Journal articles on the topic 'Fantasy fiction Illustrations'

The article discusses the latest trends in the field of presentation of natural science information for students, which have developed in the postmodern era. It is shown that botanical illustrations presented in postmodern alphabets do not reflect the morphological features of plants. When depicting plants, the author uses the technique of deconstructing images presented in ancient botanical atlases. Fragments of botanical illustrations are placed against the background of everyday scenes of the 19th century, including those of a fantasy nature. The structural components of the botanical educational book, its content and ironic author's comments are considered. The description of plants is pseudo-academic: the texts are surreal, they combine fiction and truth, fantasy and the specifics of the action. It is concluded that the irony of the comments does not contribute to the formation of the foundations of the natural science worldview.

Abstract The fiction of a national Spanish "family" that embraced the inhabitants of its "overseas provinces" was promulgated insistently in nineteenth-century colonial discourse. The fragility of this fiction was demonstrated dramatically in writings about the Philippines by peninsular Spaniards, as they tried to reconcile the profound cultural, linguistic, and ethnic heterogeneity of the archipelago with the notion of biological and cultural filiation. In his 1886 painting España y Filipinas, the Philippine reformist artist Juan Luna allegorically portrayed Spain and the Philippines as matron and racialized adolescent, suggesting that the Philippines’ future depended on its mestizo population. In the same year, Faustina Sáez de Melgar imagined both the Philippines and the Americas as "nuestras hijas" in her anthology of costumbrismo sketches, Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas. The volume’s title evoked a fantasy of feminine agency belied by the fact that virtually none of the sketches were written by a member of the "type" portrayed; and that the volume was illustrated not by a woman but by Eusebio Planas, known for his eroticized sketches of women. Josefa Estévez, a peninsular Spaniard, contributed the essay on "La filipina," in which she distinguished sharply between the Christianized populations of the archipelago and the non-Christianized "salvajes." Rather than contributing an ethnographic study of the "savage" tribes, Estévez represented this "tipo" through two narratives of sexual brutality and conquest. Both narratives suggested that the social structure of the non-Christianized colonial Philippine populations was not only untenable but unimaginable: the only moral compass available to these populations was to be found in female instincts of maternity and heterosexual love, which were ineffective against the uncontrolled instincts of lust and rage that guided both native and Spanish male characters. Estévez’s conventional invocation of the power of Christianization rings hollow in the face of her portrayal of the sexual opportunism, abuse and abandonment suffered by the native woman at the hands of the putative father of the colonial family. Ultimately, in both Estévez’s text and Planas’s illustrations, "civilization" through mestizaje in the Philippines is portrayed as impossible.

A Review of: McKechnie, Lynne (E.F.). “ ‘Spiderman is not for Babies’ (Peter, 4 Years): The ‘Boys and Reading Problem’ from the Perspective of the Boys Themselves.” The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 30.1/2 (2006): 57-67. Objective – This study looks at what constitutes legitimate reading material for boys and how this material is defined in light of assessed gender differences in reading, and is part of a larger, ongoing research project on the role of public libraries in the development of youth as readers. Design – Semi-structured, qualitative interviews and book inventories. Setting – The research originated from the MLIS 566 (Literature for Children and Young Adults) class at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Subjects – Forty-three boys, ages four through twelve, were interviewed. Most of the boys lived in Ontario, although a few came from other Canadian provinces. Methods – Library school students who were registered in a Literature for Children and Young Adults class interviewed children and young adults about their reading and information practice as part of a “Book Ownership Case Study” assignment. The researcher also interviewed children and young adults, for a total of 137 case studies. For the purpose of this article, a data subset for the 43 boys included in the larger project was analyzed. The boys ranged in age from four to twelve years. The mean age was eight and the median age was nine. The theoretical perspective of reader response theory was used to situate the study. This theory has the relationship between the text and the reader as its focus, and it suggests that to understand the reading habits of boys, there needs to be recognition that the experts about their reading are the boys themselves. The interviews, which explored reading preferences and practices, were qualitative, semi-structured, and took thirty minutes to complete. In addition to the interview, each boy’s personal book and information material collection was inventoried. The researcher used a grounded theory approach to analyze the inventory and interview data to pull out themes related to the research questions. Grounded theory “uses a prescribed set of procedures for analyzing data and constructing a theoretical model” from the data (Leedy and Ormrod 154). Main Results – The collection inventories revealed that all 43 study participants had personal collections of reading materials. The collections ranged from eight volumes to 398 volumes. There was a mean volume total of 108 and a median of 98 books per boy. In addition to books, other materials were in the collections. Video recordings were owned by 36 (83.7%) of the boys, 28 (65.1%) of participants had computer software, 28 (65.1%) owned audio recordings, and 21 (48.8%) of the collections also included magazines. In the interview data analysis, a number of themes were revealed. All of the boys except one owned fiction. Some genres appeared frequently and were different than the ones found in the inventories taken of the girls in the larger study. Genres in the boys’ collections included fantasy, science fiction, sports stories, and humorous stories. The boys also discussed genres they did not enjoy: classic children’s fiction, such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, love stories, and “books about groups of girls” (61). All but five boys had series books such as Animorphs, Captain Underpants, Redwall, and Magic Treehouse in their collections. All study participants except for one owned non-fiction titles. When asked what their favourite book was, many of the boys chose a non-fiction title. Holdings included subjects such as “jokes, magic, sports, survival guides, crafts, science, dictionaries, maps, nature, and dinosaurs” (62). In addition to books, the boys reported owning and reading a wide range of other materials. Comics, manga, magazines, pop-up and other toy books, sticker books, colouring books, puzzle books, and catalogues were among the collection inventories. Only one boy read the newspaper. Another theme that emerged from the interview data was “gaming as story” (63). The boys who read video game manuals reported reading to learn about the game, and also reading to experience the game’s story. One boy’s enjoyment of the manual and the game came from the narrative found within. Various reading practices were explored in the interviews. Formats that featured non-linear reading were popular. Illustrations were important. Pragmatic reading, done to support other activities (e.g., Pokeman), was “both useful and pleasurable” (54). And finally, the issue of what counts as reading emerged from the data. Many boys discounted the reading that “they liked the best as not really being reading” (65). Some of the boys felt that reading novels constituted reading but that the reading of computer manuals or items such as science fair project books was “not really reading” (65). A distinction was made between real books and information books by the boys. Conclusions – The researcher explored what has been labelled as the “problem” of boys reading in this paper. She found that the 43 boys in this study are reading, but what they are reading has been undervalued by society and by the boys themselves. Collection inventories found a large number of non-fiction books, computer magazines, comic books, graphic novels, and role-playing game manuals—items not necessarily privileged by libraries, schools, or even by the boys themselves. The researcher suggests that “part of the ‘boys and reading problem’ then lies in what we count as reading” (66). By keeping what boys are actually reading in mind when it comes to collection development and library programming, children’s librarians can “play a central role in legitimizing the reading practices of boys” (66).

En 1986, l’écrivain français Claude Louis-Combet publie Le roman de Mélusine, une fiction consacrée à la légendaire fée ophidienne, haute figure du tabou du voir. S’il s’inscrit clairement dans la tradition du texte établi à la fin du xive siècle par Jean d’Arras, Louis-Combet laisse affleurer dans sa réécriture une obsession du visuel, du mirage et du mimétisme, symbolisée par l’oeil dont les multiples incarnations et colorations traversent le récit. L’oeil de l’amour, regard de l’amant découvrant son reflet dans le miroir d’eau dans lequel se mire la fée, dévoile inévitablement son envers, l’iris tragique, soit l’oeil du sanglier meurtrier, augure et agent du destin. Dans le royaume des images dont Mélusine ouvre les portes à son époux, imaginaire régenté par la Femme serpentine et phallique, l’amour trouve une illustration parfaite et reste parfaitement illusoire. Pourtant, derrière les yeux miroitants de la fée, le réel s’annonce, et avec lui l’instant où la séparation marquera la fin de la passion, de la féérie et du fantasme. Écrire Mélusine revient pour Louis-Combet à rêver d’un temps d’avant la lettre où homme et femme n’étaient que les facettes d’une même imago dont la puissance de fascination reste toujours aussi vivace.

Motum, Markus. Curiosity: The Story of a Mars Rover. Candlewick Press, 2018. Curiosity: The Story of a Mars Rover, written and illustrated by Markus Motum, would be a welcome addition to any classroom’s library. With exceptional pacing and flow, Motum takes us through the true story of one of science’s great achievements: successfully landing a rover on Mars. Many young readers have an inherent interest in outer space and science fiction. In this book, Motum expounds the science of science fiction in detailing the story of how Curiosity ended up on Mars (where it still roves today) in a somewhat narrative form. It would be appropriate for all grade levels, though younger grade students would likely need experienced help in order to read it. The font size and colour vary making them readable to most audiences, and they serve the story well. The story is told from the point of view of the rover itself, named Curiosity. It begins by introducing itself as if it were a sentient creature before it goes back to the beginning, in a very cosmic sense, to plant its story within the wider view of space exploration in general. Motum’s choice in this case allows the reader to gain greater perspective for Curiosity’s story. Curiosity itself is as developed as it needs to be for the purposes of the narrative; that is to say, Motum does not imbue the rover with emotion or opinions within the story. However, the emotions and opinions of the astronauts, scientists and engineers who are namelessly featured throughout the story are indeed explored, which gives a sense of urgency and peril as we travel alongside Curiosity on its adventure. In addition to authoring this picture book, Motum also illustrates it in a mixed media style that is both alien and historic. The solid colours and painted portions evoke the artistic style of old postcards from days gone by, while simultaneously making the Martian landscape seem exotic and alien, as if Mars were a travel destination, welcoming travellers like Curiosity. Though beautiful, the illustrations do not add much information to the story of Curiosity; in some instances, they provide some spatial context like when Curiosity tries to land on Mars. The illustrations lend a hand to create atmosphere, both in the context of the story and for the reader. Some of the text is also placed in unconventional locations on the page, so the text and the illustrations work together to create meaning and story. One finds that the eye is drawn to specific parts of the image on each page, and it is masterfully done. For these and many other reasons, Curiosity: The Story of a Mars Rover is a great example of modern children’s literature. It is suitable for a variety of ages, and it is worthwhile reading in many ways. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Thomas Pasterfield Thomas Pasterfield is a fourth year undergraduate student in Elementary Education at the University of Alberta. His reading interests include fantasy novels, vegetable gardening manuals, and religious books.

Yolen, Jane. How do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? Illus. Mark Teague. New York: Scholastic, 2012. Print. If you have ever set foot in the children’s section of a public library or bookstore, you will likely recognize the dinosaur on the cover of this book. Yolen, a much-lauded author who has also penned science fiction and fantasy, has over 300 children’s books to her name and is the author of How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? and many others in the wildly successful How Do Dinosaurs… franchise created by bestselling author Jane Yolen and illustrator Mark Teague. The familiar classic dinosaur characters from Yolen and Teague’s books try their hands at baking and eating cookies while learning some ‘cookie etiquette’ along the way. While Yolen’s prose is fun and lively, in general the images of the dinosaurs have been ‘re-purposed’ from other titles in the series save for the addition of a cookie here and there. The book is also marketed as a scratch-and-sniff and according to the Scholastic web site, includes 3 cookie recipes. Sadly the 5 scratch-and-sniff scents have almost no scent at all, even in a brand new copy with minimal scratching, and there are only 2 recipes included. If your young readers are excited about the scratch-and-sniff potential they will be sorely disappointed. The recipes look easy enough and will be fun for kids to assist with in the kitchen but you will require dinosaur-shaped cookie cutters (not included) to get the full effect. There is no denying, however, the uniqueness of Mark Teague’s illustrations as well as his award-winning talent. The dinosaurs are realistic-enough looking to get slightly older kids’ attention but friendly enough for the younger set. The sturdy board-book binding, smaller size and aesthetic design make for an attractive book but the displeasure in the quality of the scratch-and-sniff and the general feeling of ‘I’ve seen this somewhere before’ is reason enough to bypass this title. Not Recommended: 1 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Debbie FeisstDebbie is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. When not renovating, she enjoys travel, fitness and young adult fiction.

Sanderson, Brandon. The Rithmatist. Illus. Ben Sweeney. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2013. Print.What if the survival of humanity depended on the geometry skills of a few elite youths? But it does.Winner of the YALSA 2014 Teen’s Top Ten Award, this book asks readers to envisage an alternate history for Earth. The Asian nation of JunSeo has overtaken much of the globe, and technology relies on elaborate systems of springs and gears. Society relies on the skills of Rithmatists, who use geometric shapes and angles to wage war against a rogue force of chalklings – two-dimensional chalk drawings with a penchant for blood.All Joel has ever wanted to be is a Rithmatist, but he has not been chosen by the Master. In spite of this, he spends all his time exploring Rithmatic principles. Joel’s dreams are realized when the disgraced Professor Fitch begins to tutor him along with remedial Rithmatics student Molly. When the far-off war against chalklings in Nebrask becomes more real and Rithmatic students begin to be targeted close at home, Joel’s suspicions are fixated on the new Rithmatics professor, Nalizar.In the misdt of this fantasy novel, American author Brandon Sanderson has embedded a number of intriguing questions. What would the world be like if a power other than Great Britain had achieved world dominance? What does the idea of predestination mean for those who are not chosen? What if different technologies had taken hold?Although there are literary and symbolic elements that posit this story as a thriller, the author has included enough humor that it still maintains a playful and adventurous tone. A sense of anticipation is maintained throughout, as the principles of Rithmatics and the plot are gradually revealed. Though Sanderson’s writing style at times impedes the immersive quality of the story, the reader is kept deliciously in suspense until the end. Ben Sweeney’s illustrations at the end of every chapter masterfully enhance the reader’s understanding of Rithmatic principles.The first in a series, this book would appeal to readers who enjoy fantasy, such as the Harry Potter series or The Golden Compass. It is recommended for children in grades 7-12 and is a good example of “hi-lo” fiction. The accessible language will engage reluctant readers. A reading and activity guide is included at the end of the book, suitable for discussion and exploration in a classroom setting.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Kelsi McGillivrayKelsi McGillivray teaches grade 3 at an international school in Kathmandu, Nepal. She is currently working on her Masters of Education in teacher-librarianship and aspires to become the school librarian in the future. She enjoys reading, hiking, and adventures.

