Journal articles on the topic 'Pathologists – Fiction'

The review reveals the content and the directions of the non-fiction book written by a professor Basilova; this book is written about the history of teaching deaf-blind children in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and modern Russia. The problems of scientific and methodological supporting the deafblind children are described through the prism of a working career of the three famous domestic speech pathologists and psychologists: Ivan Sokoliansky, Augusta Yarmolenko and Alexander Meshcheryakov.

The forensic thriller has emerged as a significant subgenre of crime fiction that depicts the work of medical examiners, coroners, forensic pathologists, and anthropologists who analyze scientific evidence. Forensic investigators do not engage directly in pursuing the criminal; instead, they interpret the physical evidence collected from the victim's body and the crime scene. The popularity of forensic fiction, film, and TV series has created the general assumption that criminalistics has become a routine police procedure. This article presents Karin Slaughter's novel Blindsighted as an example of the Southern forensic thriller. The American writer Karin Slaughter is the author of crime stories and thrillers set in the American South. Her Grant County series consists of six crime novels, beginning with Blindsighted and followed by Kisscut, A Faint Cold Fear, Indelible, Faithless, and Beyond Reach. The essay introduces the main qualities of a forensic thriller and highlights the novel's generic characteristics. Then, Blindsighted is analyzed within the paradigm of Southern regional literature, with its distinctive qualities and religious imagery.

Purpose To date, few studies have examined school-based pediatric feeding and swallowing practices across the United States. This study aims to (a) identify barriers to feeding and swallowing service provision in an educational setting and (b) identify the types of service suggested by school-based speech-language pathologists in response to a fictional case study. Method School-based speech-language pathologists and clinical fellows were invited to participate in a 15-min web-based survey. The survey questions addressed demographic and vocational information and perceived barriers to service provision. Survey respondents were also asked to develop a treatment plan in response to a fictional case study. In total, 200 anonymous survey responses were coded and analyzed using qualitative analysis methods. Results A number of barriers to practice were identified, which include academic and/or clinical preparedness and concerns related to the educational relevance of service. Analysis of the case study results indicated a wide range of treatment plans. The most common type of direct intervention suggested was an oral motor exercise regime, followed by diet modifications, and the implementation of safe swallow strategies. Conclusions Information gained in this study may be used to support policies and protocols related to the assessment and treatment of pediatric feeding and swallowing impairment in school settings.

Narrative assessment is a valid means for evaluating social pragmatic skills in high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) typically analyze fictional narratives because of their strong association with school success. A review of literature suggests that high-functioning individuals with ASD have more difficulties telling personal narratives than fictional narrative. Because problems telling personal narratives may negatively impact social relationships, we suggest evaluating personal narratives to aide intervention planning. We review the elicitation and analysis procedure for personal narratives described in McCabe & Rollins (1994) and make suggestions for intervention.

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the relationship between geography, epistemology, and genre in Nii Ayikwei Parkes's Tail of the Blue Bird (2009). More specifically, I will be discussing the perspectival modulation that both the novel and its protagonist undergo as a consequence of a simple journey into the Ghanaian provinces. Kayo Odamtten, a forensic pathologist, has been sent to investigate a suspected murder in the remote village of Sonokrom. Although he relies on standard forensic procedures when he first arrives in the village, Kayo is eventually forced to utilize other perspectives, other epistemologies, in order to solve the mystery. And as we shall see, this reorientation of the story also influences the novel at the level of discourse and genre, transforming a conventional work of detective fiction into something else altogether—something far more equivocal and difficult to categorize.

Purpose Speech-language pathologists know much more about children's development of fictional narratives than they do about children's development of personal narratives and the role these personal narratives play in academic success, social–emotional development, and self-regulation. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide clinicians with strategies for assessing and developing children's and adolescents' personal narratives. Method This tutorial reviews the literature on (a) the development of autobiographical event narratives and life stories, (b) factors that contribute to development of these genres, (c) the importance of these genres for the development of sense of self-identity and self-regulation, (d) deficits in personal narrative genres, and (e) strategies for eliciting and assessing event narratives and life stories. Implications To promote development of personal event narratives and life stories, speech-language pathologists can help clients retrieve information about interesting events, provide experiences worthy of narrating, and draw upon published narratives to serve as model texts. Clinicians can also address four interrelated processes in intervention: reminiscing, reflecting, making coherent connections, and signaling the plot structure. Furthermore, they can activate metacognitive awareness of how evaluations of experiences, coherence, and plot structure are signaled in well-formed personal event narratives and life stories.

Patients with respiratory distress present a frequent and challenging dilemma for emergency physicians (EPs). The accurate diagnosis and treatment of the underlying pathology is vitally important in these sick patients to ensure the best outcome and minimise harm from unnecessary treatments. Within the last decade, studies have shown lung ultrasonography (LU) to be valuable in the accurate diagnosis of a variety of lung pathologies, including cardiogenic pulmonary oedema, pleural effusion, pneumothorax, haemothorax and pneumonia. However, despite advances in techniques and the evidence for the use of LU in the diagnosis of respiratory pathology, it remains poorly understood and rarely used by EPs. This clinical review article provides an overview of LU and its relevance as a diagnostic aid to the detection of respiratory pathology in the Emergency Department (ED).

This article provides an introduction to this special section of James Baldwin Review 7 devoted to Baldwin and film. Jackson considers Baldwin’s distinct approach to film criticism by pairing him with James Agee, another writer who wrote fiction as well as nonfiction in several genres, and who produced a large body of film criticism, especially during the 1940s. While Agee, a white southerner born almost a generation before Baldwin, might seem an unlikely figure to place alongside Baldwin, the two shared a great deal in terms of temperament and vision, and their film writings reveal a great deal of consensus in their diagnoses of American pathologies. Another important context for Baldwin’s complex relationship to film is television, which became a dominant media form during the 1950s and exerted a great influence upon both the mainstream reception of the civil rights movement and Baldwin’s reception as a public intellectual from the early 1960s to the end of his life. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses the articles that constitute this special section.

This fictional piece draws on the author's experience as a juror and the experience of other colleagues who have served as jurors. Although this story is fairly critical of the jury process, this is not to imply that all jury processes are flawed. However, as a teacher and student of organizational behavior and an OD practitioner, the author is particularly conscious of group dynamics. In the juries that he has participated in and interviewed other colleagues about, it became clear that some jurors' decisions were influenced by pathologies that these jurors brought with them into the courtroom.

Abstract This article analyzes different pathologies of social affirmation and examines the grounds of social recognition from the point of view of the concept of expression. The red thread of the text is provided by Tove Jansson’s fictional works, and the focus will be on three cases in particular (the magic hat, the invisible girl and the figure of the Groke). The article sets out from the phenomenological distinction between the sensible expression, on the one hand, and the expressed content, on the other. By focusing on the three cases, the article distinguishes and analyses the fundamental structures of communal life and explicates different ways in which social affirmation can be one-sided or distorted.

In recent years, the interstitial cells telocytes, formerly known as interstitial Cajal-like cells, have been described in almost all organs of the human body. Although telocytes were previously thought to be localized predominantly in the organs of the digestive system, as of 2018 they have also been described in the lymphoid tissue, skin, respiratory system, urinary system, meninges and the organs of the male and female genital tracts. Since the time of eminent German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, we have known that many pathological processes originate directly from cellular changes. Even though telocytes are not widely accepted by all scientists as an individual and morphologically and functionally distinct cell population, several articles regarding telocytes have already been published in such prestigious journals as Nature and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The telocyte diversity extends beyond their morphology and functions, as they have a potential role in the etiopathogenesis of different diseases. The most commonly described telocyte-associated diseases (which may be best termed “telocytopathies” in the future) are summarized in this critical review. It is difficult to imagine that a single cell population could be involved in the pathogenesis of such a wide spectrum of pathological conditions as extragastrointestinal stromal tumors (“telocytomas”), liver fibrosis, preeclampsia during pregnancy, tubal infertility, heart failure and psoriasis. In any case, future functional studies of telocytes in vivo will help to understand the mechanism by which telocytes contribute to tissue homeostasis in health and disease.

Capsule endoscopy (CE) has improved the diagnosis and treatment of the small bowel providing a non-invasive, well tolerated method of as it should be visualizing the upper and lower gastrointestinal tract. The development of Medical Capsule Robots, which has emerged from the science fiction idea of robots touring within the body to diagnose and cure issues. The first ever introduced capsule robot was a pill or capsule endoscope evolved to seize pics of the gastrointestinal tract. Today, varieties of capsule endoscopes are available and are expected to hit the market soon. They are barely large than ordinary oral dosage forms such as tablets or capsules, made of a biocompatible case and have digital circuitry and mechanisms to seize and transmit images.15 years ago, capsule endoscopy (CE) has turn out to be the primary-line investigation system in some small bowel pathologies and scientific practices. The first marketed capsule robotic was a capsule endoscope in general evolved to seize only the pictures of the gastrointestinal tract however Later, these have been advanced to be used as a device to construct micron and sub-micron sized drug shipping structures for target shipping and treatment.Technology is swiftly progressing, assisting in the broadening and improving the benefits and applications of capsule endoscopy.

The article focuses on American fiction and detective thrillers where the writer and his double feature as central characters. Such a combination has not previously received special attention. The divided mind provides a wide range of possibilities for fascination and exploring the fundamental fears of fragmentation and potential destruction of the Self. In Stephen King’s novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (1990), crime, duplicity, madness and dissociative amnesia are integrated into the story of the writer's block. The present article, among other things, analyzes the adaptation of the novella — David Koepp’s Secret Window, 2004. Besides, it highlights the changes that the script underwent. Koepp came up with his own ending that was radically different from the Epilogue of King's story. Alongside with madness proper, King's horror and Koepp's film deconstruct the writer’s block as the result of unresolved traumas and the cause of a whole bunch of pathologies, as well as the fear of breakdown. The novella and its screen version are, in fact, phenomenological studies of mental disorders. A close comparative analysis shows that the film offers a rare example of the superiority of adaptation over the original. A particular attention in the article is paid to the imagery of ears of corn in the film, functioning both as a cannibalistic grotesque and as a visual metaphor of success.

ABSTRACT The association between memory loss and Hodgkin's lymphoma has been given the eponym of Ophelia syndrome, in memory of Shakespeare's character in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Nevertheless, there are differences between the disease and the character. Objective: To review the origins and uses of the eponym through an original article by pathologist Ian Carr, its relation to the character Ophelia, and the related autoantibodies. Methods: Historical narrative review. Results: Besides an eloquent description in the original article, Carr presaged the presence of autoantibodies, before they had been thoroughly researched. Since then, five different autoantibodies (mGluR5, Hu, NMDAR, SOX, PCA2) have been associated with Hodgkin's disease. It is interesting to note the divergent outcomes of Shakespeare's character and the patient in the original description by Carr, the latter recovering to lead a normal life, and the former deceased. Conclusions: Although there is little relationship between the fictional character and the syndrome, both imply the unintentional trigger of self-harm (suicide in one case, autoimmunity in the other), thus remaining associated.

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Common currency of the member states of Comecon came into existence in 1964, 15 years after the organization itself was created. Transfer ruble had a parity in gold (0,987412 g), but still in essence was just a unit of account. Its character was fundamentally different than that of similar currencies of capitalist states. Transfer ruble did not have basic monetary functions, such as measuring worth, paying for expenses, or accumulating value. It was not exchangeable to gold or any other currency, and the official rate of exchange wasn’t real. The transfer ruble was closely linked to planned mutual exchange of Comecon states. Multilateral clearing between Comecon states, proposed together with introduction of the transfer ruble, never came into existence. Transfer ruble, although a fictional creation, had a real impact on trade relations between Soviet bloc countries. The existence of transfer ruble resulted in different pathologies in trade relations, hindered integration and influenced growing internal and external imbalance of Comecon states.

