte, William. The Organisation Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Wagman, Ira. “Log On, Goof Off, Look Up: Facebook and the Rhythms of Canadian Internet Use”. How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts for Popular Culture. Eds. Bart Beaty, Derek, Gloria Filax Briton, and Rebecca Sullivan. Athabasca: Athabasca UP 2009. 55-77. ‹http://www2.carleton.ca/jc/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/02_Beaty_et_al-How_Canadians_Communicate.pdf›Yates, JoAnne. “Business Use of Information Technology during the Industrial Age”. A Nation Transformed by Information. Eds. Alfred D. Chandler & James W. Cortada. Oxford: Oxford UP., 2000. 107-36.

The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. 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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. Nouvelle Cuisine, Cooks and Other People: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995. Devon: Prospect, 1996. 123-7. Gayot, Andre, and Mary, Evans. "The Best of London." Gault Millau (1996): 379. Gillespie, Cailein. "Gastrosophy and Nouvelle Cuisine: Entrepreneurial Fashion and Fiction." British Food Journal 96.10 (1994): 19-23. Gisslen, Wayne. Professional Cooking. Hoboken: John Wiley, 2011. Hanneman, Leonard. Patisserie. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1971. Hegarty, Joseph. Standing the Heat. New York: Haworth P, 2004. Hsu, Kathy. "Global Tourism Higher Education Past, Present and Future." Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism 5.1/2/3 (2006): 251-267 Hughes, Mairtin. Ireland. Victoria: Lonely Planet, 2000. Ireland. Irish Statute Book: Dublin Institute of Technology Act 1992. Dublin: Stationery Office, 1992. James, Ken. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. Hambledon: Cambridge UP, 2002. Lawson, John, and Harold, Silver. Social History of Education in England. London: Methuen, 1973. Lehmann, Gilly. "English Cookery Books in the 18th Century." The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 227-9. Marnell, Josephine, Nora Breathnach, Ann Martin, and Mor Murnaghan. All in the Cooking Book 1 & 2. Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1946. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. "The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin's Haute Cuisine Restaurants, 1958-2008." Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisiplinary Research 14.4 (2011): 525-45. ---. "Chef Liam Kavanagh (1926-2011)." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 12.2 (2012): 4-6. ---. "The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History". PhD. Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. McGee, Harold. The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. New York: Hungry Minds, 1990. ---. On Food and Cooking the Science and Lore of the Kitchen. London: Harper Collins, 1991. Montague, Prosper. Larousse Gastronomique. New York: Crown, 1961. National Qualification Authority of Ireland. "Review by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (NQAI) of the Effectiveness of the Quality Assurance Procedures of the Dublin Institute of Technology." 2010. 18 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.dit.ie/media/documents/services/qualityassurance/terms_of_ref.doc› Nicolello, Ildo. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. Pepin, Jacques. La Technique. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1976. Richards, Peter. "Practical Cookery." 9th Ed. Caterer and Hotelkeeper (2001). 18 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.catererandhotelkeeper.co.uk/Articles/30/7/2001/31923/practical-cookery-ninth-edition-victor-ceserani-ronald-kinton-and-david-foskett.htm›. Roux, Albert, and Michel Roux. New Classic Cuisine. New York: Little, Brown, 1989. Roux, Michel. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. London: Conran Octopus, 1994. Saulnier, Louis. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. London: Leon Jaeggi, 1914. Sonnenschmidt, Fredric, and John Nicholas. The Art of the Garde Manger. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973. Spang, Rebecca. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Stevenson, Daniel. Professional Cookery the Process Approach. London: Hutchinson, 1985. The Culinary Institute of America. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. Hoboken: New Jersey, 2004. Vega, Cesar, and Job, Ubbink. "Molecular Gastronomy: A Food Fad or Science Supporting Innovation Cuisine?". Trends in Food Science & Technology 19 (2008): 372-82. Wilfred, Fance, and Michael Small. The New International Confectioner: Confectionary, Cakes, Pastries, Desserts, Ices and Savouries. 1968.

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.