New Year. In this edition of the news I am highlighting several online resources as well as conferences, tours, and exhibits of possible interest.First of all, I highly suggest you sign up at the Alberta School Library Council's new LitPicks site (aslclitpicks.ca). It is free, filled with promise, and includes only books recommended by the reviewers. The reviews are searchable by grade level and genre (e.g., animal, biographical fable, fantasy, humour, historical, horror, verse, realistic, mystery, myth) and include all formats. The reviews include curriculum connections and links to relevant resources. Library staff review titles based on engagement of story, readability, descriptive language, illustration excellence and integrity of data, and source for non-fiction titles. The target users are teachers, teacher-librarians, library techs, and others working in libraries. School library cataloguers can provide a link to the review from within the catalogue record.Another recommended resource is CanLit for Little Canadians, a blog that focuses on promoting children's and YA books by Canadian authors and illustrators. The blog postings can also be found on Facebook. (http://canlitforlittlecanadians.blogspot.ca/)First Nation Communities READ is another resource for your tool box. It is an annual reading program launched in 2003 by the First Nations public library community in Ontario and includes titles that are written and/or illustrated by (or otherwise involve the participation of) a First Nation, Métis, or Inuit creator and contain First Nation, Métis, or Inuit content produced with the support of First Nation, Métis, or Inuit advisers/consultants or First Nation, Métis, or Inuit endorsement. Julie Flett's Wild Berries - Pakwa Che Menisu, available in both English and Cree, was the First Nation Communities Read Selection for 2014-2015 and the inaugural recipient of the Periodical Marketers of Canada Aboriginal Literature Award. (http://www.sols.org/index.php/develop-your-library-staff/advice-consulting/first-nations/fn-communities-read)This resource should also be of great value for those schools and libraries participating in TD Canadian Children’s Book Week in 2015. Each May, authors, illustrators and storytellers visit communities throughout the country to share the delights of Canadian children’s books. Book Week reaches over 25,000 children and teens in schools and libraries across Canada every year. The theme for this year is Hear Our Stories: Celebrating First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature, celebrating the remarkable variety of topics, genres and voices being published by and about members of our First Nations, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) communities in Canada. On a personal note, I will be touring as a storyteller in Quebec as part of this year’s Book Week tour.Freedom to Read Week: February 22-28, 2015. This annual event encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This year’s Freedom to Read review marks the thirtieth anniversary of its publication and of Freedom to Read Week in Canada. It was first published in 1984 to explore the freedom to read in Canada and elsewhere and to inform and assist booksellers, publishers, librarians, students, educators, writers and the public. To commemorate Freedom to Read’s thirtieth anniversary, some of our writers have cast a look back over the past three decades. As usual, the review provides exercises and resources for teachers, librarians and students. This and previous issues of Freedom to Read, as well as appendices and other resources, are available at www.freedomtoread.ca.Half for you and Half for Me: Nursery Rhymes and Poems we Love. An exhibit on best-loved rhymes and poems and a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Alligator Pie held at the Osborne Collection in the Lillian H. Smith Library in Toronto until March 7, 2015.Serendipity 2015 (March 7, 2015). An exciting day exploring the fabulous world of young adult literature with Holly Black, Andrew Smith, Mariko Tamaki, Molly Idle, and Kelli Chipponeri. Costumes recommended! Swing Space Building, 2175 West Mall on the UBC campus. (http://vclr.ca/serendipity-2015/)For educators: Call for entries for the Martyn Godfrey Young Writers Award (YABS). An annual, juried contest open to all students in Alberta in grades 4 through 9. Students are invited to submit their short stories (500-1500 words) or comic book by March 31, 2015 to the YABS office, 11759 Groat Road, Edmonton, AB, T5M 3K6. Entries may also be emailed to info@yabs.ab.ca.Breaking News: The Canada Council for the Arts has revised the Governor General’s Literary Awards Children’s Literature categories (in consultation with the literary community) in the wake of controversy regarding graphic novels. The revised category titles and definitions:The new Children’s Literature – Illustrated Books category will recognize the best illustrated book for children or young adults, honouring the text and the illustrations as forming one creative work. It includes picture books and graphic novels, as well as works of fiction, literary non-fiction, and poetry where original illustrations occupy at least 30% of the book’s space.The Children’s Literature – Text category will recognize the best book for children or young adults with few (less than 30%) or no illustrations. http://www.bookcentre.ca/news/governor_general%E2%80%99s_literary_awards_revisions_children%E2%80%99s_literature_categoriesGail de Vos, an adjunct instructor, teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, Young Adult Literature and Comic Books and Graphic Novels at the School of Library and Information Studies for the University of Alberta and is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. She is a professional storyteller and has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

The article is devoted to one of the popular genres of the illustrating of medieval Arabic manuscripts. Namely, it concerns the visual interpretation of the verbal descriptions of nature, expounded both in the scientific treatises and in the literary works. Specific features of miniature paintings of this genre are largely determined by the deeply-rooted among the Middle East people perceptions of the universe as the genius creation of God. Those are two different, but inseparable and interconnected worlds, celestial and terrestrial ones, and each of them has its own functions, and each of them was populated by inhabitants of completely different appearances, types and habits. The natural (like nature itself) fusion of truth and fiction in the monuments of the verbal, oral and written culture of the Arab Middle Ages gave impetus to the appearance of visual images created by paints and lines. Their numerousness and diversity unfold a panorama of an amazing and incomprehensible world of fantasy and reality in front of the reader-spectator.

First, we would like to follow up on news about award shortlists reported in the last issue of the Deakin Review. The UK’s Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (www.cilip.org.uk ) announced the winners for the 2012 Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Children’s Book Awards. Interestingly, both the Carnegie Medal for outstanding book for children and the Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished illustration in a book for children were awarded for the same book - A Monster Calls published by Walker Books. Patrick Ness received the Carnegie award as author and Jim Kay the Kate Greenaway award as illustrator. In fact, Patrick Ness also won the award in 2011 for Monsters of Men. It sounds like a book not to be missed! www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/carnegie/ and www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/greenaway/ For its part, the Canadian Library Association (CLA) announced the winners of its three children’s literature awards at the CLA conference in Ottawa at the end of May. The Whole Truth by Kit Pearson (HarperCollins Canada) won the Book of the Year for Children Award, My Name is Elizabeth illustrated by Matthew Forsythe (Kids Can Press) was awarded the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator’s Award, and All Good Children by Catherine Austen (Orca) was chosen for the Young Adult Book Award. http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Book_Awards&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=12660 As for upcoming awards, the Canadian Children’s Book Centre (www.bookcentre.ca/award ) recently released the finalists for each of its seven children’s book award with winners to be announced at the TD Canadian Children`s Literature Awards and Prix TD de littérature canadienne pour l’enfance et la jeunesse events in Toronto and Montreal later this Fall. Notably, this year marks the inaugural year for the new Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Reviews of a few of the finalists have appeared in the Deakin Review. Pussycat, Pussycat, Where have you been? is up for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award (see Deakin review here: ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/deakinreview/article/view/17078) while This Dark Endeavour: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein is in contention for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People (see Deakin review here: ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/deakinreview/article/view/17096) On a local note since we are based out of the University of Alberta, Edmonton writer Nicole Luiken is a finalist for the inaugural Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy for her book Dreamline. Also, we note that Gail de Vos, a professor at our very own School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta is the chair of the jury for this award. Finally, we would like to note a few changes here at The Deakin Review of Children’s Literature. Sarah Mead-Willis who was the communication editor for the first four issues (and rare book cataloguer at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta has, as she remarks, “moved to the other end of occupational spectrum” and is enrolled in a professional cooking program at the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver. We wish her well and thank her for her contributions.Also, Maria Tan has joined the team filling in for Kim Frail who is off on maternity leave and Nicole Dalmer has stepped in as intern editor.Have a wonderful summer filled with great reads.David Sulz, Communications Editor

The reason for this research is to know about fairy tale book which can take interest for consument and good for children about 4-7 years old, so it can be applied to Indonesian folklore “Paramythi of Lily and giant snake” as a media to conserve Indonesian folklore. Quantity and quality research such as observation, study literature and interview. Folk lore is a story formed between a fictional thinking and reality, to become a story line which contain the meaning of life and to interact with others. A traditional story who try to explain about the world and the legacy in local country. Folklore is a partial of culturistic and history which belongs to Indonesia. The result form the research shows that fairy tale / folklore story has started to be forgotten and considered old in this modern era. Basically, Indonesia folklore is teaching about character building or moral education and as entertainment. From the survey result, Indonesian still assume that fairy tale book is important and they like rather a fantasy tale with a cute character design in modern backgorund. Most of them like the international fairy tale rather than the local. Things that they think important in fairy tale book is the story line, then design and colour, and the last is book cover. Interactive fairy tale book is chosen as the solution the consument wanted than the common one. The reason they like international fairy tale is because the illustration design are intersting and the story line consist of great morale and easy to understand.