This article critically examines how human life today is faced with issues of dishonesty and deception. Using the concept of post-truth in analyzing and understanding the context of change in a global society under neo-liberalism, it focuses on the way powerful people, groups, political parties, and media now take recourse to strategies such as falsification, manipulation, or deception to influence and control the human mind. Those involved in doing this use nostalgic narratives, idealize a fictional past and generate conspiracy theories to create false consciousness and thereby colonize the life world. Such colonization not only promotes social pathologies but also limits the democratic, secular, and plural spirits of multicultural nations like India. The article ends by arguing that there are limits to such politics and the best alternative to the conundrum is the assertion of human subjectivity and agency, and alternative media can play a major role in this endeavor.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine whether a free, video-based simulation activity implemented in a first-year graduate speech-language pathology class would improve students' confidence with assessment and treatment of persons with aphasia across health care settings. Method Assessment of a fictional patient with aphasia was presented for four settings: acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, home health, and outpatient rehabilitation in video format. Goals were written collaboratively, and therapy techniques were practiced in small groups with direction from clinical instructors. Pre- and posttests assessed change in students' confidence with assessment and treatment of patients with aphasia across health care settings. Students also listed the factors a speech-language pathologist should consider that would impact a patient's functional rehabilitation in any health care setting. Results Students' confidence improved from pre to post for each clinical skill and health care setting presented in the simulation activity. The simulation activity did not, however, affect the speech-language pathology students' ability to identify factors that would impact a patient's functional rehabilitation across health care settings, such as patient motivation and comorbidities. Conclusion Overall, the results suggest that a free, accessible video-based simulation can be used to facilitate student learning, when challenges such as cost and accessibility limit the use and implementation of simulation and standardized patient experiences in university settings.

PurposeSmart governance ultimately relates to the ability of political administrations to elicit trust and public confidence. Political administrations normally generate rational policies that arise from their context-sensitive goals. The capability of an administration to develop and implement policies is measured as efficacy, which can influence the value and stability of an administration. However, policy development and implementation is not only an attribute of a political administration but also of its bureaucracy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of bureaucracies, representing them as complex and dynamic.Design/methodology/approachA traditional blueprint model of a bureaucracy comes from Weber, seen to be a servicing body for the implementation of political policy decisions resulting from a process of governance. An alternative model arises from the fictional works of Kafka, which is underpinned by a firm conceptual basis of a bureaucracy that confronts that of Weber. Agency theory will be used to model bureaucracies, and comparisons will be made between the Weber and Kafka conceptualisation.FindingsThere are broad models of a bureaucracy that arise from different propositions such as a Weber and a Kafka model, the latter being more representative of administrations. Any attempts to measure comparative efficacy across political systems or administrations may well lead to failure due to the distinctions in the nature of the bureaucracies that they maintain. The paper argues that the Weber model is an unattainable boundary representation of a bureaucracy. In contrast, Kafka’s more pragmatic conceptualisation can be modelled as a pathological autonomous system that is both complex and adaptive. Such pathologies can be harmful to the implementation of socially improving policies.Practical implicationsThe paper shows that even where a political administration has policy initiatives that can improve society, these can be corrupted and misdirected by its bureaucracy, mistakenly believed (by the administration) to be dedicated to the service of the administration, rather than the bureaucracy’s own self-interests.Originality/valueNo other approach has been able to graphically represent the relative natures of different bureaucracies, or their pathologies.

The essential psychological properties of any activity lie in its motivation in particular in those purposes that lead the subject to it as a means of achieving them. Various positively colored emotional experiences awaken in the subject in the process of playing (games), such as the joy of excitement, elation, and so on create a basis of its motivation. Acquisition and use of material goods and / or social benefits have never been the motives of a game as such; it does not belong to the future or the past, but only to the present moment - to its own course here and now. However, such a motivational basis is inherent not only to a game, but also to some other activities. The so-called game tools, used by other activities, are clearly divided into two types: 1) educational and developmental (training, business, role, etc.); 2) psychotherapeutic. The subject seeking to use these tools effectively should be dominated by motivation matching their purpose. Thus, the former "belong to the future" in the sense that their basis is purpose, not some game result, but developmental, correctional and therapeutic result etc.; and the latter belong to the past, as they are to help their participants to get rid of the past pathologies effects. Therefore, according to the criterion of motivation, these "game" tools are not actually games. Differntia specific of playing/game is the creation of purely imaginary playing situations. It is this property that is the predicate-discursive basis of the term "game" denotation. The rest of its meanings are connotations and other similarities and associations, in particular superficial ones that create definitive relativism in the semantic field of playing/game theory. Among the necessary conditions and essential components of games/fictional playing situations, "fakes", pretense, etc., there are rules that ensure the functioning of a game; deviations and rule-breaking spoil and devalue the game. The subject accepts the restrictions on his freedom by the rules of the game willingly and follows them gladly, because restrictions of the game are conditions created to achieve "courage", and the subject tests their mental and physical abilities (intelligence, agility) etc. and proves them to themselves and others. This means that in the process of the game the vital forces, energies, resources of the subject "play", and they are the source of admiration, comfort, and pride, especially if the game impresses important to them individuals and groups of people with skills, beauty, and delight. Thus, the game (playing) is the creation of purely imaginary playing situations with mandatory rules of conduct, where players can test and demonstrate their mental and / or physical abilities, inclinations, strengths, and which provides enthusiasm, inspiration, strength, joy, pleasure, etc. (it allow to " play " their vital forces), and therefore participants willingly play those games that bring them such experiences.