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

Anthony Giddens and a number of other social theorists and commentators see reflexivity as the guiding principle of modern self-identity (Giddens 1992; Beck). According to this thesis, reflexivity brings, at least potentially, a new level of knowledgeability, control and orderliness to one's experience of self. It ushers in a demystified world, geared towards calculability. In Giddens' own words, "....reflexivity refers to a world increasingly constituted by information rather than pre-modern modes of conduct. It is how we live after the retreat of tradition and nature, because of having to take so many forward-orientated decisions" (Giddens & Pierson 115). Reflexivity involves "the routine incorporation of new knowledge or information into environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganised" (Giddens 1991 243). Life is characterised by planning and goal-orientation. In Giddens' terminology it is a "project", involving "the strategic adoption of lifestyle options, organised in terms of the individual's projected lifespan" (1991 243). The future is "colonised", knowledge is "reappropriated", and the self is a "trajectory". Relationships are increasingly transparent and democratic, always open to negotiation. These sentiments are repeated often, and lie at the heart of neo-liberal analyses of the contemporary self. While such accounts undoubtedly reflect certain aspects of self-identity in the modern world, it also neglects many areas of experience relevant to the contemporary self - tradition, culture and concepts of fate, the unconscious and emotions - for example, and our experience of our own self is far less clear-cut than Giddens and others suggest. Selfhood as a vehicle for grasping the world in relation to itself is experienced far more ambiguously, during both the more mundane passages of daily life, and in the more "fateful moments" of one's life. It is characterised as much by a lack of definition and precision as it is by a calculable boundary and trajectory. Giddens & the Reflexive Self Giddens ends up with a rationalist caricature of the processes that make up self-identity. His comments on the formation of values, reproduced here, are a case in point: It wouldn't be true to say we have values that are separate from the increasingly reflexive nature of the world - values are directly involved in it, because we live in a world where we have to decide what values to hold, as individuals, and in a democracy, collectively - essentially through reflexive discourse. In more traditional cultures those values are more given (Giddens & Pierson 219). Are the values we hold really the result of nothing more than rational "decisions"? Most people, if asked, would probably have only a vague idea about the origins of their values. One would be mistaken in attempting to trace them back to a purely rational decision making process. It is certainly hard to conceive of values, and maintain a meaningful sense of the word, if they are reduced to the result of "reflexive discourse" alone. This picture of the world is again far too tidy. People do not go through life choosing from and storing a range of values which they then apply methodically to their understanding of the world. What we value is bound up with all the factors I have just mentioned - culture, emotion and so on. In the same way, self-identity can no more easily be reduced to a number of options from which we choose objectively and transparently. This is apparent in a number of interrelated factors which impinge upon self-identity, largely overlooked in the championing of choice, self-disclosure and reflexivity. How we experience ourselves, how we want to see ourselves and others to see us - all the things that constitute self-identity - is open to contradiction. Giddens too easily constructs the reflexive self as a functional whole, all units - reflexivity, practical consciousness and the unconscious - working for the overall benefit of the self. Such a view of selfhood is easily complicated. I want to argue that most individuals are defined as much by the conflict of intentions, or by their actions contradicting their intentions. People are often unsure of what they want to happen - of their 'trajectory' - except when they indulge in fantasy. How one experiences one's self changes from day to day, moment to moment. A clear understanding of the self as a "reflexive narrative" is, in this context, a rare event. Individuals may be capable of reflexivity, but it is against a wider backdrop of ambiguity. In a recent analysis Giddens draws from a contemporary work of fiction to illustrate the exhaustive application of reflexivity in everyday life. The novel, Nicholas Baker's The Mezzanine, "deals with no more than a few moments in the day of a person who actively reflects, in detail, upon the minutiae of his life's surroundings and his reactions to them" (Giddens 1994a 60). Giddens goes on to quote a lengthy description, in which Baker's character reflects on an ice-cube tray he has just picked up. The extensive consideration of the changes in ice-cube trays and a detailed understanding of them represents, for Giddens, "profound processes of the reformation of daily life" (1994a 60). Everything is opened up to inspection, from a post-traditional vantage point. Even the more mundane elements of life are part of a series of "everyday experiments", in which the outcomes are no longer certain. In Giddens's analysis, "we are all in a sense, self-pioneers" (Tucker 206). Alternative Fictions Fictional accounts of selfhood, and the self's relation to others and the outside world, are likely to be pretty reflexive affairs. "Narratives of the self" are in fictional accounts, a prime concern. It may not always be helpful to draw upon fictional accounts to suggest the reflexivity of the modern world. This problem aside, fictional accounts can also be used to problematise the notion of reflexivity, and suggest a more ambiguous selfhood. In Tim Lott's recent novel, White City Blue he documents such an understanding throughout. Take this description of the development of the main character's relationship with his future wife: Not so long ago, me and Veronica would only see each other at weekends - that's Friday, Saturday and Sunday night - and on other night in the week; a ratio of freedom to commitment of 3:4. That's reasonable I think.... But as the marriage approaches, the F:C ratio is slipping badly. She's round here most nights now, and the ratio is moving towards more like 2:5 or even 1:6. I don't mind, I suppose. Processes like these aren't really stoppable anyway. It's organic, inevitable. Nobody decides, nobody really wants it to happen. But it happens anyway. I go out with my mates a few nights a week, she goes out with hers, but somehow or other, without any particular arrangement having been made, we both usually end up here (34-35; my emphasis). In this example, albeit fictional, the protagonist, far from reflexively understanding the passage of his life, only has a vague grasp of the cause of events. Reflexivity is only apparent in the retrospective illustration of those events for the reader. The fictional account of modern selfhood documented above is mirrored in a recent critique of Giddens's definition of reflexivity by Nicos Mouzelis, summarised in the following extract: the reflexive individuals' relation to their inner and outer worlds is conceptualised in ultra-activistic, instrumental terms: subjects are portrayed as constantly involved in means-ends situations, constantly trying reflexively and rationally to choose their broad goals as well as the means of their realisation; they are also constantly monitoring or revising their projects in the light of new information and of the already achieved results (85). Mouzelis does not suggest that the concept of reflexivity itself be abandoned. Instead he argues that Giddens's version of reflexive awareness is "culture-specific, or more precisely, western-specific". He argues that reflexivity needs to be re-conceptualised, to overcome Giddens's "over-activistic" tendencies, and accommodate other ways of being reflexive. Mouzelis signifies what alternative reflexivities might look like when he suggests what is missing from Giddens's concept. Giddens's understanding, he argues, "entails a type of reflexivity that excludes more contemplative, more 'easy-going', less cognitive ways of navigating reflexively in a world full of choices and individual challenges" (85). Mouzelis seeks an alternative formulation of reflexivity, which challenges Giddens's activistic version: Is it perhaps possible to resort to [a] reflexive attitude that does not seek (via rational choices) actively to construct life orientations, but rather allows in indirect, passive manner life orientations and other broad goals to emerge .... a kind of existence where instead of actively and instrumentally trying to master the complexity of growing choices, one chooses (to use Pierre-August Renoir's expression) to float as a cork in the ocean of post-traditional reality? (85-86). The main character in White City Blue would probably agree. An 'easy-going' attitude towards one's beliefs is displayed in this dialogue from the same novel: You were going to say that friends are the most important thing in life. I suppose so. I'm not sure. I suppose so. I don't know that I believe it though. Why would you say it if you didn't believe it? A good question. But isn't it what everyone does? You don't have to believe what you say. How are you meant to know what you believe? Sometimes - most of the time you just have to guess. You have to say something, after all. I don't know. Sometimes you just pick up opinions. Like fluff on your jacket. Uh-huh. And you don't always know where you picked up the fluff. But there it is all the same. In this extract the main character is disclaiming reflexive capabilities. The comparison between the fictional world evoked here and that in Giddens' example suggest two different views of modern self-identity. Reflexivity, as commonly understood in contemporary accounts, does not and cannot embrace the whole range of experiences which make up self-identity in each concrete moment, particularly the rationally ambiguous nature of everyday life, indicated here. There is more to self-experience than rational understanding – "no matter how skilled and knowledgeable the agent, miscommunication can arise because of emotional, cultural and other non-cognitive factors that are part of the process of communicating through language" (Mestrovic 46). As with communication with others, so with self-consciousness - communication with the self, and, as Halton suggests: "being human involves feeling, dreaming, experiencing, remembering and forgetting, and not simply knowing" (Halton 273). These other elements of experience contextualise reflexive awareness, and ground its transformative capabilities in the need to acknowledge the complexities of self-identity. Contemporary self-identity is characterised as much by a lack of definition and precision as it is by a calculable boundary and trajectory. It may, then, be possible to think of alternative ways of constructing identity which rely less upon rational-cognitive models of self-awareness. Alternative Selves The anti-religious philosophy of Krishnamurti is one example of an alternative formulation of self-identity incorporating a form of reflexivity (Mouzelis, Krishnamurti 1970). Krishnamurti"s texts demand that individuals give up on almost all forms of rational thinking in ordering their existence meaningfully. Furthermore: "Beliefs, divine revelations, sacred texts, as well as rationalistically derived moral codes, are not only quite irrelevant in the search for a spiritual, meaningful existence today, but they actually constitute serious obstacles to such a search" (Mouzelis 88). Krishnamurti"s belief is that genuine self-awareness comes about only when rationalised schemes and projects for the self are abandoned; "when ratiocination, planning and cognitively constructed means-end schemata are peripheralised" (Mouzelis 88). He argues "the fundamental understanding of oneself does not come through knowledge or through the cultivation of experiences" (Krishnamurti, 1970 25). To exist authentically, one has to explore one"s own self through "silent and continuous gazing inwards" (Mouzelis 89). From this state, "a tranquility that is not a product of the mind, a tranquility that is neither imagined nor cultivated" is possible (Krishnamurti 1970 28). Adorno is similarly critical of dominant formulations of emancipation, which, he argues, focus upon "the conception of unfettered activity, of uninterrupted procreation, chubby insatiability, of freedom as frantic bustle". (156). He imagines a world where "lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment, might take the place of process, act, satisfaction" (157). I have not sought to explore Krishnamurti"s perspective in any detail here, nor indeed Adorno"s, Halton"s Mouzelis"s, or many other peripheral accounts of self, only indicates that alternative formulations of reflexivity are possible, where goal-oriented thought processes take a back seat to a more contemplative and tranquil awareness of self. In pursuing these alternatives, a more complex and representative understanding of reflexivity and self-identity may be generated. At the same time, alternative discourses may further illustrate and problematise the one-sidedness of neo-liberal accounts of the reflexive self. References Adorno, T. Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 1974. Baker, N. The Mezzanine. London: Harper Collins, 1990. Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. ---. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. ---. The Transformation of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. ---. "Living in a Post-Traditional Society". U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization 1994. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Giddens, A & C. Pierson. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Halton, E "The Modern Error: Or, the Unbearable Enlightenment of Being". Featherstone, Lash & Robertson (eds.) Global Modernities. Sage: London, 1995. Krishnamurti. The Krishnamurti Reader. London: Arkana, 1970. ---. The Impossible Question. London: Penguin, 1978. Lott, T. White City Blue. London: Penguin, 1999. Mestrovic, S.G. Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist. London: Routledge, 1998. Mouzelis, N. "Exploring post-traditional orders: Individual Reflexivity, 'pure relations' and duality of structure". O'Brien, Penna & Hay (eds.) (1999) Theorising Modernity. London: Longman. Tucker, K.H. Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory. London: Sage, 1998. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Adams, Matthew. "Ambiguity" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Adams.html &gt. Chicago Style Adams, Matthew, "Ambiguity" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Adams.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Adams, Matthew. (2002) Ambiguity. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Adams.php> ([your date of access]).

There is a humorously disturbing cartoon by Mary Leunig of a mother as a suffering Jesus figure crucified on the cross of motherhood. The image simultaneously evokes and countersigns the idealised portrait of mothers as serene and self-sacrificing Madonna figures. In Leunig’s cartoon the mother wears a crown of nappy pins; her children, inconsolable, bereft of the mother as a site of selfless love and nurture, look up at her on the cross. Over twenty years old, this cartoon haunts the viewer with its ironic/iconic motifs of motherhood, because it signifies the presence of an absence – the absence of the mother as a desiring subject, and a “space where the mother can be seen as woman” (Irigaray in Grosz 1989, 119). Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI (Artificial Intelligence) is, I think, an interesting attempt to speak/visualise that space, but it ultimately taps into our Western phallocentric society’s ongoing love affair with the woman as mother, and its denial of the mother as woman. Crucial to this denial is an erasure of the female body and love of self, both of which are sacrificed on the altar of the child’s needs and desires. Luce Irigaray’s concern for the absence of the mother’s subjectivity in Western discourses tempts her to claim that men are intent on giving birth to themselves, thus not only refuting the mother as woman, but disavowing even that limited, metonymic, signifying space allotted to the mother – the mother as the site of origin. She writes: in order to become men, they continue to consume … [the mother], draw on her resources and, at the same time, they deny her or disclaim her in their identification with and their belonging to the masculine world. They owed their existence, their body, their life and they forget or misrecognise this debt in order to set themselves up as powerful men, adults busying themselves with public affairs (Irigaray in Grosz 1989, 121) Developments in reproductive technology over the past twenty years have enabled the concept of the self-made man who disavows the maternal debt to become more of a reality. Mary Ann Doane, citing Andreas Huyssen, (in Wolmark, 1999) claims that the ultimate (male) fantasy of reproductive technology is the production of life without the mother (24). Doane also points out, however, that the technology/human reproduction interface in these processes “puts into crisis the very possibility of the question of origins, the Oedipal dilemma and the relation between subjectivity and knowledge that it supports” (26). Spielberg’s film AI (which screened to mixed reception world-wide) problematises the consequences of life without the biological mother due to male technological intervention, resolving this by reaffirming the importance of the woman as mother and celebrating the mother-child bond. In effect, one of the ‘messages’ in this film is that you cannot take the mother out of the woman, and I would suggest that part of the reviewers’ antipathy to the film is fed by an aversion to Spielberg’s focus on maternal space (Shepard, 2001). The film invites the viewer to be critical of the ways in which males use technology to tamper with nature, and suggests that such intrusions will have disastrous consequences. By revealing the robots as more moral and humane than their human counterparts, AI highlights a fundamental anxiety about the human “self”. However, in attempting to resolve these issues, AI reifies the woman as mother, aligning her with “nature” and positioning the mother and child as the precious casualties of technological intervention. Thus AI confirms that well rehearsed binarism that links women with nature/nurture and men with technology/culture, in the process endorsing a reductionist view of women’s bodies as essentially maternal (Grosz, 1987, 5-6) and subsuming the mother beneath a concern for the child (Walker, 1998). AI is set in a future society topographically ravaged by the effects of greenhouse gases. Major cities have been flooded and there are legal sanctions to strictly limit pregnancies. Robots called ‘mechas’ have been invented to serve the human race and to help conserve the limited resources. David is the perfect ‘mecha’ child who can be programmed to love – the realisation of the male scientist’s dreams. He is adopted by human parents, Monica and Martin, after it seems that Henry, their biological child, will never recover from a coma. The father Martin brings David home, a gesture that echoes the male scientist’s fantasy of the reproduction of life without a mother. Monica, the mother, falls in love with David, and it is Monica, not Martin, who programs David to love her in return. Thus it is suggested that motherhood is instinctive in women. The father retains an aloof detachment from the child: “You’re a toy,” he tells David, “I’m real”. This statement clearly distinguishes the technological from the human, culture from nature, and the gendered power hierarchy that these divisions uphold. Once David is programmed to love Monica, he calls her “Mommy”. David’s desire to be a ‘real live boy’ is fuelled by his potent love for the mother, which drives the drama and the narrative shape of his quest for reunion with her. The mother-as-woman disappears under the weight of nostalgia for the certainty of origins which mandates the woman-as-mother. Elizabeth Grosz, paraphrasing Luce Irigaray argues that, “with no access to social value in her own right, she becomes the mother who has only food (that is love) to give the child, a nurture that, in our culture, is deemed either excessive or inadequate”(1989, 119). Constructed by others, the mother here is both the phallic mother who satisfies all needs and desires, and the castrated mother who denies the self, both Freudian conceptualisations. AI further portrays motherhood without the mess, by transforming the female body into the ‘good and proper’ maternal body. It thus removes the potential for the abjectification of corporeal maternal space that occurs in many horror films dealing with the mother figure (see Creed’s work). The maternal body in AI is a sanitised space that is represented by the clean, bounded rooms of the family home, and the closed, groomed, feminine body of Monica. The film confirms the home as a traditional site of nurture and motherly love, a spatial marker of women’s identity as well as place. At the end of the film, David’s twofold wish of becoming a real live boy and being with his mother is finally granted, but not until after some 2000 years. In conferring human status on David, the narrative resolves any apprehension about loss of boundaries and the blurring of the distinctions between self and other, which is generated by the human/technology interface (Creed 1995, 147). When Monica is re-born by a male scientist figure in this future society, an event that echoes the immaculate conception birth of David, she is the woman-as-mother. Reunited in the family home with David, she comments that she feels strange and doesn’t quite know why she is there; but David’s presence and love reassures her, giving her access to her only identity, that of mother. The film closes on an idyllic scene in which David and the idealised mother are falling asleep together on the parental bed in the sanctuary of the home. Spielberg’s mother is not Mary Leunig’s suffering mother, but the film’s focus on the mother/child bond bears an interesting resemblance to feminist theories of the pre-oedipal as a space of potential disruption to the Oedipal narrative (Kristeva). In its demotion of the masculine and its criticism of technology, AI could be read as a celebration of the pre-oedipal, that phase of psycho-sexual identity formation in which the mother is privileged and which is usually devalued once the father intervenes in the mother-child dyad (as Martin does when he separates David from Monica, insisting he leaves after the real son Henry recovers). The phallic domain of the father, the symbolic, is spurned in this film, while the domain of the mother, the imaginary, and the pre-Oedipal, is valorised. This is visually enhanced in the film through the use of water imagery, the invigoration of the maternal figure (Monica/ Madonna), and the primacy given to the mother-child bond. Secure in the maternal space at the end of the film, David eschews the masculine: “No Henry, no Martin, no grief”. However such a reading still prioritises the woman-as-mother, not the mother-as-woman. The problem with singing the song of the pre-oedipal sublime (Helene Cixous’s ‘white ink’ and Julia Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’), is that it threatens to buy into the same idealisation of the mother as the phallocentric discourses that it attacks (Walker, 1998). I have argued here that the mother, mothering, motherhood and the maternal body continue to be represented in our culture as idealised experiences and states of being. Such textual representation allocates homogeneity and naturalness to motherhood, and a fixed conceptualisation, even obliteration, of women’s bodies and desires. Despite appearing to undermine the masculine and valorise the maternal, AI provides a metaphorical inscription of motherly love and love for the mother that fails to recognise the flesh behind the words. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Carnivalesque.” Fields of Vision. Eds. Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995. Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” Cybersexualities: A reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism.” Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (1987): 1-9. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: three French feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Spielberg, Steven. AI. Warner Bros. and Dreamworks Pictures, 2001. Shepard, Lucius. “AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” Fantasy & Science Fiction Vol 101 (Dec 2001): 112-117. Walker, Michelle. Philosophy and the maternal body: reading silence.London; New York: Routledge, 1998. Links http://www.benway.com/mary-leunig.shtml http://www.envf.port.ac.uk/illustration/images/vlsh/psycholo/irigaray.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/barnett.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Muller, Vivienne. "Motherly Love" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/motherlylove.php>. APA Style Muller, V., (2002, Nov 20). Motherly Love. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/motherlylove.html

A slash manip is a photo remix that montages visual signs from popular media with those from gay pornography, creating a new cultural artefact. Slash (see Russ) is a fannish practice that homoeroticises the bonds between male media characters and personalities—female pairings are categorised separately as ‘femslash’. Slash has been defined almost exclusively as a female practice. While fandom is indeed “women-centred” (Bury 2), such definitions have a tendency to exclude male contributions. Remix has been well acknowledged in discussions on slash, most notably video remix in relation to slash vids (Kreisinger). Non-written slash forms such as slash vids (see Russo) and slash fanart (see Dennis) have received increased attention in recent years. This article continues the tradition of moving beyond fiction by considering the non-written form of slash manips, yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Speaking as a practitioner—my slash manips can be found here—I perform textual analysis from an aca–fan (academic and fan) position of two Merlin slash manips by male Tumblr artist wandsinhand. My textual analysis is influenced by Barthes’s use of image semiotics, which he applies to the advertising image. Barthes notes that “all images are polysemous”, that underlying their signifiers they imply “a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” (274). That said, the advertising image, he argues, constructs an “undoubtedly intentional […] signification”, making it ideally suited for analysis (270). By supplementing my analysis with excerpts from two interviews I conducted with wandsinhand in February and April 2013 (quoted here with permission), I support my readings with respect to the artist’s stated ‘intentional reading’. I then contextualise these readings with respect to canon (Merlin) representations and gay pornography—via the chosen sexual acts/positions, bukkake and doggystyle, of the pornographic base models, as selected by the artist. This approach allows me to examine the photo remix qualities of slash manips with respect to the artist’s intentions as well as how artistic choices of inclusion function to anchor meaning in the works. I describe these choices as the ‘semiotic significance of selection’. Together the readings and interviews in this article help illustrate the value of this form and the new avenues it opens for slash scholars, such as consideration of photo remix and male production, and the importance of gay pornography to slash. My interviews also reveal, via the artist’s own assessment of the ‘value’ of his practice, a tendency to devalue or overlook the significance of this particular slash form, affirming a real need for further critical engagement with this under-examined practice. Slash Photo Remix: Famous Faces, Porny Bodies Lessig defines remix culture as based on an activity of “rip, mix and burn” (12–5); while Navas describes it as a “practice of cut/copy and paste” (159)—the latter being more applicable to photo remix. Whereas Lessig is concerned primarily with issues of copyright, Navas is interested in remix’s role in aesthetics and the political economy. Within fan studies, slash vids—a form of video remix—has been a topic of considerable academic interest in recent years. Slash manips—a form of photo or image remix—however, has not attracted the same degree of interest. Stasi’s description of slash as “a non-hierarchical, rich layering of genres” points to the usefulness of slash manips as an embodiment of the process of slash; whereby artists combine, blend and mutate graphic layers from popular media with those from gay pornography. Aesthetics and the slash manip process are central concerns of this article’s consideration of slash photo remix. Slash manips, or slash photo montage, use image manipulation software (Adobe Photoshop being the community standard, see wandsinhand’s tutorial) to layer the heads of male fictional characters from stills or promotional images with scenes—static or moving—from gay pornography. Once an artist has selected pornographic ‘base models’ anatomically suited to canon characters, these models are often then repositioned into the canon universe, which in the case of Merlin means a medieval setting. (Works not repositioned and without added details from canon are generally categorised as ‘male celebrity fakes’ rather than ‘slash manips’.) Stedman contends that while many fan studies scholars are interested in remix, “studies commonly focus on examples of remixed objects rather than the compositional strategies used by remix composers themselves” (107). He advocates moving beyond an exclusive consideration of “text-centred approaches” to also consider “practice-” and “composer-centred” approaches. Such approaches offer insight into “the detailed choices composers actually make when composing” (107). He refers to recognition of the skills required by a remix composer as “remix literacy” (108). This article’s consideration of the various choices and skills that go into the composition of slash manips—what I term the ‘semiotic significance of selection’—is explored with respect to wandsinhand’s practice, coupling my reading—informed by my experience as a practitioner—with the interpretations of the artist himself. Jenkins defines slash as “reaction against” constructions of male sexuality in both popular media and pornography (189). By their very nature, slash manips also make clear the oft-overlooked connections between slash and gay pornography, and in turn the contributions of gay male participants, who are well represented by the form. This contrasts with a tendency within scholarship to compare slash with heterosexual female forms, such as the romance genre (Salmon and Symons). Gay pornography plays a visible role in slash manips—and slash vids, which often remix scenes from popular media with gay cinema and pornography. Slash as Romance, Slash as Pornography Early scholarship on slash (see Russ; Lamb and Veith) defines it as a form of erotica or pornography, by and for women; a reductive definition that fails to take into account men’s contribution, yet one that many researchers continue to adopt today. As stated above, there has also been a tendency within scholarship to align the practice with heterosexual female forms such as the romance genre. Such a tendency is by and large due to theorisation of slash as heterosexual female fantasy—and concerned primarily with romance and intimacy rather than sex (see Woledge). Weinstein describes slash as more a “fascination with” than a “representation of” homosexual relationships (615); while MacDonald makes the point that homosexuality is not a major political motivator for slash (28–9). There is no refuting that slash—along with most fannish practice—is female dominated, ethnographic work and fandom surveys reveal that is the case. However there is great need for research into male production of slash, particularly how such practices might challenge reigning definitions and assumptions of the practice. In similar Japanese practices, for example, gay male opposition to girls’ comics (shōjo) depicting love between ‘pretty boys’ (bishōunen) has been well documented (see Hori)—Men’s Love (or bara) is a subgenre of Boys’ Love (or shōnen’ai) predominately created by gay men seeking a greater connection with the lived reality of gay life (Lunsing). Dennis finds male slash fanart producers more committed to muscular representations and depiction of graphic male/male sex when compared with female-identifying artists (14, 16). He also observes that male fanart artists have a tendency of “valuing same-sex desire without a heterosexual default and placing it within the context of realistic gay relationships” (11). I have observed similar differences between male and female-identifying slash manip artists. Female-identifying Nicci Mac, for example, will often add trousers to her donor bodies, recoding them for a more romantic context. By contrast, male-identifying mythagowood is known for digitally enlarging the penises and rectums of his base models, exaggerating his work’s connection to the pornographic and the macabre. Consider, for example, mythagowood’s rationale for digitally enlarging and importing ‘lips’ for Sam’s (Supernatural) rectum in his work Ass-milk: 2012, which marks the third anniversary of the original: Originally I wasn’t going to give Sammy’s cunt any treatment (before I determined the theme) but when assmilk became the theme I had to go find a good set of lips to slap on him and I figured, it’s been three years, his hole is going to be MUCH bigger. (personal correspondence, used with permission) While mythagowood himself cautions against gendered romance/pornography slash arguments—“I find it annoying that people attribute certain specific aspects of my work to something ‘only a man’ would make.” (ibid.)—gay pornography occupies an important place in the lives of gay men as a means for entertainment, community engagement and identity-construction (see McKee). As one of the only cultural representations available to gay men, Fejes argues that gay pornography plays a crucial role in defining gay male desire and identity. This is confirmed by an Internet survey conducted by Duggan and McCreary that finds 98% of gay participants reporting exposure to pornographic material in the 30-day period prior to the survey. Further, the underground nature of gay pornographic film (see Dyer) aligns it with slash as a subcultural practice. I now analyse two Merlin slash manips with respect to the sexual positions of the pornographic base models, illustrating how gay pornography genres and ideologies referenced through these works enforce their intended meaning, as defined by the artist. A sexual act such as bukkake, as wandsinhand astutely notes, acts as a universal sign and “automatically generates a narrative for the image without anything really needing to be detailed”. Barthes argues that such a “relation between thing signified and image signifying in analogical representation” is unlike language, which has a much more ‘arbitrary’ relationship between signifier and signified (272). Bukkake and the Assertion of Masculine Power in Merlin Merlin (2008–12) is a BBC reimagining of the Arthurian legend that focuses on the coming-of-age of Arthur and his close bond with his manservant Merlin, who keeps his magical identity secret until Arthur’s final stand in the iconic Battle of Camlann. The homosexual potential of Merlin and Arthur’s story—and of magic as a metaphor for homosexuality—is something slash fans were quick to recognise. During question time at the first Merlin cast appearance at the London MCM Expo in October 2008—just one month after the show’s pilot first aired—a fan asked Morgan and James, who portray Merlin and Arthur, is Merlin “meant to be a love story between Arthur and Merlin?” James nods in jest. Wandsinhand, who is most active in the Teen Wolf (2011–present) fandom, has produced two Merlin slash manips to date, a 2013 Merlin/Arthur and a 2012 Arthur/Percival, both untitled. The Merlin/Arthur manip (see Figure 1) depicts Merlin bound and on his knees, Arthur ejaculating across his face and on his chest. Merlin is naked while Arthur is partially clothed in chainmail and armour. They are both bruised and dirty, Arthur’s injuries suggesting battle given his overall appearance, while Merlin’s suggesting abuse, given his subordinate position. The setting appears to be the royal stables, where we know Merlin spends much of his time mucking out Arthur’s horses. I am left to wonder if perhaps Merlin did not carry out this duty to Arthur’s satisfaction, and is now being punished for it; or if Arthur has returned from battle in need of sexual gratification and the endorsement of power that comes from debasing his manservant. Figure 1: wandsinhand, Untitled (Merlin/Arthur), 2013, photo montage. Courtesy the artist. Both readings are supported by Arthur’s ‘spent’ expression of disinterest or mild curiosity, while Merlin’s face emotes pain: crying and squinting through the semen obscuring his vision. The artist confirms this reading in our interview: “Arthur is using his pet Merlin to relieve some stress; Merlin of course not being too pleased about the aftermath, but obedient all the same.” The noun ‘pet’ evokes the sexual connotations of Merlin’s role as Arthur’s personal manservant, while also demoting Merlin even further than usual. He is, in Arthur’s eyes, less than human, a sexual plaything to use and abuse at will. The artist’s statement also confirms that Arthur is acting against Merlin’s will. Violence is certainly represented here, the base models having been ‘marked up’ to depict sexualisation of an already physically and emotionally abusive relationship, their relative positioning and the importation of semen heightening the humiliation. Wandsinhand’s work engages characters in sadomasochistic play, with semen and urine frequently employed to degrade and arouse—“peen wolf”, a reference to watersports, is used within his Teen Wolf practice. The two wandsinhand works analysed in this present article come without words, thus lacking a “linguistic message” (Barthes 273–6). However even so, the artist’s statement and Arthur’s stance over “his pet Merlin” mean we are still able to “skim off” (270) the meanings the image contains. The base models, for example, invite comparison with the ‘gay bukkake’ genre of gay pornography—admittedly with a single dominant male rather than a group. Gay bukkake has become a popular niche in North American gay pornography—it originated in Japan as a male–female act in the 1980s. It describes a ritualistic sexual act where a group of dominant men—often identifying as heterosexual—fuck and debase a homosexual, submissive male, commonly bareback (Durkin et al. 600). The aggression on display in this act—much like the homosocial insistency of men who partake in a ‘circle jerk’ (Mosher 318)—enables the participating men to affirm their masculinity and dominance by degrading the gay male, who is there to service (often on his knees) and receive—in any orifice of the group’s choosing—the men’s semen, and often urine as well. The equivalencies I have made here are based on the ‘performance’ of the bukkake fantasy in gay niche hazing and gay-for-pay pornography genres. These genres are fuelled by antigay sentiment, aggression and debasement of effeminate males (see Kendall). I wish here to resist the temptation of labelling the acts described above as deviant. As is a common problem with anti-pornography arguments, to attempt to fix a practice such as bukkake as