Over the last two decades the female forensic pathologist investigator has become a prominent figure in crime fiction. Her presence causes suspicion on a number of levels in the narrative and this article will examine the reasons for that suspicion and the manner in which it is presented in two texts: Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem and Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner. Cornwell and Gerritsen are North American crime writers whose series of novels both feature female forensic pathologists who are deeply involved in homicide investigation. Cornwell’s protagonist is Dr Kay Scarpetta, then-Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Gerritsen’s is Dr Maura Isles, a forensic pathologist in the Boston Medical Examiner’s office. Their jobs entail attending crime scenes to assess bodies in situ, performing examinations and autopsies, and working with police to solve the cases.In this article I will first examine Western cultural attitudes towards dissection and autopsy since the twelfth century before discussing how the most recent of these provoke suspicion in the selected novels. I will further analyse this by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. I will then consider how female pathologist protagonists try to deflect their colleagues’ suspicion of their professional choices, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as a performative category. I define ‘gender’ as the socially constructed roles, activities, attributes, and behaviours that Western culture considers appropriate for women and men, and ‘sex’ as the physical biological characteristics that differentiate women and men. I argue that the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed as suspicious in the chosen novels for her occupation of the abject space caused by her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist, her identification with the dead, and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles. Scholars such as Barthes, Rolls, and Grauby have approached detective fiction by focusing on intertextuality, the openness of the text, and the possibility of different meanings, with Vargas being one example of how this can operate; however, this article focuses on examining how the female forensic pathologist investigator is represented as suspicious in mainstream crime novels that attract a readership seeking resolution and closure.A significant part of each of these novels focuses on the corpse and its injuries as the site at which the search for truth commences, and I argue that the corpse itself, those who work most closely with it and the procedures they employ in this search are all treated with suspicion in the crime fiction in this study. The central procedures of autopsy and dissection have historically been seen as abominations, in some part due to religious views such as the belief of Christians prior to the thirteenth century that the resurrection of the soul required an intact body (Klaver 10) and the Jewish and Muslim edicts against disfigurement of the dead (Davis and Peterson 1042). In later centuries dissection was made part of the death sentence and was perceived “as an abhorrent additional post-mortem punishment” that “promised the exposure of nakedness, dismemberment, and the deliberate destruction of the corpse,” which was considered “a gross assault on the integrity and the identity of the body, and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson 154). While now a mainstay of many popular crime narratives, the autopsy as a procedure in real life continues to appall much of the public (Klaver 18). This is because “the human body—especially the dead human body—is an object still surrounded by taboos and prohibitions” (Sawday 269). The living are also reluctant to “yield the subjecthood of the other-dead to object status” (Klaver 18), which often produces a horrified response from some families to doctors seeking permission to dissect for autopsy. According to Gawande, when doctors suggest an autopsy the victim’s family commonly asks “Hasn’t she been through enough?” (187). The forensic pathologists who perform the autopsy are themselves linked with the repugnance of the act (Klaver 9), and in these novels that fact combined with the characters’ willingness to be in close proximity with the corpse and their comfort with dissecting it produces considerable suspicion on the part of their police colleagues.The female sex of the pathologists in these novels causes additional suspicion. This is primarily because women are “culturally associated [...] with life and life giving” (Vanacker 66). While historically women were also involved in the care of the sick and the dead (Nunn and Biressi 200), the growth of medical knowledge and the subsequent medicalisation of death in Western culture over the past two centuries has seen women relegated to a stylised kind of “angelic ministry” (Nunn and Biressi 201). This is an image inconsistent with these female characters’ performance of what is perceived as a “violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment” (Sawday 1). Drawing on Butler’s ideas about gender as a culturally constructed performance, we can see that while these characters are biologically female, in carrying out tasks that are perceived as masculine they are not performing their traditional gender roles and are thus regarded with suspicion by their police colleagues. Both Scarpetta and Isles are aware of this, as illustrated by the interior monologue with which Gerritsen opens her novel:They called her the Queen of the Dead. Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she travelled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. [...] Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? (Gerritsen 6)The police officers’ inability to understand why Isles chooses to work with the dead leads them to wonder whether she takes pleasure in it, and because they cannot comprehend how a “normal” person could act that way she is immediately marked as a suspicious Other. Gerritsen’s language builds images of transgression: words such as murmured, wake, whispers, disquiet, unholy, death’s footsteps, cold, stench, and decay suggest a fearful attitude towards the dead and the abjection of the corpse itself, a topic I will explore shortly. Isles later describes seeing police officers cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck: The ivory skin, the black hair with its Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs. And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts. (Gerritsen 7) While the term “odd duck” suggests a somewhat quaintly affectionate tolerance, it is contrasted by the rest of the description: the red slash brings to mind blood and a gaping wound perhaps also suggestive of female genitalia; the calmness, the coolly regal gaze, and the verb “surveys” imply detachment; the willingness to move close to the corpse, to touch and even smell it, and later cut it open, emphasise the difference between the police officers, who can “barely stomach” the sight, and Isles who readily goes much further.Kristeva describes the abject as that which is not one thing or another (4). The corpse is recognisable as once-human, but is no-longer; the body was once Subject, but we cannot make ourselves perceive it yet as fully Object, and thus it is incomprehensible and abject. I suggest that the abject is suspicious because of this “neither-nor” nature: its liminal identity cannot be pinned down, its meaning cannot be determined, and therefore it cannot be trusted. In the abject corpse, “that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight [...] that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything” (Kristeva 4), we see the loss of borders between ourselves and the Other, and we are simultaneously “drawn to and repelled” by it; “nausea is a biological recognition of it, and fear and adrenalin also acknowledge its presence” (Pentony). In these novels the police officers’ recognition of these feelings in themselves emphasises their assumptions about the apparent lack of the same responses in the female pathologist investigators. In the quote from The Sinner above, for example, the officers are unnerved by Isles’ calmness around the thing they can barely face. In Postmortem, the security guard who works for the morgue hides behind his desk when a body is delivered (17) and refuses to enter the body storage area when requested to do so (26) in contrast with Scarpetta’s ease with the corpses.Abjection results from “that which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4), and by having what appears to be an unnatural reaction to the corpse, these women are perceived as failing to respect systems and boundaries and therefore are viewed as abject themselves. At the same time, however, the female characters strive against the abject in their efforts to repair the disturbance caused by the corpse and the crime of murder that produced it by locating evidence leading to the apprehension of the culprit. Ever-present and undermining these attempts to restore order is the evidence of the crime itself, the corpse, which is abject not only for its “neither-nor” status but also because it exposes “the fragility of the law” (Kristeva 4). In addition, these female pathologist characters’ sex causes abjection in another form through their “liminal status” as outsiders in the male hierarchy of law enforcement (Nunn and Biressi 203); while they are employed by it and work to maintain its dominance over law-breakers and society in general, as biological females they can never truly belong.Abjection also results from the blurring of boundaries between investigator and victim. Such blurring is common in crime fiction, and while it is most likely to develop between criminal and investigator when the investigator is male, when that investigator is female it tends instead to involve the victim (Mizejewski 8). In these novels this is illustrated by the ways in which the female investigators see themselves as similar to the victims by reason of gender plus sensibility and/or work. The first victim in Cornwell’s Postmortem is a young female doctor, and reminders of her similarities to Scarpetta appear throughout the novel, such as when Scarpetta notices the pile of medical journals near the victim's bed (Cornwell 12), and when she considers the importance of the woman's fingers in her work as a surgeon (26). When another character suggests to Scarpetta that, “in a sense, you were her once,” Scarpetta agrees (218). This loss of boundaries between self and not-self can be considered another form of abjection because the status and roles of investigator and victim become unclear, and it also results in an emotional bond, with both Scarpetta and Isles becoming sensitive to what lies in wait for the bodies. This awareness, and the frisson it creates, is in stark contrast to their previous equanimity. For example, when preparing for an autopsy on the body of a nun, Isles finds herself fighting extreme reluctance, knowing that “this was a woman who had chosen to live hidden from the eyes of men; now she would be cruelly revealed, her body probed, her orifices swabbed. The prospect of such an invasion brought a bitter taste to [Isles’s] throat and she paused to regain her composure” (Gerritsen 57). The language highlights the penetrative nature of Isles’s contact with the corpse through words such as revealed, orifices, probed, and invasion, which all suggest unwanted interference, the violence inherent in the dissecting procedures of autopsy, and the masculine nature of the task even when performed by a female pathologist. This in turn adds to the problematic issue here of gender as performance, a subject I will discuss shortly.In a further blurring of those boundaries, the female characters are often perceived as potential victims by both themselves and others. Critic Lee Horsley describes Scarpetta as “increasingly giv[ing] way to a tendency to see herself in the place of the victim, her interior self exposed and open to inspection by hostile eyes” (154). This is demonstrated in the novel when plot developments see Scarpetta’s work scrutinised (Cornwell 105), when she feels she does not belong to the same world as the living people around her (133), and when she almost becomes a victim in a literal sense at the climax of the novel, when the perpetrator breaks into her home to torture and kill her but is stopped by the timely arrival of a police officer (281).Similarly, Gerritsen’s character Isles comes to see herself as a possible victim in The Sinner. When it is feared that the criminal is watching the Boston police and Isles realises he may be watching her too, she thinks about how “she was accustomed to being in the eye of the media, but now she considered the other eyes that might be watching her. Tracking her. And she remembered what she had felt in the darkness at [a previous crime scene]: the prey’s cold sense of dread when it suddenly realises it is being stalked” (Gerritsen 222). She too almost becomes a literal victim when the criminal enters her home with intent to kill (323).As investigators, these characters’ sex causes suspicion because they are “transgressive female bod[ies] occupying the spaces traditionally held by a man” (Mizejewski 6). The investigator in crime fiction has “traditionally been represented as a marginalized outsider” (Mizejewski 11), a person who not only needs to think like the criminal in order to apprehend them but be willing to use violence or to step outside the law in their pursuit of this goal, and is regarded as suspicious as a result. To place a woman in this position then makes that investigator’s role doubly suspicious (Mizejewski 11). Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance provides a useful tool for examining this. Because “the various acts of gender create the gender itself” (Butler 522), these female characters are judged as woman or not-woman according to what they do. By working as investigators in the male-dominated field of law-enforcement and particularly by choosing to spend their days handling the dead in ways that involve the masculine actions of penetrating and dismembering, each has “radically crossed the limits of her gender role, with her choice of the most unsavoury and ‘unfeminine’ of professions” (Vanacker 65). The suspicion this attracts is demonstrated by Scarpetta being compared to her male predecessor who got on so well with the police, judges, and lawyers with whom she struggles (Cornwell 91). This sense of marginalisation and unfavourable comparison is reinforced through her recollections of her time in medical school when she was one of only four women in her class and can remember vividly the isolating tactics the male students employed against the female members (60). One critic has estimated the dates of Scarpetta’s schooling as putting her “on the leading edge of women moving into professionals schools in the early 1970s” (Robinson 97), in the time of second wave feminism, when such changes were not welcomed by all men in the institutions. In The Sinner, Isles wants her male colleagues to see her as “a brain and a white coat” (Gerritsen 175) rather than a woman, and chooses strategies such as maintaining an “icy professionalism” (109) and always wearing that white coat to ensure she is seen as an intimidating authority figure, as she believes that once they see her as a woman, sex will get in the way (175). She wants to be perceived as a professional with a job to do rather than a prospective sexual partner. The white coat also helps conceal the physical indicators of her sex, such as breasts and hips (mirroring the decision of the murdered nun to hide herself from the eyes of men and revealing their shared sensibility). Butler’s argument that “the distinction between appearance and reality [...] structures a good deal of populist thinking about gender identity” (527) is appropriate here, for Isles’s actions in trying to mask her sex and thus her gender declare to her colleagues that her sex is irrelevant to her role and therefore she can and should be treated as just another colleague performing a task.Scarpetta makes similar choices. Critic Bobbie Robinson says “Scarpetta triggers the typical distrust of powerful women in a male-oriented world, and in that world she seems determined to swaddle her lurking femininity to construct a persona that keeps her Other” (106), and that “because she perceives her femininity as problematic for others, she intentionally misaligns or masks the expectations of gender so that the masculine and feminine in her cancel each other out, constructing her as an androgyne” (98). Examples of this include Scarpetta’s acknowledgement of her own attractiveness (Cornwell 62) and her nurturing of herself and her niece Lucy through cooking, an activity she describes as “what I do best” (109) while at the same time she hides her emotions from her colleagues (204) and maintains that her work is her priority despite her mother’s accusations that “it’s not natural for a woman” (34). Butler states that “certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way” (527). Scarpetta’s attention to her looks and her enjoyment of cooking conform to a societal assumption of female gender identity, while her construction of an emotionless facade and focus on her work falls more in the area of expected male gender identity.These characters deliberately choose to perform in a specific manner as a way of coping and succeeding in their workplace: by masking the most overt signs of their sex and gender they are attempting to lessen the suspicion cast upon them by others for not being “woman.” There exists, however, a contradiction between that decision and the clear markers of femininity demonstrated on occasion by both characters, for example, the use by Isles of bright red lipstick and a smart Cleopatra haircut, and the performance by both of the “feminised role as caretaker of, or alignment with, the victim’s body” (Summers-Bremner 133). While the characters do also perform the more masculine role of “rendering [the body’s] secrets in scientific form” (Summers-Bremner 133), a strong focus of the novels is their emotional connection to the bodies and so this feminised role is foregrounded. The attention to lipstick and hairstyle and their overtly caring natures fulfill Butler’s ideas of the conventional performance of gender and may be a reassurance to readers about the characters’ core femininity and their resultant availability for romance sub-plots, however they also have the effect of emphasising the contrasting performative gender elements within these characters and marking them once again in the eyes of other characters as neither one thing nor another, and therefore deserving of suspicion.In conclusion, the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed in the chosen novels as suspicious for her involvement in the abject space that results from her comfort around and identification with the corpse in contrast to the revulsion experienced by her police colleagues; her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist where these roles are conventionally seen as masculine; and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles as she carries out her work. This, however, sets up a further line of inquiry about the central position of the abject in novels featuring female forensic pathologist investigators, as these texts depict this character’s occupation of the abject space as crucial to the solving of the case: it is through her ability to perform the procedures of her job while identifying with the corpse that clues are located, the narrative of events reconstructed, and the criminal identified and apprehended.ReferencesBarthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. 1975. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1988): 519–31. 5 October 2011 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893›Cornwell, Patricia. Postmortem. London: Warner Books, 1994. Davis, Gregory J. and Bradley R. Peterson. “Dilemmas and Solutions for the Pathologist and Clinician Encountering Religious Views of the Autopsy.” Southern Medical Journal. 89.11 (1996): 1041–44. Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. London: Profile Books, 2003.Gerritsen, Tess. The Sinner. Sydney: Random House, 2003. Grauby, Francois. “‘In the Noir’: The Blind Detective in Bridgette Aubert’s La mort des bois.” Mostly French: French (in) detective fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.Horsley, Lee. Twentieth Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Klaver, Elizabeth. Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture. Albany: State U of NYP, 2005.Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Mizejewski, Linda. “Illusive Evidence: Patricia Cornwell and the Body Double.” South Central Review. 18.3/4 (2001): 6–20. 19 March 2010. ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190350›Nunn, Heather and Anita Biressi. “Silent Witness: Detection, Femininity, and the Post Mortem Body.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.2 (2003): 193–206. 18 January 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1468077032000119317›Pentony, Samantha. “How Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Works in Relation to the Fairy Tale and Post Colonial Novel: Angela Carter’s The Blood Chamber and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Deep South. 2.3 (1996): n.p. 13 November 2011. ‹http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no3/pentony.html›Richardson, Ruth. “Human Dissection and Organ Donation: A Historical Background.” Mortality. 11.2 (2006): 151–65. 13 May 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576270600615351›Robinson, Bobbie. “Playing Like the Boys: Patricia Cornwell Writes Men.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 39.1 (2006): 95–108. 2 August 2010. ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00205.x/full›Rolls, Alistair. “An Uncertain Place: (Dis-)Locating the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction.” in Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.---. “What Does It Mean? Contemplating Rita and Desiring Dead Bodies in Two Short Stories by Raymond Carver.” Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. 18.2 (2008): 88-116. Sawday, Jonathon. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1996.Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Post-Traumatic Woundings: Sexual Anxiety in Patricia Cornwell’s Fiction.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. 43 (2001): 131–47. Vanacker, Sabine. “V.I Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto P, 1997. 62–87. Vargas, Fred. This Night’s Foul Work. Trans. Sian Reynolds. London: Harvill Secker, 2008.

The twenty-first century television detective drama often relies heavily on the forensic pathologist; analysing what they see and reaching a conclusion about the manner of death, not just the cause. This might include determining that a case that initially looks like natural causes is in fact murder. While this may involve toxicology reports and other modern methods of investigation, it might also include the state of the body; things like post-mortem lividity or marks such as scratches, or a lack of them. Using these sorts of indicators is not new; in fact Shakespeare was writing about them in the late sixteenth century in 2 Henry VI. In it, the Earl of Warwick describes the state of the body of the Duke of Gloucester who has reportedly died in his bed. Over the course of around twenty lines Warwick gives a detailed catalogue of the state of the body and why each sign indicates a violent, rather than peaceful, death. This paper looks at that description and relates it to other descriptions of murder victims in drama at the time, as well as to those investigated by twenty-first century television pathologists.

AbstractGrievance landscapes form in rapidly industrialising contexts where social and environmental impacts are inevitable. This paper focuses on the complex operational and organisational settings in which grievances arise and the industrial pathologies that form around resource development projects. The arguments draw on classic and contemporary literature on “grievance”, “right” and “entitlement”, and the authors’ own sustained engagement with global mining companies and local communities. Our contention is that the grievance landscape is far more critical to understanding environmental, human rights, and mining interactions than the managerial systems that companies construct to signal compliance with voluntary international norms. These managerial systems, or operational-level grievance mechanisms, map the procedural contours of how a local grievance would travel once it is made visible to the company. In practice, however, it is fiction, illegibility and invisibility that dominate. Across the pathologies, the common denominator is the corporate propensity to avoid recognising the legitimacy of a local grievance and the source of its cause.

The “Suspicion” issue of M/C Journal explores suspicion as both critical approach and cultural concept, inviting us to engage with its interpretive potential in a world where mistrust has become the norm. Contemporary Western culture is characterised by a climate of increased border security and surveillance, especially since 9/11. Judith Butler identifies an increase in paranoia and censorship associated with these factors, which has greatly affected freedom of speech, politics, the press, and what constitutes the public sphere. These shifts have had considerable impact on how we relate to words and images. In such a culture of distrust—of authority, of politics, and of supposed objective truth—how revealing or misleading is suspicion as a critical methodology? This issue of M/C Journal attempts to unravel that question; although it promises no answers, what it does offer is insight into the complexities of using suspicion to critique a range of texts, not all of which lend themselves so easily to a suspicious reading. The hermeneutics of suspicion, an approach introduced by Paul Ricoeur, assumes that the manifest or surface meaning of a text is a veil that masks its true agenda. As a critical approach, suspicion reads against the text, calling into question the authenticity of representation. The essays collected here use suspicion to explore contemporary fiction, film, and imagery, attempting not only to expose their hidden meanings, but to uncover the perspicacity of the suspicious approach itself. In her feature paper, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Rita Felski discusses the place of suspicion in contemporary critical theory, questioning its neglect in favour of critique, which is deemed more “intellectually rigorous” and less prone to the potential pitfalls of subjectivity. Felski challenges us to reconsider this view, positing that the “muted affective state” of suspicion may offer “an antidote to the charisma of critique,” bringing an element of pleasure and “game-like sparring” to the process of analysing a text. Felski acknowledges that “contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object.” And indeed each of the articles in this collection are concerned, across a range of disciplines, with a text’s potential to elicit an affective response, whether from within a text, outside of it, or from some uncertain position in between.Suspicion can draw us into a text and force us to think more deeply about it, even as that text may seem to evade a suspicious reading. In “‘There’s Suspicion, Nothing More’: Suspicious Readings of Michael Haneke’s Cache,” Alison Taylor discusses Haneke’s challenging 2005 film, which presents viewers with a conundrum that has no resolution. Although the film invites a suspicious reading as we follow the attempts of the protagonist, Georges, to discover who is responsible for making surveillance tapes of his home, the culprit is never identified; our suspicion is both pre-empted and never resolved. Taylor charts a frustrated suspicious response on the part of the film’s audience, its critics, scholars, and even its characters, and argues that the film is in fact a critique of the interpretive process, as it plays with and upends the expectations of the viewer.Niva Kaspi similarly questions the interpretive process, as she investigates the source of narrative suspicion towards a terrorist/victim discourse in Don DeLillo’s post 9/11 novel, Falling Man, for readers and characters alike. In “Bill Lawton by Any Other Name: Language Games and Terror in Falling Man,” Kaspi suggests that the way the text plays with language, naming and re-naming the terrorist-suspect—bin Laden is misheard by the protagonist’s son and his friends, the Siblings, and misnamed Bill Lawton—and other “tricks” and “errors,” activates our suspicion, so that “the reader, after a while, distances somewhat from the text, scanning for alternative possibilities and approaching interpretation with a tentative sense of doubt.” We come to view the printed text with suspicion, and hence question our responses to the hyper-public, press-mediated discourses that followed the events of 9/11. Nick Levey’s “‘Analysis Paralysis’: Suspicion, Trust, and David Foster Wallace’s ‘Wager’” explores how Wallace’s work deliberately evades decoding and interpretation, asking us to consider how fruitful the opposite approach to suspicion—trust—may be in light of how few answers the book yields. Infinite Jest itself poses a critique of suspicion, as only the characters in the novel who do not question their surroundings and circumstances achieve any sort of closure. Levey’s paper examines Wallace’s concern with “the existential implications of suspicion, in what might be lost in following doubt to its most ‘radical’ conclusions.” The existential implications of suspicion are further explored in Sarah Richardson’s analysis of Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home, “‘Old Father, Old Artificer’: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Bechdel’s graphic memoir charts her relationship with her troubled father, who hid his homosexuality behind “a veneer of perfect provincial Christian fatherhood and respectability.” Although Bechdel initially interprets her father’s history suspiciously, she moves towards a “positive queering of her family history and the embrace of her father’s legacy.” Thus Bechdel’s turn away from suspicion is restorative and ultimately creative.Nicola Scholes, on the other hand, explores the dilemma in facing a text that turns deliberately and self-consciously towards suspicion. In “The Difficulty of Reading Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ Suspiciously,” Scholes identifies the challenge of seeking hidden meanings in Ginsberg’s poem due to its self-exposing nature. Contrary to the potential a hermeneutic of suspicion has to expose and reveal hidden truths, “Kaddish” blatantly “parades its unpalatable truths.” However Scholes argues that a suspicious reading of “Kaddish” is still possible; indeed, it can mine the poem’s depths even further, “resisting its self-inscribed psychoanalysis to expose the gender politics of Allen’s exposé.”Gender and sexuality may infinitely complicate or subvert suspicious analysis, as two papers in this issue aptly demonstrate. Samantha Lindop’s “The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me” explores the oft-neglected figure of the homme fatal, questioning whether we can regard this figure with the same suspicion-grounded psychoanalytic perspective typically applied to the femme fatale of classic film noir. Focusing on neo-noir films Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me, Lindop exposes the homme fatal as a figure who subverts the suspicious gaze with his self-reflexive knowledge of Freudian theory. By contrast, the female protagonist in crime fiction is a figure who attracts suspicion on a number of narrative levels. As Katherine Howell argues in “The Suspicious Figure of the Female Forensic Pathologist Investigator in Crime Fiction,” female forensic pathologists in novels by popular crime writers Patricia Cornwell and Tess Gerritsen are portrayed as suspicious not simply for their performance of conventionally masculine gender roles—that of investigator and pathologist—but for their identification with the dead. These characters occupy abject space—they exist on the borderlines of life and death, self and other, masculine and feminine—and are thus coded as suspect from within the text.As the innately suspicious atmosphere of crime fiction and film noir brings us face to face with issues of morality and mortality, so too does Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2007 film The Lives of Others, which draws on the recent history of East Germany under Stasi rule. In her paper “Love in the Time of Socialism: Negotiating the Personal and the Social in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others,” Rowena Grant-Frost explores the film’s blurring of public and private—a boundary that depends on the climate of suspicion created by the Stasi as a form of State control. Through focusing on the film’s love story rather than its social milieu, Grant-Frost discusses the “affective experiences associated with constant surveillance,” suggesting this as a means for “contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate.”But can an understanding of the suspicion at the heart of systems of surveillance, power, and control that so pervade our contemporary world help to develop our moral awareness? Chari Larsson’s “Suspicious Images: Iconophobia and the Ethical Gaze” asks what happens when the images we are constantly exposed to in our media-saturated culture transgress and violates limits, and when, as spectators, we have an ethical and moral responsibility to bear witness. Considering the relationship between iconophobia—suspicion of, and anxiety towards, images—and spectatorship, Larsson draws on art critic Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the prohibition of Holocaust representation, and extrapolates his insights to analyse Laura Waddington’s 2004 film, Border, about asylum seekers in Northern France. Larsson suggests that both Didi-Huberman and Waddington argue for a model of spectatorship that undermines the relationship between viewer and image, so that “the terms of spectatorship may be relocated from suspicion to an ethical, participatory mode of engagement.”Perhaps, in the end, distrust is all we can trust as we attempt to decode the meaning of any text. What seems most important is for us to understand how to apply suspicion wisely; as the papers in this issue demonstrate, suspicious readings do not simply attempt to expose hidden meanings, but reconnect us with the pleasures of that discovery process, and equip us with the self-reflexive ability to question both a text and the efficacy of our approach to it. As Felski points out, while critique lets us sweep away a text’s surface and suspicion asks us to mine its depths, both approaches call for a “knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance” that offers new insights and prompts us to think more critically, more deeply, and more fruitfully.This issue of M/C Journal was inspired by the “Reading the Suspect” Work in Progress Conference for which Rita Felski delivered the keynote address at the University of Queensland in July 2010. ReferencesButler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. 2004.Felski, Rita. "Suspicious Minds." "Reading the Suspect": 14th Work-In-Progress Conference. University of Queensland. St Lucia, Qld. 30 July 2010. Keynote Address. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale U P, 1970. 32–56.

Abstract Background Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most promising areas in medicine with many possibilities for improving health and wellness. Already today, diagnostic decision support systems may help patients to estimate the severity of their complaints. This fictional case study aimed to test the diagnostic potential of an AI algorithm for common sports injuries and pathologies. Methods Based on a literature review and clinical expert experience, five fictional “common” cases of acute, and subacute injuries or chronic sport-related pathologies were created: Concussion, ankle sprain, muscle pain, chronic knee instability (after ACL rupture) and tennis elbow. The symptoms of these cases were entered into a freely available chatbot-guided AI app and its diagnoses were compared to the pre-defined injuries and pathologies. Results A mean of 25–36 questions were asked by the app per patient, with optional explanations of certain questions or illustrative photos on demand. It was stressed, that the symptom analysis would not replace a doctor’s consultation. A 23-yr-old male patient case with a mild concussion was correctly diagnosed. An ankle sprain of a 27-yr-old female without ligament or bony lesions was also detected and an ER visit was suggested. Muscle pain in the thigh of a 19-yr-old male was correctly diagnosed. In the case of a 26-yr-old male with chronic ACL instability, the algorithm did not sufficiently cover the chronic aspect of the pathology, but the given recommendation of seeing a doctor would have helped the patient. Finally, the condition of the chronic epicondylitis in a 41-yr-old male was correctly detected. Conclusions All chosen injuries and pathologies were either correctly diagnosed or at least tagged with the right advice of when it is urgent for seeking a medical specialist. However, the quality of AI-based results could presumably depend on the data-driven experience of these programs as well as on the understanding of their users. Further studies should compare existing AI programs and their diagnostic accuracy for medical injuries and pathologies.

AbstractThis article explores male popular culture in Australia in the mid‐1940s, particularly men's magazines of the period, to illuminate aspects of the psycho‐sexual dimensions of Australian veterans returning to civil society. The sexual landscape of Australian society had undergone considerable transformation, especially through an increasing sexualisation of popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This provided a context for considerable sexual anxiety and tension, especially in the context of numerous stories of Australian women consorting with American servicemen during the war. Men's popular culture, especially short fiction, where more lurid fantasies could play out, often depicted women as sexually voracious and duplicitous. Many of the short stories involved love triangles where the men were betrayed by women. But the resolution of these rivalries often pathologised women while preserving the male bonds of war. Homosocial bonds were a bulwark in the troubled transition from war to peace.

Clinical reasoning skills underlie the decisions speech-language pathologists (SLPs) make during practice. Although clinical reasoning is included in speech-language pathology accreditation standards in the United States, there is limited research on preservice SLPs’ development or use of clinical reasoning skills. Because clinical reasoning skills specific to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) service provision have not been identified or reported in depth, this qualitative study focused on two cases of children with developmental disabilities who used AAC systems. Eight novice (i.e. preservice) SLPs and eight expert SLPs completed think-aloud tasks while they developed intervention plans, which made their clinical reasoning skills observable. Responses were transcribed for qualitative analysis. Six clinical reasoning skills were identified: summarizing, interpreting, hypothesizing, rationalizing, comparing and deferring. Expert and novices used four of these clinical reasoning skills similarly; however, there were differences among the remaining two skills. Novices deferred more frequently during the tasks and were limited in their ability to make comparisons to the fictional cases as compared to the experts. The expert-novice gap in clinical reasoning presents implications for teaching preservice SLPs in the classroom and the clinic.

Purpose: Effective early intervention (EI) services hinge on a partnership between speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and caregivers. Caregivers play a pivotal role in this partnership, as they must learn language facilitation strategies from SLPs and then implement these strategies with their children. Unfortunately, caregiver progress has often been overlooked, in both research and practice. The purpose of this clinical focus article is to underscore the importance of monitoring caregiver progress in EI and highlight practical data collection methods to do so. Method: This clinical focus article reviews the value of collecting caregiver data at baseline, during EI sessions, and over the course of a caregiver-implemented intervention. A fictional clinical scenario is used to illustrate how these methods can be applied. In this scenario, an EI SLP works with a caregiver to set goals, teaches the caregiver language facilitation strategies using the See and Say Sequence, and measures progress using various types of caregiver data. Conclusions: Collecting caregiver data can be a feasible and useful practice in EI. Caregiver data can guide SLPs in setting caregiver and child goals, in promoting caregiver practice during EI sessions, and in monitoring progress over time. Furthermore, it has the potential to increase caregiver engagement and build caregiver confidence in the EI process.

Colonizers have used language as an instrument of socio-political and economic control during colonisation. This has enabled them in the process to establish power hierarchy based mostly on linguistic superiority by undermining native tongues. In recent years, theories of postcolonial discourses hold the view that colonialism has fundamentally affected modes of representation of colonised spaces. Through questioning and travestying western hegemonic discourses, writers from once colonised spaces have challenged and subverted the hegemonic power of the colonial language by inserting different strategies into their own language to suit socio-cultural contexts. For postcolonial literary artists, this consists in taking the language of the former imperial power, to unlearn its worldview and re-place it in a discourse fully adapted to ones’ own space and subsequently, produce new modes of representation in countering colonial canonical texts. In this sense, postcolonial discourse is crystallised by and replete with ‘abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’ in the canon of postcolonial studies. This suggests the writer’s use of linguistic structure of the borrowed language, the manipulation of its syntactical structure as well as its semantics, to convey stance against the colonizer. In its pronouncement, an effort is made to advocate for a critical rethinking of the legacies of colonial domination as well as its accompanying epistemologies. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o uses elements of oral tradition (orality) or better indigenous poetics in his fictional works, mostly The River Between, to express the meanings, feelings and experiences of his Gikuyu people. Thus, orality as a means of communication and carrier of the culture of those people to whom it is a mother tongue, has social, cultural, and political aesthetic roles to play in the African worldview. To achieve this, Ngugi employs historically significant events, moments and stylistic features which are characteristics of oral tradition to emphasise important key concepts that help to reconstruct positive moral values in conflict with foreign ones in a fragmented Kenyan society. Though many controversies surround Ngugi’s writing and its medium of reception, this paper contends that his fictions written in his mother tongue or in English and/or translated into English, are part and parcel of his endeavour to appropriate the literary enterprise not only as a weapon of active physical revolt and textual indignation but also as against (post)colonial pathologies. Ngugi refashions the colonial English language to show that his country, Kenya, is not a mere passive entity in tolerating colonial legacies; but challenges western hegemonic power dimensions, dismantles them to the point of bringing them under its own terms and conditions. The conceptual frameworks that underpin the study are New historicism (New Culturalism) and postcolonial theory. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0728/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