deviant and abject—by, for example, equating it to rape (Franklin 24)—is to negate a much more complex consideration of distinctions and ambiguities between force and consent; lived and fantasy; where pleasure is, where it is performed and where it is taken. I extend this desire not to label the manip in question, which by exploiting the masculine posturing of Arthur effectively sexualises canon debasement. This began with the pilot when Arthur says: “Tell me Merlin, do you know how to walk on your knees?” Of the imported imagery—semen, bruising, perspiration—the key signifier is Arthur’s armour which, while torn in places, still ensures the encoding of particular signifieds: masculinity, strength and power. Doggystyle and the Subversion of Arthur’s ‘Armoured Self’ Since the romanticism and chivalric tradition of the knight in shining armour (see Huizinga) men as armoured selves have become a stoic symbol of masculine power and the benchmark for aspirational masculinity. For the medieval knight, armour reflects in its shiny surface the mettle of the man enclosed, imparting a state of ‘bodilessness’ by containing any softness beneath its shielded exterior (Burns 140). Wandsinhand’s Arthur/Percival manip (see Figure 2) subverts Arthur and the symbolism of armour with the help of arguably the only man who can: Arthur’s largest knight Percival. While a minor character among the knights, Percival’s physical presence in the series looms large, and has endeared him to slash manip artists, particularly those with only a casual interest in the series, such as wandsinhand: Why Arthur and Percival were specifically chosen had really little to do with the show’s plot, and in point of fact, I don’t really follow Merlin that closely nor am I an avid fan. […] Choosing Arthur/Percival really was just a matter of taste rather than being contextually based on their characterisations in the television show. Figure 2: wandsinhand, Untitled (Arthur/Percival), 2012, photo montage. Courtesy the artist. Concerning motivation, the artist explains: “Sometimes one’s penis decides to pick the tv show Merlin, and specifically Arthur and Percival.” The popularity of Percival among manip artists illustrates the power of physicality as a visual sign, and the valorisation of size and muscle within the gay community (see Sánchez et al.). Having his armour modified to display his muscles, the implication is that Percival does not need armour, for his body is already hard, impenetrable. He is already suited up, simultaneously man and armoured. Wandsinhand uses the physicality of this character to strip Arthur of his symbolic, masculine power. The work depicts Arthur with a dishevelled expression, his armoured chest pressed against the ground, his chainmail hitched up at the back to expose his arse, Percival threading his unsheathed cock inside him, staring expressionless at the ‘viewer’. The artist explains he “was trying to show a shift of power”: I was also hinting at some sign of struggle, which is somewhat evident on Arthur’s face too. […] I think the expressions work in concert to suggest […] a power reversal that leaves Arthur on the bottom, a position he’s not entirely comfortable accepting. There is pleasure to be had in seeing the “cocky” Arthur forcefully penetrated, “cut down to size by a bigger man” (wandsinhand). The two assume the ‘doggystyle’ position, an impersonal sexual position, without eye contact and where the penetrator sets the rhythm and intensity of each thrust. Scholars have argued that the position is degrading to the passive party, who is dehumanised by the act, a ‘dog’ (Dworkin 27); and rapper Snoop ‘Doggy’ Dogg exploits the misogynistic connotations of the position on his record Doggystyle (see Armstrong). Wandsinhand is clear in his intent to depict forceful domination of Arthur. Struggle is signified through the addition of perspiration, a trademark device used by this artist to symbolise struggle. Domination in a sexual act involves the erasure of the wishes of the dominated partner (see Cowan and Dunn). To attune oneself to the pleasures of a sexual partner is to regard them as a subject. To ignore such pleasures is to degrade the other person. The artist’s choice of pairing embraces the physicality of the male/male bond and illustrates a tendency among manip producers to privilege conventional masculine identifiers—such as size and muscle—above symbolic, nonphysical identifiers, such as status and rank. It is worth noting that muscle is more readily available in the pornographic source material used in slash manips—muscularity being a recurrent component of gay pornography (see Duggan and McCreary). In my interview with manip artist simontheduck, he describes the difficulty he had sourcing a base image “that complimented the physicality of the [Merlin] characters. […] The actor that plays Merlin is fairly thin while Arthur is pretty built, it was difficult to find one. I even had to edit Merlin’s body down further in the end.” (personal correspondence, used with permission) As wandsinhand explains, “you’re basically limited by what’s available on the internet, and even then, only what you’re prepared to sift through or screencap yourself”. Wandsinhand’s Arthur/Percival pairing selection works in tandem with other artistic decisions and inclusions—sexual position, setting, expressions, effects (perspiration, lighting)—to ensure the intended reading of the work. Antithetical size and rank positions play out in the penetration/submission act of wandsinhand’s work, in which only the stronger of the two may come out ‘on top’. Percival subverts the symbolic power structures of prince/knight, asserting his physical, sexual dominance over the physically inferior Arthur. That such a construction of Percival is incongruent with the polite, impeded-by-my-size-and-muscle-density Percival of the series speaks to the circumstances of manip production, much of which is on a taste basis, as previously noted. There are of course exceptions to this, the Teen Wolf ‘Sterek’ (Stiles/Derek) pairing being wandsinhand’s, but even in this case, size tends to couple with penetration. Slash manips often privilege physicality of the characters in question—as well as the base models selected—above any particular canon-supported slash reading. (Of course, the ‘queering’ nature of slash practice means at times there is also a desire to see such identifiers subverted, however in this example, raw masculine power prevails.) This final point is in no way representative—my practice, for example, combines manips with ficlets to offer a clearer connection with canon, while LJ’s zdae69 integrates manips, fiction and comics. However, common across slash manip artists driven by taste—and requests—rather than connection with canon—the best known being LJ’s tw-31988, demon48180 and Tumblr’s lwoodsmalestarsfakes, all of whom work across many fandoms—is interest in the ‘aesthetics of canon’, the blue hues of Teen Wolf or the fluorescent greens of Arrow (2012–present), displayed in glossy magazine format using services such as ISSUU. In short, ‘the look’ of the work often takes precedent over canonical implications of any artistic decisions. “Nothing Too Serious”: Slash Manips as Objects Worth Studying It had long been believed that the popular was the transient, that of entertainment rather than enlightenment; that which is manufactured, “an appendage of the machinery”, consumed by the duped masses and a product not of culture but of a ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Rabinbach 12). Scholars such as Radway, Ang pioneered a shift in scholarly practice, advancing the cultural studies project by challenging elitism and finding meaning in traditionally devalued cultural texts and practices. The most surprising outcome of my interviews with wandsinhand was hearing how he conceived of his practice, and the study of slash: If I knew I could get a PhD by writing a dissertation on Slash, I would probably drop out of my physics papers! […] I don’t really think too highly of faking/manip-making. I mean, it’s not like it’s high art, is it? … or is it? I guess if Duchamp’s toilet can be a masterpiece, then so can anything. But I mainly just do it to pass the time, materialise fantasies, and disperse my fantasies unto others. Nothing too serious. Wandsinhand erects various binaries—academic/fan, important/trivial, science/arts, high art/low art, profession/hobby, reality/fantasy, serious/frivolous—as justification to devalue his own artistic practice. Yet embracing the amateur, personal nature of his practice frees him to “materialise fantasies” that would perhaps not be possible without self-imposed, underground production. This is certainly supported by his body of work, which plays with taboos of the unseen, of bodily fluids and sadomasochism. My intention with this article is not to contravene views such as wandsinhand’s. Rather, it is to promote slash manips as a form of remix culture that encourages new perspectives on how slash has been defined, its connection with male producers and its symbiotic relationship with gay pornography. I have examined the ‘semiotic significance of selection’ that creates meaning in two contrary slash manips; how these works actualise and resist canon dominance, as it relates to the physical and the symbolic. This examination also offers insight into this form’s connection to and negotiation with certain ideologies of gay pornography, such as the valorisation of size and muscle. References Adorno, Theodor W., and Anson G. Rabinbach. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (1975): 12–19. Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas. London: Methuen, 1985. Armstrong, Edward G. “Gangsta Misogyny: A Content Analysis of the Portrayals of Violence against Women in Rap Music, 1987–93.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 8.2 (2001): 96–126. Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Music, Text. London: HarperCollins, 1977. 269–85. Burns, E. Jane. Courtly Love Undressed: Reading through Clothes in Medieval French Culture. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Cowan, Gloria, and Kerri F. Dunn. “What Themes in Pornography Lead to Perceptions of the Degradation of Women?” The Journal of Sex Research 31.1 (1994): 11–21. Dennis, Jeffery P. “Drawing Desire: Male Youth and Homoerotic Fan Art.” Journal of LGBT Youth 7.1 (2010): 6–28. Duggan, Scott J., and Donald R. McCreary. “Body Image, Eating Disorders, and the Drive for Muscularity in Gay and Heterosexual Men: The Influence of Media Images.” Journal of Homosexuality 47.3/4 (2004): 45–58. Durkin, Keith, Craig J. Forsyth, and James F. Quinn. “Pathological Internet Communities: A New Direction for Sexual Deviance Research in a Post Modern Era.” Sociological Spectrum 26.6 (2006): 595–606. Dworkin, Andrea. “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality.” Letters from a War Zone. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1997. 19–38. Fejes, Fred. “Bent Passions: Heterosexual Masculinity, Pornography, and Gay Male Identity.” Sexuality & Culture 6.3 (2002): 95–113. Franklin, Karen. “Enacting Masculinity: Antigay Violence and Group Rape as Participatory Theater.” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 1.2 (2004): 25–40. Hori, Akiko. “On the Response (or Lack Thereof) of Japanese Fans to Criticism That Yaoi Is Antigay Discrimination.” Transformative Works and Cultures 12 (2013). doi:10.3983/twc.2013.0463. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance. Trans. F. Hopman. London: Edward Arnold & Co, 1924. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Kendall, Christopher N. “‘Real Dominant, Real Fun!’: Gay Male Pornography and the Pursuit of Masculinity.” Saskatchewan Law Review 57 (1993): 21–57. Kreisinger, Elisa. “Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012). doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0395. Lamb, Patricia F., and Diane L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. Ed. D Palumbo. New York: Greenwood, 1986. 235–57. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Vintage, 2001. Lunsing, Wim. “Yaoi Ronsō: Discussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics, Gay Comics and Gay Pornography.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 12 (2006). ‹http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/lunsing.html›. MacDonald, Marianne. “Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenom.” The Gay & Lesbian Review 13.1 (2006): 28–30. McKee, Alan. “Australian Gay Porn Videos: The National Identity of Despised Cultural Objects.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.2 (1999): 178–98. Morrison, Todd G., Melanie A. Morrison, and Becky A. Bradley. “Correlates of Gay Men’s Self-Reported Exposure to Pornography.” International Journal of Sexual Health 19.2 (2007): 33–43. Mosher, Donald L. “Negative Attitudes Toward Masturbation in Sex Therapy.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 5.4 (1979): 315–33. Navas, Eduardo. “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture.” Mashup Cultures. Ed. Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss. New York: Springer, 2010. 157–77. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984. Russ, Joanna. “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love.” Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts: Feminist Essays. Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1985. 79–99. Russo, Julie Levin. “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence.” Cinema Journal 48.4 (2009): 125–30. Salmon, Catherine, and Donald Symons. Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Human Sexuality. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001. Sánchez, Francisco J., Stefanie T. Greenberg, William Ming Liu, and Eric Vilain. “Reported Effects of Masculine Ideals on Gay Men.” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 10.1 (2009): 73–87. Stasi, Mafalda. “The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Karen Hellekson, and Kristina Busse. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. 115–33. Stedman, Kyle D. “Remix Literacy and Fan Compositions.” Computers and Composition 29.2 (2012): 107–23. Weinstein, Matthew. “Slash Writers and Guinea Pigs as Models for Scientific Multiliteracy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 38.5 (2006): 607–23. Woledge, Elizabeth. “Intimatopia: Genre Intersections between Slash and the Mainstream.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Karen Hellekson, and Kristina Busse. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. 97–114.