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Since its return in 2005 the science fiction series Doctor Who (BBC1) has featured many alien creatures which bear a striking similarity to non-human Earth species: the Judoon in “Smith and Jones” (2007) have heads like rhinoceroses; the nurses in “New Earth” (2006) are cats in wimples; the Tritovores in “Planet of the Dead” (2009) are giant flies in boilersuits. Yet only one non-human animal has appeared twice in the series, in unrelated stories: the pig. Furthermore, alien races such as the Judoon and the Tritovores simply happen to look like human species, and the series offers no narrative explanation as to why such similarities exist. When the pig has appeared, however, it has instead been as the consequence of experimentation and mutation, and in both cases the appearance of such porcine hybrids is signalled as horrific, unsettling and, in the end, to be pitied. The fact that the pig has appeared in this way twice suggests there is something about the human understanding of this animal which means it can fulfil a role in fiction unavailable to other Earth species. The pig’s appearance has been in two stories, both two-parters. In “Aliens of London”/“World War Three” (2005) a spaceship crashes into London’s Thames river, and the pilot inside, thought to be dead, is sent to be scientifically examined. Alone in the laboratory, the pathologist Doctor Sato is startled to find the creature is alive and, during its attempt to escape, it is shot by the military. When the creature is examined The Doctor reveals it is “an ordinary pig, from Earth.” He goes on to explain that, “someone’s taken a pig, opened up its brain, stuck bits on, then they’ve strapped it in that ship and made it dive-bomb. It must have been terrified. They’ve taken this animal and turned it into a joke.” The Doctor’s concern over the treatment of the pig mirrors his earlier reprimand of the military for shooting it; as he cradles the dying creature he shouts at the soldier responsible, “What did you do that for? It was scared! It was scared.” On the commentary track for the DVD release of this episode Julie Gardner (executive producer) and Will Cohen (visual effects producer) note how so many people told them they had a significant emotional reaction to this scene, with Gardner adding, “Bless the pig.” In that sense, what begins as a moment of horror in the series becomes one of empathy with a non-human being, and the pig moves from being a creature of terror to one whose death is seen to be an immoral act. This movement from horror to empathy can be seen in the pig’s other appearance, in “Daleks in Manhattan”/“Evolution of the Daleks” (2007). Here the alien Daleks experiment on humans in order to develop the ability to meld themselves with Earthlings, in order to repopulate their own dwindling numbers. Humans are captured and then tested; as Laszlo, one of the outcomes of the experimentation, explains, “They’re divided into two groups: high intelligence and low intelligence. The low intelligence are taken to becomes Pig Slaves, like me.” These Pig Slaves look and move like humans except for their faces, which have prolonged ears and the pig signifier of a snout. At no point in the story is it made clear why experimentations on low intelligence humans should result in them looking like pigs, and a non-hybrid pig is not seen throughout the story. The appearance of the experiments’ results is therefore not narratively explained, and it does not draw on the fact that “in digestive apparatus and nutrient requirements pigs resemble humans in more ways than any mammal except monkeys and apes, which is why pigs are much in demand for [human] medical research” (Harris 70); indeed, considering the story is set in the 1930s such a justification would be anachronistic. The use of the pig, therefore, draws solely on its cultural, not its scientific, associations. These associations are complex, and the pig has been used to connote many things in Western culture. Children’s books such as The Sheep-Pig (King-Smith) and Charlotte’s Web (White) suggest the close proximity of humans and pigs can result in an affinity capable of communication. The use of pigs to represent Poles in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), on the other hand, has been read as offensive, drawing on the animal’s association with dirt and greed (Weschler). These depictions are informed by debates about pigs in the real world, whereby an animal which, as mentioned above, is similar enough to humans to be useful in medical research can also, for the food industry, go through a slaughtering process described by Bob Torres as “horribly cruel” (47). Such cruelty can only be justified if the boundaries between the pig and the human are maintained, and this is why pig-human representations are capable of being shocking and horrific. The hybrid nature of the human-pig creature draws on the horror trope that Noël Carroll refers to as “fusion” which works because it “unites attributes held to be categorically distinct” such as “inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine” (43). He explains that this is why characters in horror narratives do not find such creatures simply fearful, but also “repellent, loathsome, disgusting, repulsive and impure” (54); their failure to conform to accepted cultural categories destabilises assumed norms and, perhaps most horrifically, undermines ‘the human’ as a stable, natural and superior category. As Donna Haraway notes, “‘The species’ often means the human race, unless one is attuned to science fiction, where species abound” (18). Science fiction therefore commonly plays with ideas of species because it is often interested in “the image of the scientist ‘playing god’” (Jones 51) and the horrific outcomes of “the total severing of scientific concerns from ethical concerns” (53). That the result of human/non-human experimentation should be regarded as horrific is evidence of the need to maintain the distinctions between humans and other creatures; after all, a pig/human can only be thought of as horrific if it as assumed that there is something unnatural about the destabilisation of the human category. And it is precisely the human which matters in this equation; it is not really as if anyone cares about the pig’s categorical stability in all of this. In both these stories, the appearance of the pig-creature is narratively structured to be surprising and shocking, and is withheld from the audience for as long as possible. The first appearance of a Pig Slave in “Daleks in Manhattan” constitutes that episode’s pre-credits cliff-hanger, with the creature appearing out of the shadows and bearing down upon the camera, directly towards the audience viewing at home. At this point, the audience has no idea why such a creature exists; the meaning of the pig-human hybrid is contained purely in its visual appearance, with the horrific fact of its contradictory appearance perhaps drawing on the pig’s historical association with evil and the Devil (Sillar and Meyler 82). Similarly, in “Aliens of London” we see Sato’s shocked reaction to the pig far earlier than we actually see the creature ourselves, and Sato’s scream is clearly intended to construct what we have yet to encounter as horrific. The Doctor’s search for the creature is similarly signalled, as he roams dimly-lit corridors trying to find it, following the trail of the grunts and noises that it makes. That the pig might constitute a horrific—or at least unsettling—site for humans is unsurprising considering the cultural roles it has often played. There is, after all, an “opposition between civilization and piggishness” (Ashley, Hollows, Jones and Taylor 2) in which (incorrect) assumptions about pigs’ filthy behaviour helps mark out humanity’s cleaner and more civilised way of living. While this is true of all human/non-human interactions, it is argued that the pig occupies a particular role within this system as it is a “familiar beast” (4) because for centuries it has been a domesticated animal which has often lived alongside humans, usually in quite close proximity. In that sense, humans and pigs are very similar. Demarcating the human as a stable and natural “conceptual category ... in which we place all members of our own species and from which we exclude all non-members” (Milton 265-66) has therefore required the denigration of non-humans, at least partly to justify the dominion humans have decided they have the right to hold over other creatures such as pigs. The difficulties in maintaining this demarcation can be seen in the documentary The Private Life of Pigs (BBC2 2010) in which the farmer Jimmy Docherty carries out a number of tests on animals in order to better understand the ‘inner life’ of the pig. Docherty acknowledges the pig’s similarity to humans in his introductory piece to camera; “When you look in their piggy little eyes with their piggy little eyelashes you see something that reflects back to you—I don’t know—it makes you feel there’s a person looking back.” However, this is quickly followed by a statement which works to reassert the human/non-human boundary; “I know we have this close relationship [with pigs], but I’m often reminded that just beneath the surface of their skin, they’re a wild animal.” Perhaps the most telling revelation in the programme is that pigs have been found to make certain grunting noises only when humans are around, which suggests they have developed a language for ‘interacting’ with humans. That Docherty is uncomfortably startled by this piece of information shows how the idea of communication troubles ideas of human superiority, and places pigs within a sphere hitherto maintained as strictly human. Of course, humans often willingly share domestic spaces with other species, but these are usually categorised as pets. The pet exists “somewhere between the wild animal and the human” (Fudge 8), and we often invest them with a range of human characteristics and develop relationships with such animals which are similar, but not identical, to those we have with other humans. The pig, however, like other food animals, cannot occupy the role afforded to the pet because it is culturally unacceptable to eat pets. In order to legitimise the treatment of the pig as a “strictly utilitarian object; a thing for producing meat and bacon” (Serpell 7) it must be distinguished from the human realm as clearly as possible. It is worth noting, though, that this is a culturally-specific process; Dwyer and Minnegal, for example, show how in New Guinea “pigs commonly play a crucial role in ceremonial and spiritual life” (37-8), and the pig is therefore simultaneously a wild animal, a source of food, and a species with which humans have an “attachment” (45-54) akin to the idea of a pet. Western societies commonly (though not completely) have difficulty uniting this range of animal categories, and analogous ideas of “civilization” often rest on assumptions about animals which require them to play specific, non-human roles. That homo sapiens define their humanity in terms of civilization is demonstrated by the ways in which ideas of brutality, violence and savagery are displaced onto other species, often quite at odds with the truth of such species’ behaviour. The assumption that non-human species are violent, and constitute a threat, is shown in Doctor Who; the pig is shot in “Aliens of London” for assumed security reasons (despite it having done nothing to suggest it is a threat), while humans run in fear from the Pig Slaves in “Evolution of the Daleks” purely because of their non-human appearance. Mary Midgley refers to this as “the Beast Myth” (38) by which humans not only reduce other species to nothing other than “incarnations of wickedness, … sets of basic needs, … crude mechanical toys, … [and] idiot children” (38), but also lump all non-human species together thereby ignoring the specificity of any particular species. Midgley also argues that “man shows more savagery to his own kind than most other mammal species” (27, emphasis in original), citing the need for “law or morality to restrain violence” (26) as evidence of the social structures required to uphold a myth of human civilization. In that sense, the use of pigs in Doctor Who can be seen as conforming to centuries-old depictions of non-human species, by which the loss of humanity symbolised by other species can be seen as the ultimate punishment. After all, when the Daleks’ human helper, Mr Diagoras, fears that the aliens are going to experiment on him, he fearfully exclaims, “What do you mean? Like those pig-men things? You’re not going to turn me into one of those? Oh, God, please don’t!” In the next episode, when all the Pig Slaves are killed by the actions of the Doctor’s companion Martha, she regrets her actions, only to be told, “No. The Daleks killed them. Long ago”, for their mutation into a ‘pig-man thing’ is seen to be a more significant loss of humanity than death itself. The scene highlights how societies are often “confused about the status of such interspecies beings” (Savulescu 25). Such confusion is likely to recur considering we are moving into a “posthumanist” age defined by the “decentering of the human” (Wolfe xv), whereby critiques of traditional cultural categories, alongside scientific developments that question the biological certainty of the human, result in difficulties in defining precisely what it is that is supposedly so special about homo sapiens. This means that it is far too easy to write off these depictions in Doctor Who as merely drawing on, and upholding, those simplistic and naturalised human/non-human distinctions which have been criticised, in a manner similar to sexism and racism, as “speciesist” (Singer 148-62). There is, after all, consistent sympathy for the pig in these episodes. The shooting of the pig in “Aliens of London” is outrageous not merely because it gives evidence of the propensity of human violence: the death of the pig itself is presented as worth mourning, in a manner similar to the death of any living being. Throughout the series the Doctor is concerned over the loss of life for any species, always aiming to find a non-violent method for solving conflicts and repeatedly berating other characters who resort to bloodshed for solutions. Indeed, the story’s narrative can be read as one in which the audience is invited to reassess its own response to the pig’s initial appearance, shifting from fear at its alien-ness to sympathy for its demise. This complication of the cultural meanings of pigs is taken even further in the two-part Dalek story. One of the key plots of the story is the relationship between Laszlo, who has been transmuted into a Pig Slave, and his former lover Tallulah. Tallulah spends much of the story thinking Laszlo has disappeared, when he has, in fact, gone into hiding, certain that she will reject him because of his post-experimentation porcine features. When they finally reunite, Laszlo apologises for what has happened to him, while Tallulah asks, “Laszlo? My Laszlo? What have they done to you?” At the end of the story they decide to try re-establishing their relationship, despite Laszlo’s now-complicated genetic make-up. In response to this Martha asks the Doctor, “Do you reckon it’s going to work, those two?” The Doctor responds that while such an odd pairing might be problematic pretty much anywhere else, as they were in New York they might just get away with it. He reflects, “That’s what this city’s good at. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and maybe the odd Pig Slave Dalek mutant hybrid too.” While there is an obvious playfulness to this scene, with the programme foregrounding the kinds of narrative available to the science fiction genre, it is also clear that we are invited to find this a good narrative conclusion, a suitable resolution to all that has preceded it. In that sense, the pig and the human come together, dissolving the human/non-human divide at a stroke, and this is offered to the audience as something to be pleased about. In both narratives, then, the pig moves from being understood as alien and threatening to something if not quite identical to human, then certainly akin to it. Certainly, the narratives suggest that the lives, loves and concerns of pigs—even if they have been experimented upon—matter, and can constitute significant emotional moments in primetime mainstream family television. This development is a result of the text’s movement from an interest in the appearance of the pig to its status as a living being. As noted above, the initial appearances of the pigs in both stories is intended to be frightening, but such terror is dependent on understanding non-human species by their appearance alone. What both of these stories manage to do is suggest that the pig—like all non-human living things, whether of Earth or not—is more than its physical appearance, and via acknowledgment of its own consciousness, and its own sense of identity, can become something with which humans are capable of having sympathy; perhaps more than that, that the pig is something with which humans should have sympathy, for to deny the interior life of such a species is to engage in an inhuman act in itself. This could be seen as an interesting—if admittedly marginal—corrective to the centuries of cultural and physical abuse the pig, like all animals, has suffered. Such representations can be seen as evoking “the dreaded comparison” (Spiegel) which aligns maltreatment of animals with slavery, a comparison that is dreaded by societies because to acknowledge such parallels makes justifying humans’ abusive treatment of other species very difficult. These two Doctor Who stories repeatedly make such comparisons, and assume that to morally and emotionally distinguish between living beings based on categories of species is nonsensical, immoral, and fails to acknowledge the significance and majesty of all forms of life. That we might, as Gardner suggests, “Bless the pig”—whether it has had its brain stuffed full of wires or been merged with a human—points towards complex notions of human/non-human interaction which might helpfully destabilise simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race. References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. “Person, Place or Pig: Animal Attachments and Human Transactions in New Guinea.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 37-60. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harris, Marvin. “The Abominable Pig.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 67-79. Jones, Darryl. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold, 2002. King-Smith, Dick. The Sheep-Pig. London: Puffin, 1983. Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1979/2002. Milton, Kay. “Anthropomorphism or Egomorphism? The Perception of Non-Human Persons by Human Ones.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 255-71. Savulescu, Julian. “Human-Animal Transgenesis and Chimeras Might be an Expression of our Humanity.” The American Journal of Bioethics 3.3 (2003): 22-5. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sillar, Frederick Cameron and Ruth Mary Meyler. The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961. Singer, Peter. “All Animals are Equal.” Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989. 148-62. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. London and Philadelphia: Heretic Books, 1988. Speigelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986/1991. Torres, Bob. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2007. Weschler, Lawrence. “Pig Perplex.” Lingua France: The Review of Academic Life 11.5 (2001): 6-8. White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. London: Harper Collins, 1952. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Print culture, as the call for this issue suggests, has dominated the world for 500 years, but also suggests that print’s hegemony may now be under threat from new communications technologies. There are a number of perspectives from which to view the ‘threats’ to which print culture is subject, the longer term effects this will have and, particularly, on what it will mean to be human in the future of print culture. I’d like to address this issue by turning my attention to one dimension of this question that seems essentially absent from the discourses which surround it. I’d like to step back and put this question in the context of the structural relations of print as a cultural technology. My questions concern what these structural relations and their effects are, the limits of this print model of textuality, and what would constitute an ‘outside’ to the print system of texts. The point of this is to expose the ‘naturalised’ elements of this cultural formation, to show that there is as yet no radical break from print culture, and to consider the nature of the current pressures on print culture. The primary infrastructure of the print system concerns the structure of its texts, the structure of its modes of subject formation, and the structural relations between them. We should note how deeply embedded these structural relations are in terms of the idea of the human, of the idea of being human. Walter Ong (117-38), for example, has shown us how the print form is deeply embedded within culture and affects us at deeper levels than just the external manifestations of the medium. The conventions of print greatly influence and structure the ways in which it is possible to think – for Ong, the dominant communicational culture affects and determines the possibilities of thought and expression, and the relationships between individuals and texts structures the ways in which we view the world. This is what Ong calls “a psychological breakthrough of the first order”. For Ong, the achievement of alphabetic letterpress printing was that it “embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it a kind of commodity”. It was, he says, the first assembly line, and from this we have the mass distribution of texts, mass literacy through mass schooling, religion, etc. (Extended examinations of the function of religion in the construction of a print model can be pursued in both Aries and Luke.) Firstly, we must note that a model of textuality is not a natural thing; it is a technology. A textual model provides an infrastructure which determines and articulates the possibilities of relationships between those elements of the textual infrastructure – texts, subjects, and their relationships. As a consequence, the model also largely determines the possibilities for reading and writing within the textual system. The print-based system of texts has always presented an infrastructure that consists of a two-dimensional surface to which it sutures a subject in a face-to-face relationship – the requirement is for a certain kind of text, a certain kind of subject, and a certain kind of relationship between them in a highly prescribed and circumscribed textual infrastructure. This model of textuality is assumed as the natural mode of textuality, and consequently the referent for all textuality. What is obscured in the naturalisation of the print model of textuality are the technological dimensions of textuality: that all textual models are technologies. This print model has become so naturalised that it disappears. These structural relations of print do not change with the advent of the desktop personal computer, nor screen culture generally, as these are already cast within the infrastructure of the print model. Even three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional screen is always-already simulacra, constituted by continual changes on a surface which give only the appearance of three-dimensionality. The screen and keyboard therefore mark a continuity with the pre-existing social relations of print-based technology and its system of texts, and inscribe these textual relations in the model of the desktop personal computer. The essential “face-to-face” relation, where the subject is always placed “in front of”, also largely determines this subject. This mode of positionality is the condition of this subject. Its possibilities for “knowing” and “understanding”, if not wholly determined, are strongly influenced by this positionality. When Heidegger says that the meaning of the term understanding is intended to go back to its usage in ordinary language, he is referring to understanding (verstehen) in these terms: In German we say that someone can vorstehen something – literally stand in front or ahead of it, that is, stand at its head, administer, manage, preside over it. This is equivalent to saying that he versteht sich darauf, understands in the sense of being skilled or expert at it, has the know how of it. (Heidegger, “Age” 129-30) Such a subject, in that she or he is always placed “in front of” the text, surface, screen, page, is always the subject of the print age. This is the sense in which the desktop personal computer is still a Book. Accounts of computing per se initiating a radically new textuality, then, should proceed with caution. There is a new textual environment, to be sure, yet assertions of its radicality would seem firstly to refer to changes in degree rather than changes in kind. For Heidegger, the very essence of ‘man’ changes in the representationalist paradigm in that ‘man becomes subject’. He points out that the word sub-iectum names ‘that-which-lies-before’, and which ‘as ground, gathers everything onto itself’ (Heidegger, “Age” 128). When man becomes primary, then ‘man becomes that being upon which all that is is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth’. It is only possible for man to become this relational centre when ‘the comprehension of what is as a whole changes’ (Heidegger, “Age” 128). In terms of this change, Heidegger says, we are asking after the ‘essence of the modern age’ which concerns the ‘modern world picture (Weltbild)’. World picture … does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. … Whenever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter. He further points out that The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age. (Heidegger, “Age” 129-30) It is the positionality largely determined through these structural relations that enables the identity of the modernist subject, and the possibility of its representation (as an object for another subject). Representationalism therefore requires positionality in order to represent. The print subject is sutured to the page or screen and this always provides it with a representable position. The subject of representationalism therefore comes to appear as naturally given, just as, in this view, technology is also a given. Positionality concerns fixation, or what can be held to be true. Positionality is what Deleuze and Guattari oppose to nomadism which concerns constant movement and circulation. Representationalism requires this stable formation, and infusions of ‘noise’ into the system are rendered as pathologies. “Virtual reality” then, in that it disrupts or introduces something that is apparently new into the system, tends to become a pathologisation of the subject. It is on this basis that claims are made of crises in modes of subjectivity within virtual reality or cyberculture, where the problematic is mis-construed in terms of the subject rather than in terms of this model of interpretation. In this sense, it clings to the illusion of the subject as ground, that everything that is, is an object for a subject. In this model, it becomes a question of repositioning the subject such that the subject may be accommodated in an expanded representational regime, a practice that is widespread. Bukatman (8-9), for example, has argued a representationalist position which can be seen in the following passage. It is the purpose of much recent science fiction to construct a new subject position to interface with the global realms of data circulation, a subject that can occupy or intersect the cyberscapes of contemporary existence. For Bukatman, it is about a new position for the subject: that is, it is a question of how to represent the subject such that it can be accommodated to or within a representationalist paradigm. This subject is reduced to the notion of positionality which is representable as the subject labelled “I”. It concerns differences in degree rather than in kind. The establishing of the human subject as ground for “that which is” positions the human in an entirely different way from the subject of earlier times. For the first time, Heidegger says, there became such a thing as a “position” of the human. Humanity is subiectum, and must stand in front of, or “take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective”. What is decisive, he says is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself, that he intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for a possible development of humanity. (Heidegger, “Age” 132) This decisive event, for Heidegger, is what begins a new way of being human that gives rise to the world as picture. Heidegger’s “age of the world picture” corresponds with the arrival of the mass textual system or model (the printing press of the fifteenth century) which serves to instantiate this model of “man”. This is an actualisation of the technology of the subiectum, the age of the world picture, that is henceforth demanded in order to produce and to represent this “man”, and to represent him to himself. There has been no radical break with the structures underlying the social formation of print culture, yet this formation is subject to increasing pressures. What is most under pressure in this late age of print, however, is not the particular formation of texts, but, crucially, this mode of being human that has been ever more deeply embedded in the human psyche for more than 500 years. This will not disappear overnight; however, its structural conditions of existence do appear to be beginning to overflow their limit, producing an excess that is not, or not easily, assimilated back to itself. This excess is constituted by those contemporary elements that do not fit the structural model of the print system of texts. There are several aspects to this which can only be gestured towards in this space. In particular, one aspect will concern the complex network of relations in the changing nature of information in a digital, networked era, the commodification of information in global capitalism, and the distortions of space and time these produce. It gestures towards the possibility of a post-representationalism – a new subject that, rather than being fixed and positional, sutured to a screen/page, is set in motion – a structure which would alter all relations as well as the constitution of the subject. Immersive virtual reality texts already begin the necessity of thinking these relations and the possibility of a subject in motion within fields of information flow. These immersive virtual realities gesture towards the possibility of the subject becoming a post-print. A post-print will not emerge fully formed or all at once, or even very soon, but reflections on what such a system of texts and subjects might be or become poses the relations of print or our reflections on them in a different way. In any event, it points towards a difficult time ahead for the print subject and for the formation and meaning of print culture. References Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. Trans. Robert Baldick. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. A. Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. —. “The Age of the World Picture”. In Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977. 115-54. Luke, Carmen. Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism. Albany: State U of New York, 1989. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. 1982. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Roe, Phillip. "Dimensions of Print." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/07-roe.php>. APA Style Roe, P. (Jun. 2005) "Dimensions of Print," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/07-roe.php>.