Contemporary approaches to agency and film authorship, such as performativity and “techniques of the self,” (Staiger, 2003) provide an explanation for the expression of agency within the always-already-existing structure of the text, yet fail to account for, firstly, how the individual determines which agential choices to make and, then, interacts with society with causality and efficacy (Staiger, 2003). Critical Realism, in particular Archer’s 2003 theory of the internal conversation (Structure), provides an alternative theoretical framework to postmodernism by acknowledging both the existence of orders of reality that impact upon the individual’s choices, and the effects of cultural and societal structures. I would suggest that postmodernism has restricted our understanding of human agency and how individual choice is determined within the highly structured creative industries. Although interplay between agency and structure applies to all creative collaborators, in this essay I will focus on the agency of the screenwriter as author (an overlooked aspect of film authorship), as Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) provides an excellent illustration of the function of the internal conversation in the development of a screenplay. Adaptation, written by highly regarded contemporary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, also presents an interesting comment on the role of the screenwriter within the Hollywood film industry, and foregrounds the notion of creative film authorship. The film can be considered a postmodern film, in its intertextuality, deconstruction of both the subject and the filmic structure, the parodic theme and the oppositional characterisation. Charlie Kaufman even becomes his own textual creation represented in the film, and many of the other characters in the film are based on actual people. However, the film also contains representations of reality, conflicting accounts of authorial intent, and a positioning of the subject and object that realises reflexive deliberation and human agency. Thematically, the film expresses a philosophical concern with individual human identity, and societal interaction and development. I would suggest that, although the film is usually considered a fine example of the postmodern film, from a Critical Realist perspective, it can be read as providing a critique of the “postmodern condition”, in particular the repetitive, formulaic mainstream Hollywood film. Archer argues that there must of necessity be both a separation of the individual from society or culture and an acknowledged mingling of self and society. Agency is dependent upon engagement with social and cultural structures, but this could not happen unless there were other (non-social) identifiable aspects to the individual (Structure, 7). According to Archer, natural reality consists of three orders: nature, which concerns physical well-being; practice, where performative achievement is necessary for work; and the social, where the individual’s main concern is in the achievement of self-worth (Structure, 138). The sense of self, or continuity of consciousness, constitutes the natural human and is universal. Therefore the individual, although a part of society, does not exist because of society, but because of reality. Without this continuing sense of self, an individual would not be able to “appropriate social expectations and … recognise what is expected of them” (“Realism”, 13). For society to function effectively, people must have a continuity of consciousness that transcends society. Human agency “originates in people themselves, from their own concerns, forged in the space between the self and reality as a whole” (“Realism”, 12). This is a liminal space—that is, an unstructured area of imagination—in which a screenwriter who wishes to create original acts of authoring operates. The internal conversation takes the form of a dialogue conducted with oneself, not with society, but about society. The individual conducts a conversation between their subjective self, which asks a question, and their objective self, which provides the answer. The person is speaking to themselves, but occupying transitory positions in order to process information, thoughts, and possible courses of action. It is a method for arriving at self-knowledge and decisions through the process of “discernment, deliberation and dedication” (Archer, Structure, 138). Through this internal process, individuals prioritise their concerns, and how they will accommodate those other necessary aspects of reality that may impinge on what they care about most. This process develops and changes as individuals mature, and as they are affected by all aspects of reality. The internal conversation provides a conciliatory approach to the interplay between the filmic culture industry and the individual screenwriter. The screenwriter as author can be seen to negotiate personal projects within the structural constraints and enablements of the film production process, and to enact agency through personal reflexive deliberation, choice and thematic style. How socially efficacious the resulting screenplay is depends upon the screenwriter’s authorship skills, the story’s cultural resonance, societal relevance, and the freedoms and impositions encountered within the filmic industry structure. Adaptation can be read as illustrative of this process. The film opens with an inner dialogue. “Kaufman” (the character, as opposed to Charlie Kaufman, the writer) is questioning, and answering, himself regarding his concerns. He considers his current situation, and his ability as a screenwriter, then deliberates on possible strategies for improving himself. This inner conversation continues throughout the film, both as voiceover, and as a dual characterisation, that of “Kaufman” in relation to his identical twin brother, Donald. Immediately we are given an insight into “Kaufman’s” mind. He is concerned with his health, his work practices and his self-worth. The three orders of reality are then presented as themes in the film. Nature is addressed through the subject of the book: orchids and their adaptability, and how this relates to human beings and their mutability. Practice is seen in “Kaufman’s” and Donald’s opposite approaches to writing a screenplay, the effects of the accepted industry format and expectations, and the eventual resolution of the film. Finally, society itself is questioned through the contrasting self-worth of the characters. “Kaufman” compares himself to: Orlean, as a competent writer; Laroche, as possessor of self-esteem and passion; and Donald, as carefree and socially adept. That the film encompasses all orders of reality reinforces Archer’s point that individuals must conceive of projects that “establish … satisfactory practices in the three orders … [as this process is] the inescapable condition for human beings to survive or thrive” (Structure, 138). “Kaufman” entertains the project of adapting a book into a screenplay when he meets with Valerie, an attractive executive producer. However, once he has entered into the project, he must negotiate the limitations and possibilities of the cultural structures of both the film industry and the book. “Kaufman” is considered for the adaptation because of his reputation as an unusual screenwriter. However, when he states that he wants to let the movie exist, and not turn it into a typical Hollywood product with car chases, turning the orchids into poppies, cramming in sex and guns, and characters learning profound life lessons, Valerie suggests that Orlean and Laroche could fall in love. Immediately “Kaufman’s” ideas are constrained. He is subjected to the hierarchical structure of the Hollywood film industry where the producer holds power. The screenwriter is an employee, contracted to do a job: that is, write a screenplay that can be made into a high-grossing film. As well, “Kaufman” has read the book and wishes to stay true to Orlean’s story. This poses another limitation, especially given that The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book, a factual account of a rather unique individual (John Laroche) who came to Orlean’s attention when Laroche was charged with orchid poaching from a Florida state preserve. The book has no narrative structure, but digresses among Laroche’s story, Orlean’s personal reflections, the passion orchids inspire in enthusiasts, and the history of orchids and orchid hunters. However, once “Kaufman” has accepted the project, he must begin his process of deliberation and creation, and negotiate his strategy for completing the screenplay. If we take the fictional identical twin brother Donald to be “Kaufman’s” alter-ego, the two characters can be seen as separate facets of “Kaufman’s” negotiation of The Orchid Thief project, and their conversation reflects an internal dialogue of deliberation. By juxtaposing Donald and “Kaufman” as both the subjective (or speaking) self, and the objective (or answering) self, we can follow the internal dialogue that “Kaufman” conducts during the film. This highlights “Kaufman’s” concerns and possible choices regarding the project he has undertaken. He questions the task ahead of him and weighs the options available. The easy way forward would simply be to write a repetitive generic Hollywood film, and still get paid a lot of money. But “Kaufman” has ideals, and values his writing as a craft: as creating a literary work. In contrast, Donald finds it easy to write a screenplay by following the accepted cultural order, whereas “Kaufman” has personal (authorial) concerns that he wishes to express. “Kaufman’s” specific interests take precedence in his work and can be seen as other orders of reality impinging upon the social order. In order to understand the book he is adapting (and also to fulfill his own personal concerns as agential author) “Kaufman” must attempt to encompass the natural-order theme of the book, and the social-order expectations of the film industry. He has to decide which is more important. Initially, “Kaufman’s” preference is for the reality of the book, the actuality of how the world is, and this is where his interests as both a writer and an individual lie. This focus can be seen through the themes of Charlie Kaufman’s other screenplays. In his films, his main thematic concern—as he himself states—is “issues of self and why I’m me and not that other person” (cited in Kennedy). Charlie Kaufman delves deep into the notion of subjectivity, agency and human consciousness. However “Kaufman” (and, the implication is, in real life Charlie) is constrained by the cultural order of Hollywood which, although he tries to evade it, continually imposes limitations upon the completion of this screenplay. Donald is that side of “Kaufman” which keeps reminding him that, although he has freedom as a respected screenwriter, there are some aspects of writing for film that cannot be discounted. “Kaufman” and Donald are two sides of the same coin. They represent “Kaufman’s” inner dialogue and his internal conflict. The twin screenwriting characters personify his struggle to produce a screenplay that satisfies his ultimate personal convictions as a unique and creative writer (to remain true to the thematic concerns of the book) and the need to conform to the accepted Hollywood ideal of a high-budget feature film. The film can also be read as the actual writing of the screenplay unfolding on the screen. As “Kaufman” writes it, this is what we see visually. For the first two acts of the film, “Kaufman” succeeds in portraying his thematic concerns with the progress of life, and the necessity of change, and his involvement in the process of screenwriting. In this he stays true to Orlean’s book, even including digressive “chapters” where he not only introduces the real characters (that is, the story of the book), but also investigates the history of orchids and the concept of adaptability. “Kaufman” balances these thematic interests against each other through his own process of writing the screenplay. He also addresses issues that are of concern to him personally. He deliberates on these through the juxtaposition of his character “Kaufman” with those of Orlean and Laroche. He regards Orlean as the consummate writer, shown comfortably working in her office, in contrast to “Kaufman” hunched over an old typewriter perched on a chair. Laroche is a passionate individual who becomes engrossed in projects, but can then abandon them completely. “Kaufman” finds this difficult, as he is a screenwriter who, although passionate about his craft, cannot distance himself from his project. These oppositions are further reinforced through the character of Donald, who adopts a formulaic approach to writing his own film, to finishing his thriller-screenplay, while “Kaufman” is still struggling with his own adaptation. Once Donald has completed his film, he divests himself of all interest in it except for how much money he will receive. Donald also shows passion, not for his craft, but for women, whereas “Kaufman” finds it difficult to maintain a continuing relationship and resorts to fantasy and masturbation. “Kaufman” becomes so involved in the writing of the screenplay that Orlean becomes a part of his sexual fantasies, yet he cannot bring himself to meet her face to face. The opposition and comparison of these three characters, “Kaufman”-and-Donald (as one composite character), Orlean, and Laroche, is also reflected in Donald’s screenplay, The Three. Donald’s screenplay is about a cop, trying to find a serial killer’s latest victim; she becomes his Holy Grail. However, Donald’s three characters are, in fact, all the one character, who is suffering from multiple personality disorder. In Adaptation, “Kaufman” is questioning himself about aspects of his personality and providing the answers to those queries through other characters. As the search for perfection is Laroche’s Holy Grail, and passion is Orlean’s, for “Kaufman” it is the completion of the screenplay with integrity and aplomb. What “Kaufman” questions about the filmic reality of, and complications with, Donald’s screenplay are in fact included in “Kaufman’s” own screenplay that we see unfolding on the screen. The two screenplays are questioning and answering each other, and represent an internal conversation. Through these characterisations (and in particular the dialogic interactions with Donald), “Kaufman” is diagnosing his circumstances. By the end of the second act, “Kaufman” is coming to a realisation that it would have been much easier to write something else, anything else (including The Three), than attempting to complete the project he has started, and maintain his stance regarding the truth of the book, and the reality of life. In the third act, “Kaufman” accepts that he cannot complete his project and admits he needs help. However, he cannot simply cease working, as this would reflect on his other concerns: those of his own well-being and his work ethic, as well as his social standing as a Hollywood screenwriter. He is dedicated to completing the screenplay, but has to reassess his methods, and his options. His deliberations become more conventional, in keeping with the need to accommodate the constraints of the Hollywood cultural structure, and it is here that “Kaufman” must abandon his idealistic approach and allow Donald to take over. “Kaufman” cannot sustain his original concern of staying true to Orlean’s book and also maintaining the screenplay structure. He has to negotiate the limitations and consider new possibilities. According to Archer, “Once an agential project has activated a constraint or enablement, there is no single answer about what is to be done, and therefore no one predictable outcome” (Structure, 131). This is illustrated in the film, through the variant scenic possibilities “Kaufman” imagines and attempts to coalesce into his screenplay. However, he cannot bring the screenplay to an acceptable (and therefore, satisfactory) climax and resolution. “Kaufman” becomes like the serial killer in Donald’s script, who, because he is forcing his victim to eat herself, is also eating himself to death. In the same way, the film begins to consume and kill the characters one by one. “Kaufman” has a problem that he must overcome. He achieves this by making the third act a fiction of reality, and the characters into caricatures. The third act, “Kaufman’s” Japanese paper ball which, when dropped into water turns into a flower, is a metaphor, where the film turns back on itself. Instead of showing the reality of the book, the book becomes a fiction of the film. Donald takes over, and the climax of the film provides all the conventions of a typical Hollywood film: much more like Donald’s generic thriller than “Kaufman’s” initial premise. All “Kaufman’s” detested conventions are included: Orlean and Laroche fall in love, the Ghost Orchid is a potent psychedelic, there are guns, car chases, and death. “Kaufman” as protagonist learns a profound life lesson, and the deus ex machina is included, not once, but twice. An unsuspecting Ranger causes an horrific car accident and Laroche gets attacked by an alligator. Orobouros has been let loose. The characters have turned on themselves and are being deconstructed to death. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay both encompasses the postmodern and rejects it. Through his writing skill, his unique plot conventions and his character development, he lays bare the contemporary conceptions of reality, filmic reality, and the influence of Hollywood production on both the audience and the screenwriter. He addresses the oppositional: the creative voice and the clichéd utterance; reality and fiction; disappointment and fulfillment; entrapment and freedom; and creates a new totality, a unique film that provides an alternative to the tired screenwriting paradigm. That he has managed to adapt a non-fiction book, insert real people as characters within the film, and write a critically acclaimed screenplay, shows both his skill and craft as a screenwriter and his efficacious agency. He has posited that there is an alternative to the conventional Hollywood film and that film can pose the “big” questions, about life, about what it means to be human and why things don’t change. Charlie Kaufman has taken the postmodern film, turned it inside out, and managed to not only expose the fiction, but embrace the reality. Adaptation provides a visual example of both the interplay between individual agency and socio-cultural structure and the screenwriter as author. For most of the film, “Kaufman” occupies a liminal space that—although existing in reality—is separate from society and the natural world. This, it could be said, is the “in-between space” of the practice of the screenwriter. It is a creative area of communitas (in the case of the screenwriter, as singular, rather than as a group); an unstructured equality that exists between boundaries, and where meaning is found in the imagination of a writer. In this liminal space, the author lives in a world of images and words, of personal concerns and the desire to share stories, but is always mindful of the restricted, accepted, mainstream film structure. The screenwriter’s liminal space is both expressively free and creatively constricted. Yet, because of this, the screenwriter provides an excellent example of the role of the internal conversation in the mediation of agency within cultural and societal structures. A discussion of agency and authorship is not simply a matter of repetitive cultural discourses, or existing social structures, but an incorporation of all orders of reality. It is through the formulation of specific projects that agents interact with social and structural power. Adaptation presents the Critical Realist concept that human beings and society are continually changing and developing, and neither agents, nor structure, can restrict the other completely. The creative agent absorbs current shifts in culture and society, reflects topical concerns, and envisages and expresses alternative ideas, even those opposed to postmodernism. Authorial agency, and indeed all individual human agency, is an ongoing process of adapting, however, as Mahatma Ghandi stated, “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation”. References Archer, Margaret S. “Realism and the Problem of Agency.” Journal of Critical Realism 5.1 (2002). 28 Aug. 2005 http://journalofcriticalrealism.org/archive/JCRv5n1_archer11.pdf>. ———. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Kaufman, Charlie and Kaufman, Donald. Adaptation 2000. 14 May 2005 http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/adaptationnov2000.pdf>. Kennedy, L. “Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original ‘Mind’”. Denver Post 26 Mar. 2004. Staiger, Janet. “Authorship Approaches.” In Authorship and Film. Eds David Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2003. 27-59. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McMerrin, Michelle. "Agency in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>. APA Style McMerrin, M. (May 2007) "Agency in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>.