Introduction Many years ago, the moral fable of Pinocchio warned children about the evils of lying (Perella). This article explores how children are learning lie-related insights from genres of currently marketed polygraph-style “spy kits”, voice stress analysis apps, and electric shock-delivering games. These artifacts are emerging despite the fact that polygraphy and other lie detection approaches are restricted in use in certain business and community contexts, in part because of their dubious scientific support. However, lie detection devices are still applied in many real-life settings, often in critically important security, customs, and employment arenas (Bunn). A commonly accepted definition of the term “lie” is “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue” (Vrij 15), which includes the use of lies in various gaming situations. Many children’s games involve some kind of deception, and mental privacy considerations are important in many social contexts (such as “keeping a poker face”). The dystopian scenario of children learning basic honesty notions through technologically-enabled lie detection games scripted by corporate developers presents frightening prospects. These lie detection toys and games impart important moral perspectives through technological and algorithmic means (including electrical shocks and online shaming) rather than through human modelling and teaching. They normalise and lessen the seriousness of lying by reducing it into a game. In this article I focus on United States and United Kingdom toys and games, but comparable lie detection approaches have permeated other nations and cultures. Alder characterises the US as having an “obsession” with lie detection devices (1), an enthusiasm increasingly shared with other nations. Playing with the Truth: Spy Kits, Voice Stress Apps, and Shocking Liar The often-frightening image of an individual strapped to sensors and hooked up to a polygraph is often found in movies, television shows, and social media (Littlefield). I construe the notion of “lie detection” as “the use of a physiological measurement apparatus with the explicit aim of identifying when someone is lying. This typically comes with specific protocols for questioning the subject, and the output is graphically represented” (Bergers 1). Some lie detection toys utilise autonomic or unintentionally-supplied input in their analyses (such as the vocal changes related to stress); with networked toys, the data can subsequently be utilised by third parties. These aspects raise questions concerning consent as well as the validity of the results. Developers are producing related artifacts that challenge the difference between truth and lies, such as robots that “lie” by giving children responses to questions based on the children’s analysed preferences rather than standard determinations of truth and falsity (Zhu). Early lie detection games for children include the 1961 Lie Detecto from Manning Manufacturing. The technologies involved are galvanometers that required a 9-volt battery to operate, and sensors strapped to the hands of the subjects. It was reportedly designed “for junior G-men”, with suggested test questions for subjects such as "Do you like school?" Its ratings included "Could Be" and "Big Whopper" (“TIME’s New Products”). Lie detection had also been projected as fertile ground for children’s own educational research ventures. For example, in 2016 the popular magazine Scientific American outlined how young people could conduct experiments as to whether cognitive load (such as working on complex puzzles) affects the subject’s galvanic input to lie detection devices (Science Buddies). However, the Science Buddies’ description of the proposed activity did not encourage children to question the validity of the device itself. In organisational and agency settings, polygraph-style strategies are generally labour-intensive, involving experts who set up and administer tests (Bunn). These resource-intensive aspects of polygraphs may make their use in games attractive to players who want theatrical scripts to act out particular roles. An example of a lie detection toy that models the polygraph is the currently marketed Discovery Kids’ Electronic Lie Detection Portable Spy Kit, in which children go through the procedures of attaching the polygraph’s sensors to a human subject (Granich). The roles of “spy” and “detective” are familiar ones in many children’s books and movies, so the artifacts involved fit readily into children’s narratives. However, the overall societal importance of what they are modelling may still be beyond children’s grasps. Users of the comparable spy kit Project MC2 are given the following characterisation of their lie detection device, designed for individuals aged 6 and older: When someone lies, his or her body often produces small reactions from being nervous or stressed. One of those reactions is a small release of sweat. That moisture increases the skin’s electrical conductivity, or galvanic skin response, and the lie detector reads it as a fib. That's why the lie detector’s clips go on the fingers, because there are lots of sweat glands in your hands. Product includes: Lie detector, disguised as a mint box with a hidden button to force a truth or lie. Equipped with indicator light and sounds. Neon-colored wires with finger clips. (“Project MC2”) Similar sorts of lie detection approaches (though more sophisticated) are currently being used in US military operations. For example, the US Army’s Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening Systems (PCASS) are handheld polygraphs designed for use in battle. Voice stress analysis systems for lie detection have been used for decades in business as well as medical and crime contexts. As described by Price, the US toy maker Hasbro distributes The Lie Detector Game, which “uses voice analysis to determine whether someone is lying”. In the box you’ll get a lie detector device and 64 cards with questions to answer as part of the gameplay … . If you tell the truth, or the device at least thinks you did, then you score a point. Lying loses you a point” (1). An assortment of smartphone apps with voice-stress analysis capabilities designed for lie detection are also widely available along with suggestions for their use in games (McQuarrie), providing yet another way for children to explore truth and deception in technologically-framed contexts. Lie detection devices for entertainment generally construe at least one of the participants in the toy’s or game’s operations as a “subject”. The Shocking Liar game openly entices users to construct the human game players as “victims”: The SHOCKING LIAR [sic] is a table top device that you strap your victim's hand to, delivering a small electric shock when it thinks a lie is being told… The lie detector evaluates the data and stores the information after each question giving an accumulation of data on the person being questioned. This means the more questions that you ask, the more information the lie detector has to evaluate... Place your hand onto the hand plate of the SHOCKING LIAR. If you tell the truth, you can move away from it safely and if you tell a direct lie or have given an unacceptable amount of half-truths, you will receive an electric shock. Children who use Shocking Liar are indeed led to assume that they can catch themselves or friends in dishonesty, but research justification for the Shocking Liar’s results is not available. The societal messages imparted by the toys to children (such as “this toy can determine whether you are lying”) make their impacts especially consequential. These toys and games extract from the subjects’ data various aspects of which the subjects may not have conscious control or even awareness. For instance, the pitch of the subject’s voice can be mined and subsequently given voice stress analysis, as in the previously described Hasbro game. From this “shadow” or autonomic input is developed an interpretation (however problematic) of the subjects’ mental state. The results of the analysis may eventually be processed consciously by subjects, either as polygraph readings or electrical shocks (as in Shocking Liar). The autonomic input involved is often known as “leakage” or “tells” (Ekman). Game playing with robots presents new lie detection venues. Children often react differently in robot-mediated interactions to truth and deception issues than they do with human beings (Pearson). Since the opportunities for child-robot interaction are increasing with the advent of companion robots, new contexts for lie detection games are emerging. Robots that present verbal feedback to children based on the child’s preferences over time, or that strategically withhold information, are being developed and marketed. Research on children’s responses to robots may provide clues as to how to make cognitive engineering and mental privacy invasions more acceptable. This raises serious concerns about children’s perceptions of the standings of robots as moral guides as well as gaming companions. For younger children who are just acquiring the notion of lying, the toys and games could extend the kinds of socialisation provided by their parents and guardians. As lie detection initiatives are taking on wide roles in everyday human interaction (such as educational cheating and employee credibility assessment), the integration of the approaches into children’s activities may serve to normalise the processes involved. Older children who already have some sense of what lying constitutes may find in the lie detection toys and games some insights as to how to become more effective as liars. Some parents may use these lie-detection toys in misguided attempts to determine whether their children are lying to them about something. Many toys and games are explicit in their lie detection and surveillance themes, with specific narratives relating to the societal roles of detectives and spies. Children become complicit in the societal functions of lie detection, rather than simply being subjects or audiences to them. Children’s toys and games are all about experimentation, and these lie detection artifacts are no different (Oravec 2000). Children are enabled through interactions with the toys and games to experiment with lying behavior and possibly explore certain aspects of their own mental lives as well as those of others. Children can learn how to modulate some of the external physiological signals that are often associated with lying, much in the way that individuals can alter various physiological responses with assistance of biofeedback technologies. Such efforts may be empowering in some senses but also increase the potential for confusion about truthfulness and lying. Use of the toys and games may support the emergence of psychopathic tendencies in which children exhibit antisocial and egocentric behavior along with a failure to learn about the consequences of their actions, in this case lying (Hermann). This situation is comparable to that of organisations that advertise training for how to “beat” or “outsmart” polygraphs, efforts that have often confounded law enforcement and intelligence agencies (Rosky). Playing with the Truth: Children and Honesty The constructions of lie detection events that are fostered in these toys and games generally simplify and mechanise truth-lie differences, and often present them in an unquestioning manner. Children are not encouraged to wonder whether the devices are indeed functioning as stated in the instructions and advertising materials. Failure to inform children about the toys’ intents and to request their consent about lie detection could also challenge some of them to attempt to subvert the toys’ mechanisms. However, many lie detection toys and games provide the opportunity for historically grounded lessons for children about the detection and surveillance strategies of other eras, if introduced in a critical and context-sensitive manner. The assumption that effective lie detection is possible and mental privacy is thus limited is reinforced by the framings of many of these toys and games (Oravec “Emergence”). Lying is indeed a reflection of “Theory of Mind” which enables us to imagine the minds of others, and children are given an arena for exploration on this theme. However, children also learn that their mental worlds and streams of consciousness are readily accessible by others with the use of certain technologies. Scientific justification for the use of polygraphs through the past decades has yielded problematic results, although polygraphs and many other lie detection technologies have still retained social acceptability apparently related to their cultural appeal (Paul, Fischer, and Voigt). Many voice stress apps are also not reliable according to recent research (Tyrsina). The normalisation of current and projected systems for lie detection and mental privacy incursions presents unsettling prospects for children’s development, and the designers and disseminators of toys and games need to consider these dimensions. Using technologically enhanced games, toys, or robots to detect “lies” rather than engaging more directly with other humans in a game context may have unfortunate overall outcomes. For example, the ability to practice various schemes to evade detection while lying may be an attractive aspect of these toys and games to some individuals. The kinds of input often linked with lying behaviors (or “leakage”) can include physiological changes in voice qualities that are generally not directly controllable by the speaker without specific practice; the games and toys provide such practice venues. Individuals who are able to disconnect from their autonomic expressions and lie without physical or acoustic signs can exacerbate personality issues and social pathologies. Some may become psychopaths, who lie to get their way and tend not to feel remorseful, with the games and toys potentially exacerbating genetic tendencies; others may become pathological liars, who lie regardless of whether there is specific benefit to them in doing so (Vrij). Some of these toy-related spying and detective activities can unfortunately be at the expense of others’ wellbeing, whatever their impacts on the children directly involved as players. For example, some forms of lie detection technologies incorporate the remote collection of data without notification of participants, as in the voice-analysis systems just described. Children’s curiosity about others’ thoughts and mental lives may be at the root of such initiatives, though children can also utilise them for bullying and other forms of aggressive behavior. Some research shows that early lie telling by children is often linked with self-defense as they attempt to save face, but other research couples it with anti-social action and behavioral problems (Lavoie). However, adults have been shown to have some considerable influence on children in their lie-telling conduct (Dykstra, Willoughby, and Evans), so there is hope that parents, guardians, teachers, and concerned community members can have some positive influence. Reflections and Conclusions: The “New Pinocchio”? Toys and games can indeed project comforting and nurturing imageries for children. However, they can also challenge individuals to think differently about themselves and others, and even present dystopian scenarios. For toy and game developers to promote lie detection technologies can be problematic because of the associations of lying with antisocial activity and behavioral problems as well as moral concerns. The characters that children play in roles of spies and lie detector administrators supply them with powerful narratives and impact on their mental concepts. The significance of truth-telling in children’s lives is expanding as societal attention to credibility issues increases. For example, children are often called on to present evidence during divorce proceedings and abuse-related cases, so there is a significant body of research about children’s verbal truth and deception patterns (Talwar, Lavoie, and Crossman). The data collected by some networked lie detection toys (such as voice stress analysers) can subsequently be used by third-parties for marketing purposes or direct surveillance, raising critical questions about consent (Oravec “Emergence”). Future entertainment modes may soon be developed with lie detection approaches comparable to the ones I discuss in this article, since many games rely on some form of mental privacy assumptions. Games often have some aspect of personal cognitive control at their roots, with the assumption that individuals can shield their own deliberations from other players at least to some extent. Technological capabilities for lie detection can alter the kinds of strategies involved in games. For example, if players know the quality of other players’ poker hands through technological means, games would need to be restructured substantially, with speed of response or other aspects at a premium. The current and future toy and game developments just discussed underscore the continuing need for ethical and professional vigilance on the part of researchers and developers as they choose projects to work on and technologies to bring to market. Children and young people who play with lie detection and surveillance-related artifacts are being exposed to assumptions about how their own consciousness functions and how they can best navigate in the world through truth-telling or lying. Although children once acquired insights about lying though moral fables like Pinocchio, they are now learning from corporate-developed technological toys and games. References Alder, Ken. The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession. Simon and Schuster, 2007. Bergers, Lara. “Only in America? A History of Lie Detection in the Netherlands in Comparative Perspective, ca. 1910–1980.” The Netherlands: Utrecht U, 2018. <https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/30502>. Bunn, Geoffrey C. The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Dykstra, Victoria, Teena Willoughby, and Angela D. Evans. "Perceptions of Dishonesty: Understanding Parents’ Reports of and Influence on Children and Adolescents’ Lie-Telling." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 49 (2020): 49–59. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01153-5>. Ekman, Paul. Telling Lies. New York: Norton, 1985. Granich, Mike. “17 Spy Gadgets and Spy Gear for Kids to Gift This Year.” Technolocheese, 2020. 14 Feb. 2020 <https://www.technolocheese.com/spy-gear-for-kids/>. Hermann, Henry. Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals: The Great Game of Life. Elsevier, 2017. Lavoie, Jennifer, et al. "Lie-telling as a Mode of Antisocial Action: Children’s Lies and Behavior Problems." Journal of Moral Education 47.4 (2018): 432–450. <https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2017.1405343>. Littlefield, Melissa. The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction. U of Michigan P, 2011. McQuarrie, Laura. “Hasbro's Lie Detector Game Uses Voice Analysis to Pick Up on Untruths.” Trendhunter, 2019. <https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/lie-detector-game>. Oravec, Jo Ann. "Interactive Toys and Children's Education: Strategies for Educators and Parents." Childhood Education 77.2 (2000): 81-85. ———. "The Emergence of 'Truth Machines'? Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Lie Detection." Ethics and Information Technology 24.6 (2022). <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-022-09621-6>. Paul, Bettina, Larissa Fischer, and Torsten Voigt. “Anachronistic Progress? User Notions of Lie Detection in the Juridical Field.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 328–346. <https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.433>. Pearson, Yvette. "Child-Robot Interaction: What Concerns about Privacy and Well-Being Arise When Children Play with, Use, and Learn from Robots?" American Scientist 108.1 (2020): 16–22. 22 June 2023 <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A613271878/AONE?u=anon~66b204b9&sid=googleScholar&xid=067570c2>. Perella, Nicolas. "An Essay on Pinocchio." Italica 63.1 (1986): 1–47. <https://doi.org/10.2307/479125>. Price, Emily. “Hasbro Is Launching a Lie Detector Party Game and Ghost-Busting Robot.” Fortune, 2019. 15 Feb. 2019 <http://fortune.com/2019/02/15/lie-detector-party-game/>. “Project MC2.” Amazon, 2020. <https://www.amazon.com/Project-Mc2-539230-Lie-Detector/dp/B015A7CHSA>. Rosky, Jeffrey. "The (F)utility of Post-Conviction Polygraph Testing." Sexual Abuse 25.3 (2013): 259–281. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1079063212455668>. Science Buddies. “Pinocchio’s Arm: A Lie Detector Test.” Scientific American, 10 Mar. 2016. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pinocchio-s-arm-a-lie-detector-test/>. “Shocking Liar.” Amazon, 2020. <https://www.amazon.com/Dayan-Cube-Lie-Detector-Game/dp/B000GUGTYU>. Talwar, Victoria, Jennifer Lavoie, and Angela Crossman. "Carving Pinocchio: Longitudinal Examination of Children’s Lying for Different Goals." Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 181 (2019): 34–55. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.12.003>. “TIME’s New Products.” TIME Magazine 78.1 (7 July 1961): 35. Tyrsina, Radu. “These 2 Lie Detecting Programs for PC Will Help You Determine the Truth from All the Lies.” Windowsreport, 5 Aug. 2017. <https://windowsreport.com/lie-detector-software-pc/>. Vrij, Aldert. Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities. John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Zhu, Dingju. "Feedback Big Data-Based Lie Robot." International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence 32.2 (2018). <https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218001418590024>.