Let us work backwards from what we know, from personal experience: the photograph of which we have each been the subject. Roland Barthes says of this photograph that it transforms "the subject into object": one begins aping the mask one wants to assume, one begins, in other words, to make oneself conform in appearance to the disguise of an identity (Camera Lucida 11). A quick glance back at your most recent holiday gathering will no doubt confirm his diagnosis. Barthes gives to this subject-object the title of Spectrum in order to neatly join the idea of spectacle with the fearsome spectre, what he calls that "terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead" (Camera Lucida 9). Cathy Davidson points out that in "photocentric culture, we can no longer even see that we see ourselves primarily as seen, imaged, the photograph as the evidential proof of existence"; photocentric culture thus generates "a profound confusion of image and afterlife" (669 672). Andre Bazin announces that the medium "embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption" (242), while Susan Sontag points out that it may "assassinate" (13). What 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 spectral haunting of the photograph is familiar to anyone who has ever looked at snapshots in a family album. How much more present it was to the producers and consumers of early photography who engineered the genre of the memento mori, portraits taken of the dead or in imitation of death. Despite the acknowledged 'eeriness' of our own recorded and vanished pasts, such pictures seem grotesquely morbid to us now -- for what we cannot recover is the absolute novelty of photography in its early days, or the vehicle that it provided in the nineteenth century for a whole set of concerns about selfhood that begin, ironically, with death. Those early photographs bring to mind another death, that of the author. Re-enter Barthes, for it is he who definitively announces the new textual paradigm in which the author disappears. In "Death of the Author," Barthes calls the author tyrannical and adopts liberationist rhetoric in unseating him. But what cult is Barthes actually countering? His essay begins and ends with Balzac, and includes Baudelaire, Van Gogh and Tchaikovsky, while his heroes are Mallarmé, Valéry and Proust. Barthes' notion of the author is implicitly a nineteenth-century construction, to be undone by modernist writing against the grain. And what distinguishes the nineteenth-century author from his predecessors? His portrait, of course. Thanks to the surge of visual and reproductive technologies culminating in the mechanised printing process and photography, the nineteenth-century author is suddenly widely available to readers as an image. The author literally becomes a face hovering above the text; it is this omnipresence that Barthes objects to. Photography gives new momentum to the cult of the author, but this is not mere historical coincidence -- that the photograph is developed at a point in history when authorship is particularly mobile: in between the Romantic individualism that transforms authorship from a craft to a calling, and the modernist interrogation of ontology and representation that explodes such notions from within. However, the opposite is also true. Photography as we know it is a product of the institution of authorship. Photography is founded on and makes available, through the democratisation and dissemination of a certain technology, a concept of public selfhood that hitherto had been reserved for those in charge of textual representation, of themselves as well as of other subjects. Primarily this is because the ideological, technological and material vehicles of the photograph -- identities, characters, scenes, the properties of chemical interaction, the invention of specialised apparatus, poses, props, and photo albums -- were closely related to book culture. How did photography change the notion of the author? It did so by commandeering truth claims -- by serving as the scientific illustration of divinely-ordained natural laws. The art of chemically fixing the image obtained through a camera obscura was perfected in 1839 by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Fox Talbot, separately, with different techniques.1 Daguerre's method caught on quickly, partly because his daguerreotype recorded such exquisite detail. The daguerreotype surface was reflective and sharply etched; inspection with a magnifying glass disclosed minutiae -- insects, eyelashes, objects in the far distance. The daguerreotype, popularly nicknamed "the pencil of the sun," seemed like a miniaturised and complete mirror of the world, a representation without human intervention.2 In 1839, and throughout the 1840's and '50's, photography transparently supported the notion that the discoveries of science would help reveal God's secrets, not disprove them -- a view that suffered but continued on after the publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859. Its presumed objectivity and comprehensive truthfulness made photography immediately appealing as a scientific and artistic tool. Although it was used to record geologic formations and vegetation, the bulky apparatus of the early photographic methods meant that it was better suited to the indoor studio -- and the portrait, in which the truth of human character could be made visible. It served as a means of defining normality and deviation; it was central to the project of identifying physical characteristics of the insane and the criminal, and of classifying racial features, as in the daguerreotypes made of slaves in the United States by J. T. Zealy in 1850, which the natural scientist Louis Aggasiz used as independent evidence of the natural differences between the races in order to endorse the doctrine of "separate creation" (Trachtenberg 53) So perceptive and penetrating did the photograph seem, it was even deemed capable of revealing vice and virtue, and it was in this way that the photographer moved onto the terrain of the author. The truth-telling properties of photography seemed to corroborate the authorial estimation of character that was a central element of nineteenth-century fiction. In texts where photography is itself on display this property is especially obvious -- in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, for example, where true and secret characters are only discerned in daguerreotype portraits. But photography did more than divinely and scientifically confirm fictional character; the venerated author's ability to delineate moral qualities made him, or her, an exemplary character as well. The Victorians prized "sincerity," the criterion by which they measured their authors. Especially in the influential pronouncements of Carlyle, the Victorian notion of sincerity "makes man and artist inseparable" (Ball 155). An exemplary moral life was particularly powerful in the form of an author. Indeed, it was through authorship of some kind that such lives could take the public form they needed in order to fulfill their function as models. And so photography appears not just in the text but on its margins, framing and qualifying it: the portrait of the author, already a bibliographic convention, gains additional authority through the objective lens of the camera, in which the author's character is exhibited as a kind of testimony to his or her truth-telling abilities. The frontispiece guarantees the right of the author to moral leadership. As literacy and readership expanded and exceeded former class distinctions, the nineteenth-century author began to need to market himself in order to find and keep an audience. But since the source of the author's authority was sincerity, the commodification of the authorial self presented a dilemma. Some writers, such as Dickens, embraced this role; others withdrew from the task of performing a public self, but their refusal of the public's gaze was itself often dramatised, as for Tennyson, Elizabeth Barret Browning and, after her death, Emily Dickinson. The photograph portrait of the artist, as well as other likenesses of his visage, was a particularly convenient piece of authorial paraphernalia because it sustained the idea of the author as moral exemplar, but in fact it was only one of the many ways in which nineteenth-century readers kept the author before their eyes. Souvenirs such as autographs, original manuscripts and other tokens testifying to the presence of the author's body, as well as gift books and precious editions designed to generate and satisfy fans, were mainstays of Victorian keepsake culture. The photograph as corporeal souvenir signals the point where we must turn around and consider the question of photography and authorship from the other direction: that is, how the institution of authorship constructs photography. Given that photography as an art developed out of the desire to eliminate the human hand, to trace directly from nature, it seems ironic that photography could have an author. And yet it was the notion of a public and visible self, associated primarily with authorship, which accounted for the widespread popularity of photography. When the daguerreotype was introduced in 1839, enterprising amateurs in Europe and the United States transformed it from a tricky chemical procedure into a practical art, a livelihood. Daguerrean saloons appeared in the cities and in rural areas, itinerant daguerreotypists set up temporary headquarters. But every daguerreotype studio had two purposes, whether it was the high-end urban atelier of Southworth and Hawes in Boston or a peddler's rented room: it was the place where one went to have one's picture taken and it was also a public gallery, where the portraits of former customers were displayed. In an urban gallery, those portraits might include the poets, ministers and politicians of the day, but even in a village studio, one could see exhibited the portraits of the local beauties, the town big-wigs. Entering the studio as a customer or a spectator, anyone could imaginatively take his or her place among an assembly of eminent personages. More importantly, the daguerreotype and later forms of photography made portraiture accessible to the middle and working classes for the first time. The studio was a democratic space where one could entertain the fantasy of a different self, and in fact one could literally enact that fantasy through the props and accessories of identity that the studio provided. In borrowed hats and canes, sitting stiffly in chairs or standing against painted backdrops, holding books, flowers, candles, and even other daguerreotypes, the sitter could assume the persona he or she would like others to see. Often the sitter composes an obvious gender performance, other times the sitter exhibits himself as the master of a certain occupation. With the invention of the wet plate collodion process in 1851, which made it possible to reproduce quantities of images from a single negative, the public went in for the carte-de-visite, on which one's very own portrait was imprinted and handed out like a postcard souvenir. The carte-de-visite necessitated a new way of keeping and displaying multiple photographs, and thus the photo album was born. But in fact the paradigm of the book already governed photographic display and the storage of the personal collection. When the Bible was the only book a family might own, it served as the cabinet of memorable dates and events. Other kinds of mementoes were stored in lockets and books: locks of hair, painted miniatures, pressed flowers. Daguerreotypes were kept in small codex-like cases or in hinged lockets. The souvenir and its symbolic connection to the body (one's own or that of a beloved) was of course not limited to the cult of the author but was available as a mode of identity to anybody who read novels. The culture of the souvenir, the keepsake, the personal precious object stored in a book, offered a means of articulating the self that readily accommodated the photograph, and in that context, the photograph took on the properties of a personal talisman. In the wake of photography, the scrapbook, the flower album, the signature album -- all those vehicles for collecting and displaying the ephemera of a lifetime -- flourished. Books were no longer mainly devoted to dense layers of print but could consist of open space to be filled in by their owners, who would thereby become authors of their own works and incidentally of their own identities. The popularity of the album was partly due to developments in printing, which was changing from a text-based industry to one increasingly concerned with images, a shift that culminated in photo-offset printing and photoduplication. But the popularity of the album and other biblioform containers for the personal collection also has something to do with the culture of the souvenir, which prepared the way for the photograph as personal talisman and then accomodated the tremendous expansion photography offered to the self. Via the photograph, a self that was allied with its own mementoes would be transformed: selfhood formerly attached to an object intended for private contemplation was subsequently attached to an object intended for exhibition. Via the photograph, the same publicity attendant on the circulation of the author was incorporated into the stuff of the ordinary subject, who regarded his or her own image and offered it up to history. The reflexive spectacle of visible selfhood brings us back to the return of the dead, that feature of the photograph which seems to persist, and perhaps illuminates the difference between the kind of death it spooks us with now and the kind of 150 years ago. For our ancestors, the photograph was a way to cheat death, to manipulate the strict boundaries of identity, to become memorable, to catch a heady glimpse of absolute truth; but for us it is different. We can see how much we are the creations of photography, and how much we surrender to the public self it burdens us with. Notes 1. The technological history of photography is of course much complicated by issues of competition, technological "prehistory" and intellectual property—for example, there is the matter of the disappearance of Daguerre's partner Niepce. However, Daguerre is generally credited with "inventing" the medium. See Gernsheim, Greenough et al and Newhall. 2. The phrase and others like it were not only popularised by influential critic-practitioners of photography such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fox Talbot, in The Pencil of Nature, and Marcus Aurelius Root, in The Camera and the Pencil, but were perpetuated in the everyday language of commerce—for example, the portrait studio that advertised its "Sun Drawn Miniatures" (Gernsheim 106). References Ball, Patricia. The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian Imagination. London: Athlone Press, 1968. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ---. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, Conn: Leete's Island Books, 1980. 237-244. Davidson, Cathy N. "Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne." South Atlantic Quarterly 89.4 (Fall 1990): 667-701. Gernsheim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Greenough, Sarah, Joel Snyder, David Travis and Colin Westerbeck. On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography, From 1839 to the Present. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977. Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to the Present. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Dean, Gabrielle. "Portrait of the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt. Chicago Style Dean, Gabrielle, "Portrait of the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Dean, Gabrielle. (2002) Portrait of the Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt ([your date of access]).

IntroductionUtopian and forward looking in tenor, official narratives of urban renewal and development implicitly promote normative ideals of progress and necessary civic improvement. Yet an underlying condition of such renewal is frequently the very opposite of building: the demolition of existing urban fabric. Taking as its starting point the large-scale demolition of buildings proposed for the NSW Government’s Sydney Metro rail project, this article interrogates the role of literary treatments of demolition in mediating complex, and often contradictory, responses to transformations of the built environment. Case studies are drawn from literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations, notably Louis Aragon’s 1926 Surrealist document of a threatened Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant, and the non-fiction accounts of the redevelopment of London’s East End by British writer Iain Sinclair. Sydney UnbuiltPresently, Australia’s biggest public transport project according to the NSW Government website, the Sydney Metro is set to revolutionise Sydney’s rail future with more than 30 metro stations and a fleet of fully-automated driverless trains. Its impetus extends at least as far back as the Liberal-National Coalition’s landslide win at the 2011 New South Wales state election when Barry O’Farrell, then party leader, declared “NSW has to be rebuilt” (qtd in Aston). Infrastructure upgrades became one of the Coalition’s key priorities upon forming government. Following a second Coalition win at the 2015 election, the state of NSW, or the city of Sydney more accurately, remains today deep amidst widespread building works with an unprecedented number of infrastructure, development and urban renewal projects simultaneously underway.From an historical perspective, Sydney is certainly no stranger to demolition. This was in evidence in Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that captured the zeitgeist of 2016 with its historical survey of Sydney’s demolished architecture. As the exhibition media release pointed out: “Since 1788 Sydney has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt as it has grown from Georgian town to Victorian city to the global urban centre it is today” (Museum of Sydney). What this evolutionist narrative glosses over, however, is the extent to which the impact of Sydney’s significant reinventions of itself through large-scale redevelopment are often not properly registered until well after such changes have taken place. With the imminent commencement of Sydney Metro Stage 2 CBD works, the city similarly stands to lose a number of buildings that embody the civic urban ideals of an earlier era, the effects of which are unlikely to be fully appreciated until the project’s post-demolition phase. The revelation, over the past year, of the full extent of demolition required to build Sydney Metro casts a spotlight on the project and raises questions about its likely impact in reconfiguring the character of Sydney’s inner city. An Environmental Impact Statement Summary (EISS) released by the NSW Government in May 2016 confirms that 79 buildings in the CBD and surrounding suburbs are slated for demolition as part of station development plans for the Stage 2 Chatswood to Sydenham line (Transport for NSW). Initial assurances were that the large majority of acquisitions would be commercial buildings. Yet, the mix also comprises some locally-heritage listed structures including, most notably, 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney (Image 1), a residential apartment tower of 54 studio flats located at the top end of the Sydney central business district.Image 1: 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney apartment towers (middle). Architect: Emil Sodersten. Image credit: Ella Mudie.As the sole surviving block of CBD flats constructed during the 1930s, 7 Elizabeth Street had been identified by the Australian Institute of Architects as an example of historically significant twentieth-century residential architecture. Furthermore, the modernist block is aesthetically significant as the work of prominent Art Deco architect Emil Sodersten (1899-1961) and interior designer Marion Hall Best (1905-1988). Disregarding recommendations that the building should be retained and conserved, Transport for NSW compulsorily acquired the block, evicting residents in late 2016 from one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in the inner-city. Meanwhile, a few blocks down at 302 Pitt Street the more than century-old Druids House (Image 2) is also set to be demolished for the Metro development. Prior to purchase by Transport for NSW, the property had been slated for a state-of-the-art adaptive reuse as a boutique hotel which would have preserved the building’s façade and windows. In North Sydney, a locally heritage listed shopfront at 187 Miller Street, one of the few examples of the Victorian Italianate style remaining on the street, faces a similar fate. Image 2. Druids House, 302 Pitt Street Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.Beyond the bureaucratic accounting of the numbers and locations of demolitions outlined in the NSW Government’s EISS, this survey of disappearing structures highlights to what extent, large-scale transport infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro, can reshape what the Situationists termed the “psychogeography” of a city; the critical manner in which places and environments affect our emotions and behaviour. With their tendency to erase traces of the city’s past and to smooth over its textures, those variegations in the urban fabric that emerge from the interrelationship of the built environment with the lived experience of a space, the changes wrought by infrastructure and development thus manifest a certain anguish of urban dynamism that is connected to broader anxieties over modernity’s “speed of change and the ever-changing horizons of time and space” (Huyssen 23). Indeed, just as startling as the disappearance of older and more idiosyncratic structures is the demolition of newer building stock which, in the case of Sydney Metro, includes the slated demolition of a well-maintained 22-storey commercial office tower at 39 Martin Place (Image 3). Completed in just 1972, the fact that the lifespan of this tower will amount to less than fifty years points to the rapid obsolescence, and sheer disposability, of commercial building stock in the twenty first-century. It is also indicative of the drive towards destruction that operates within the project of modernism itself. Pondering the relationship of modernist architecture to time, Guiliana Bruno asks: can we really speak of a modernist ruin? Unlike the porous, permeable stone of ancient building, the material of modernism does not ‘ruin.’ Concrete does not decay. It does not slowly erode and corrode, fade out or fade away. It cannot monumentally disintegrate. In some way, modernist architecture does not absorb the passing of time. Adverse to deterioration, it does not age easily, gracefully or elegantly. (80)In its resistance to organic ruination, Bruno’s comment thus implies it is demolition that will be the fate of the large majority of the urban building stock of the twentieth century and beyond. In this way, Sydney Metro is symptomatic of far broader cycles of replenishment and renewal at play in cities around the world, bringing to the fore timely questions about demolition and modernity, the conflict between economic development and the civic good, and social justice concerns over the public’s right to the city. Image 3: 39 Martin Place Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.In the second part of this article, I turn to literary treatments of demolition in order to consider what role the writer might play in giving expression to some of the conflicts and tensions, as exemplified by Sydney Metro, that manifest in ‘unbuilding’ the city. How might literature, I ask, be uniquely placed to mobilise critique? And to what extent does the writer—as both a detached observer and engaged participant in the city—occupy an ambivalent stance especially sensitive to the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the built environment’s relationship to modernity?Iain Sinclair: Calling Time on the Grand Projects For more than two decades, British author Iain Sinclair has been mapping the shifting terrain of London and its edgelands across a spectrum of experimental fiction and non-fiction works. In addition to the thematic attention paid to neoliberal capitalist processes of urban renewal and their tendency to implode established ties between place, memory and identity, Sinclair’s hybrid documentary-novels are especially pertinent to the analysis of “writing demolition” for their distinct writerly approach. Two recent texts, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011) and London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), highlight an intensification of interest on Sinclair’s part in the growing influence exerted by global finance, hyper consumerism and security fears on the reterritorialisation of the English capital. Written in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, Ghost Milk is Sinclair’s scathing indictment of the corporate greed that fuelled the large-scale redevelopment of Stratford and its surrounds ahead of the Games. It is an angry and vocal response to urban transformation, a sustained polemic intensified by the author’s local perspective. A long-term resident of East London, in the 1970s Sinclair worked as a labourer at Chobham Farm and thus feels a personal assault in how Stratford “abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer generated Olympic parks” (28). For Sinclair, the bulldozing of the Stratford and Hackney boroughs was performed in the name of a so-called civic legacy beyond the Olympic spectacle that failed to culminate in anything more than a “long march towards a theme park without a theme” (11), a site emblematic of the bland shopping mall architecture of what Sinclair derisorily terms “the GP [Grand Project] era” (125).As a literary treatment of demolition Ghost Milk is particularly concerned with the compromised role of language in urban planning rhetoric. The redevelopment required for the Olympics is backed by a “fraudulent narrative” (99), says Sinclair, a conspiratorial co-optation of language made to bend in the service of urban gentrification. “In many ways,” he writes, “the essential literature of the GP era is the proposal, the bullet-point pitch, the perversion of natural language into weasel forms of not-saying” (125). This impoverishment and simplification of language, Sinclair argues, weakens the critical thinking required to recognise the propagandising tendencies underlying so many urban renewal programs.The author’s vocal admonishment of the London Olympics did not go unnoticed. In 2008 a reading from his forthcoming book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), at a local library was cancelled out of fear of providing a public platform for his negative views. In Ghost Milk Sinclair reflects upon the treatment of his not yet published docu-novel as “found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics” (115). Confronted with the type of large-scale change that underpins such projects as the Olympic Games, or the Sydney Metro closer to home, Sinclair’s predicament points to the ambiguous position of influence occupied by writers. On the one hand, influence is limited in so far as authors play no formal part in the political process. Yet, when outspoken critique resonates words can become suddenly powerful, radically undermining the authority of slick environmental impact statements and sanctioned public consultation findings. In a more poetic sense, Sinclair’s texts are further influential for the way in which they offer a subjective mythologising of the city as a counterpoint to the banal narratives of bureaucratised urbanism. This is especially apparent in London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), in which Sinclair recounts a single-day street-level pedestrian exploration of the 35-mile and 33-station circuit of the new London Overground railway line. Surveying with disapproval the “new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops” (20) that have sprung up along the route of the elevated railway, the initial gambit of the text appears to be to critique the London Overground as a “device for boosting property values” (23). Rail zone as “generator for investment” (31), and driver of the political emasculation of suburbs like Hackney and Shoreditch. Yet as the text develops the narrator appears increasingly drawn to the curious manner in which the Overground line performs an “accidental re-mapping of London” (24). He drifts, then, in search of: a site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything. (London Overground 127)Summoning the oneiric qualities of the railway and its inclination to dreaming and reverie, Sinclair reimagines it as divine oracle, a “ladder of initiation” (47) bisecting resonant zones animated by traces of the visionary artists and novelists whose sensitivity to place have shaped the perception of the London boroughs in the urban imaginary. It is in this manner that Sinclair’s walks generate “an oppositional perspective against the grand projects of centralized planning and management of space” (Weston 261). In a kind of poetic re-enchantment of urban space, texts like Ghost Milk and London Overground shatter the thin veneer of present-day capitalist urbanism challenging the reader to conceive of alternative visions of the city as heterogeneous and imbued with deep historical time.Louis Aragon: Demolition and ModernityWhile London Overground was composed after the construction of the new railway circuit, the pre-demolition phase of a project is, by comparison, a threshold moment. Literary responses to impending demolition are thus shaped in an unstable context as the landscape of a city becomes subject to unpredictable changes that can unfold at a very swift pace. Declan Tan suggests that the writing of Ghost Milk in the lead up to the London Olympics marks Sinclair’s disapproval as “futile, Ghost Milk is knowingly written as a documentary of near-history, an archival treatment of 2012 now, before it happens.” Yet, paradoxically it is the very futility of Sinclair’s project that intensifies the urgency to record, sharpening his polemic. This notion of writing a “documentary of near-history” also suggests a certain breach in time, which in the case of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant is mined for its revolutionary energies.First published in book form in 1926, Paris Peasant is an experimental Surrealist novel comprising four collage-like fragments including Aragon’s famous panegyric on the Passage de l’Opéra, a nineteenth-century Parisian arcade slated for demolition to make way for a new access road to the Boulevard Haussmann. Reading the text in the present era of Sydney Metro works, the predicament of the disappearing Opera Arcade resonates with the fate of the threatened Art Deco tower at 7 Elizabeth Street, soon to be razed to build a new metro station. Critical of the media’s overall neglect of the redevelopment, Aragon’s text pays sympathetic attention to the plight of the arcade’s business owners, railing against the injustices of their imminent eviction whilst mourning the disappearance of one of the last vestiges of the more organic configuration of the city that preceded the Haussmann renovation of Paris:the great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. (Aragon 14)In light of these concerns it is tempting to cast Paris Peasant as a classic anti-development polemic. However, closer interrogation of the narrator’s ambivalent stance points to a more complicated attitude towards urban renewal. For, as he casts a forensic eye across the arcade’s shops it becomes apparent that these threatened sites hold a certain lure of attraction for the Surrealist author. The explanatory genre of the guide-book is subverted in a highly imaginative inventory of the arcade interiors. Touring its baths, brothels and hair salon, shoe shine parlour, run-down theatre, and the Café Certa—meeting place of the Surrealists—the narrator’s perambulation provides a launching point for intoxicated reveries and effervescent flights of fancy. Finally, the narrator concedes: “I would never have thought of myself as an observer. I like to let the winds and the rain blow through me: chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment” (88). Neither a journalist nor an historian, Paris Peasant’s narrator is not concerned merely to document the Opera Arcade for posterity. Rather, his interest in the site resides in its liminal state. On the cusp of being transformed into something else, the ontological instability of the arcade provides a dramatic illustration of the myth of architecture’s permanency. Aragon’s novel is concerned then, Abigail Susik notes, with the “insatiable momentum of progress,” and how it “renders all the more visible what could be called the radical remainders of modernity: the recently ruined, lately depleted, presently-passé entities that, for better and for worse, multiply and accumulate in the wake of accelerated production and consumption in industrial society” (34). Drawing comparison with Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic critique of commodity culture, Paris Vaclav similarly characterises Paris Peasant as manifesting a distinct form of “political affect: one of melancholy for the destruction of the arcades yet also of a decidedly non-conservative devotion to aesthetic innovation” (24).Sensitive to the contradictory nature of progress under late capitalist modernity, Paris Peasant thus recognises destruction as an underlying condition of change and innovation as was typical of avant-garde texts of the early twentieth century. Yet Aragon resists fatalism in his simultaneous alertness to the radical potential of the marvellous in the everyday, searching for the fault lines in ordinary reality beneath which poetic re-enchantment challenges the status quo of modern life. In this way, Aragon’s experimental novel sketches the textures and psychogeographies of the city, tracing its detours and shifts in ambience, the relationship of architecture to dreams, memory and fantasy; those composite layers of a city that official documents and masterplans rarely ascribe value to and which literary authors are uniquely placed to capture in their writings on cities. ConclusionUnable to respond within the swift publication timeframes of journalistic articles, the novelist is admittedly not well-placed to halt the demolition of buildings. In this article, I have sought to argue that the power and agency of the literary response resides, rather, in its long view and the subjective perspective of the author. At the time of writing, Sydney Metro is poised to involve a scale of demolition that has not been seen in Sydney for several decades and which will transform the city in a manner that, to date, has largely passed uncritiqued. The works of Iain Sinclair and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant point to the capacity of literary texts to deconstruct those broader forces that increasingly reshape the city without proper consideration; exposing the seductive ideology of urban renewal and the false promises of grand projects that transform multifaceted cityscapes into homogenous non-places. The literary text thus makes visible what is easily missed in the experience of everyday life, forcing us to consider the losses that haunt every gain in the building and rebuilding of the city.ReferencesAragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Taylor Watson. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Aston, Heath. “We’ll Govern for All.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Mar. 2011. 23 Feb. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/state-election-2011/well-govern-for-all-20110326-1cbbf.html>. Bruno, Guiliana. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” Ruins. Ed. Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 76-81.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Museum of Sydney. Demolished Sydney Media Release. Sydney: Sydney Living Museums 20 Oct. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/2016/12/05/new-exhibition-demolished-sydney>.Paris, Vaclav. “Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Autumn 2013): 21-39.Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.———. London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.Susik, Abigail. “Paris 1924: Aragon, Le Corbusier, and the Question of the Outmoded.” Wreck: Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2.2 (2008): 29-44.Tan, Declan. “Review of Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.” Huffington Post 15 Dec. 2011; updated 14 Feb. 2012. 21 Feb 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/declan-tan/ghost-milk-ian-sinclair-review_b_1145692.html>. Transport for NSW, Chatswood to Sydenham: Environmental Impact Statement Summary. 25 Mar. 2017 <http://www.sydneymetro.info>. Sydney: NSW Government, May-June 2016.Weston, David. “Against the Grand Project: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (Summer 2015): 255-79.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

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>.