Closer examination of contemporary art forms including music videos in addition to the Gothic’s literature legacy is essential, “as it is virtually impossible to ignore the relationship the Gothic holds to popular culture” (Piatti-Farnell ii). This article critically examines how Gothic themes and modes are used in the music videos of Lana Del Rey; particularly the “ways in which Gothic is dispersed through contemporary non-literary media” (Spooner and McEvoy 2). This work follows the argument laid down by Edwards and Monnet who describe Gothic’s assimilation into popular culture —Pop Gothic— as a powerful pop cultural force, not merely a subcultural or cult expression. By interpreting Del Rey’s work as a both a component of, and a contributor to, the Pop Gothic advance, themes of social climate, consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze can be interrogated. Indeed the potential for a collective crisis of these issues in early 21st Century western culture is exposed, “the façade of carnivalised surfaces is revealed to hide the chaos and entropy of existential emptiness.” (Yeo 17). Gothic modes have been approximated by Pop Gothic into the mainstream (Edwards and Monnet) as a driving force behind these contradictions and destabilisations. The Gothic has become ubiquitous within popular culture and continues to exert influence. This is easily reflected in the $392 million the first Twilight movie grossed at the box office (Edwards and Monnet). Examples are abundant in pop culture across music, film and television. Edwards and Monnet cite the movies Zombieland and Blade in the Pop Gothic march, along with TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Being Human, True Blood as well as Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster music album. Edwards and Monnet observe that the Gothic aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s, “melancholy and imagery associated with death, dying and the undead” (3), shifted from the corners of subculture to the mainstream of millennial popular culture. With this shift comes the rebelliousness and melancholy that characterises Gothic texts. This is evident when a pop star of Lana Del Rey’s popularity —her Summertime Sadness video alone has over 160 million views on youtube.com (YouTube)— narratively represents themes of death and suicide repeatedly in her videos. In two of Lana Del Rey’s music videos —Blue Jeans and Born to Die— either she or a representation of her persona dies. In a third video, Summertime Sadness, her companion takes her own life and Lana ultimately follows suit. Themes of death and loss are just the most obvious of Gothic elements present in Del Rey’s work. Del Rey’s songs and videos speak of the American dream, of aestheticised beauty, of being immaculately presented, well dressed and having hair “beauty queen style”, as in Summertime Sadness. She depicts an excess of hedonistic consumption and love that knows no bounds, not even death. Much of the delivery has resonance with the Gothic; performatively, visually and musically, and shows a subversion and fatalism that juxtaposes, contests and contradicts pop cultural tropes (Macfarlane). This contrary nature of the Gothic, as characterised by Botting, can provoke a sense of otherness; the uncanny, including “displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion or obsession” (Gothic 2). It is argued that these characteristics have been commodified into merchandisable and mainstream stylistic representations (Edwards and Monnet). Del Rey’s visual work uses this otherness and representation of repressed darkness as subversion or contestation to the bubble gum consumerist, fairy tale sexualisation of the Katy Perry brand of neo-liberal pop music that floods the mainstream (Macfarlane). Del Rey also harnesses the Gothic mode in her music, underscoring social anxieties through moments of sound which act as “a sonic imp, this music enters perception through the back door, and there it does its destabilising work” (van Elferen 137). As potential psychosocial sources of this otherness in the Gothic (Botting, Gothic), Jung argued that as a collective consciousness by repressing our darkest side, we can be dislocated from it. Further he argued that many modern ills —conflict, war, disenfranchisement, poverty— stem from culturally rationalised divisions of ‘good vs evil’ (Tacey). Providing a space for these dark sides to surface, Swirski comments that cultural product can act "as a social barometer and a cultural diagnostic tool. It identifies social trends and cultural patterns and weaves elaborate counterfactuals- literary fictions- that hang human faces on large-scale human abstractions such as society and culture" (1). Jung proposes the large-scale social abstraction; that to truly live with ourselves we need embrace the otherness inside us— to learn to live with it (Tacey). The Gothic may enable this living with, rather than living without. Jung asserts that we now rely so much on what we can touch, taste and own, that western culture has become a “creed without substance” (Tacey 32). In more concrete terms, Hoffie argues that popular media today tells stories: in terms of disaster and crisis: weather patterns: disastrous. Climate Change: disastrous. Global Financial Crisis: disastrous. Political situations: disastrous. Unemployment: disastrous. And so on. The high-pitched wail of this lament corrodes the peaks and troughs of potential emotional responsiveness; the vapours of benumbing apathy steam upwards like a bewitching spell. All stands still. Action, like in a bad dream, seems impossible. (14) This apathy in the face of crisis or disaster is well expressed in Del Rey’s work through the Gothic influenced lyrics and videos; she describes her partner as so good looking as to be “sick as cancer” in Blue Jeans and that her lover left her because he was “chasing paper”. Represented here is the social current that the need to acquire goods in late capitalism’s climate “of unrestrained consumerism” (Heine and Thakur 2) is her lover’s priority over companionship. Revealing more of the Gothic aesthetic is that her videos and songs represent this loss, they depict “disturbances of sanity and security” (Botting, Gothic 2) and thematically reflect the social climate of “disaster and crisis” (Hoffie 14). This sense of otherness through Gothic influences of the uncanny, death and melancholy have a significant impact on creative expression creating music videos that play like a kind of half remembered nightmare (Botting, Love Your Zombie; Macfarlane). In the black and white video for Blue Jeans the opening shot shows an image of Del Rey rippling and blurred, framed by circular waves of water as black as oil. The powerful Gothic aesthetic of the abyss is rendered here, “to convey the figurative meaning of a catastrophic situation seen as likely to occur whereby the individual will sink to immeasurable intellectual, ethical or moral depths” (Edwards and Monnet 9). This abyss is represented as Del Rey sings to her ghostly tattooed lover that she will love him until “the end of time” and climaxes in the suggestion that he drowns her. As in Edwards and Monnet‘s description of zombie films, Del Rey’s videos narratively “suggest that the postmodern condition is itself a form of madness that disseminates cultural trauma and erases historical memory” (8). This view is evident in contrasting Del Rey’s interview comment that she finds conversations about feminism boring (Cooper). Yet in her song delivery and lyrics she retains an ironic tone regards feminine power. This combination helps “produce a darkly funny and carnivalesque representation of sex and waste under late capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). Further evidence of these ironies and distorted juxtapositions of loss and possession are evident in the song Radio. The video —a bricolage of retrospective fashion imagery— and lyrics hint at the persistent desire for goods in US western culture (Heine and Thakur). Simultaneously in her song Radio, she is corruptibly engorged by consumption and being consumed (Mulvey) as she sings that life is “sweet like cinnamon, a fucking dream on Ritalin”. The video itself represents distorted dreams hyper-real on Ritalin. Del Rey’s work speaks of an excess; the overflow of sensations, sexual excess, of buying, of having, of owning, and at the same time the absence; of loss or not knowing what to have (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Exemplified by the lyrics in What Makes Us Girls, “do I know what I want?” and again in Radio “American dreams came true somehow, I swore I’d chase until I was dead”. Increasingly it is evident that Del Rey sings “as a woman who does not know what she wants” (Vigier 5). She illustrates the “endemic narcissism” (Hoffie 15) of contemporary western culture. Del Rey therefore clearly delineates much of “the loneliness, emptiness, and alienation that results from rampant consumerism and materialism under advanced capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). As a theme of this representation, Del Rey implies a sense of commodified female sexual energy through the male gaze (Mulvey), along with a sense of wasted youth and opportunity in the carnivalesque National Anthem. The video, shot as if on Super 8 film, tells the story of Del Rey’s ‘character’ married to a hedonistic style of president. It is reminiscent of the JFK story including authentic and detailed presentation of costume —especially Del Rey’s Jackie Onassis fashions— the couple posing in presidential gardens with handsome mixed-race children. Lavish lifestyles are depicted whilst the characters enjoy drinking, gambling and consumerist excess, Del Rey sings "It's a love story for the new age, For the six page, We're on a quick sick rampage, Wining and dining, Drinking and driving, Excessive buying, Overdose and dyin'". In National Anthem sexual excess is one of the strongest themes communicated. Repeatedly depicted are distinct close up shots of his hand on her thigh, and vice versa. Without being sexually explicit in itself, it is an overtly sexual reference, communicating something of sexual excess because of the sheer number of times it is highlighted in close-up shots. This links to the idea of the Gothic use of jouissance, a state of: excessive energies that burst in and beyond circuits of pleasure: intensities are read in relation to a form of subjectivity that finds itself briefly and paradoxically in moments of extreme loss. (Botting, Love Your Zombie 22) Del Rey represents these moments of loss —of herself, of her man, of her power, of her identity being subsumed by his— as intense pleasure, indicated in the video through sexual referencing. Botting argues that these excesses create anxieties; that in the pursuit of postmodern excess, of ownership, of consumption: the subject internalises the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalism, manifesting pathologies not of privation but overabundance: stress, eating disorders, self-harming, and a range of anxieties. (Love Your Zombie 22) These anxieties are further expressed in National Anthem. Del Rey sings to her lover that he cannot keep his “pants on” and she must “hold you like a python”. The python in this tale simultaneously symbolises the exotic, erotic and dangerous entrapment by her male suitor. Edwards and Monnet argue for the Gothic monster, whose sign is further referenced as Del Rey swims with crocodiles in Blue Jeans. Here the male power, patriarchy and dominance is represented as monstrous. In the video she shares the pool with her beau yet we only see Del Rey swim and writhe with the crocodiles. Analogous of her murderous lover, this adds a powerful otherness to the scene and reinforces the symbols of threatening masculinity and impeding disaster. This expression of monstrousness creates a cathartic tension as it “puts the ‘pop’ in Pop Goth: its popularity is based on the frisson of selling simultaneous aversion from and attraction to self-destruction and cultural taboo” (Edwards and Monnet 9). In a further representation of anxieties Del Rey conforms to the sexual object persona in large part through her retro pin-up iconography —meticulous attention to costume, continuous posing and pouting— and song lyrics (Buszek). As in National Anthem her lyrics talk of devotion and male strength to protect and to “keep me safe in his bell tower”. Her videos, whilst they may show some of her strength, ultimately reside in patriarchal resolution (Mulvey). She is generally confounded by the male figures in her videos appearing to be very much alone and away from them: most notably in Blue Jeans, Born to Die and Video Games. In two cases it is suggested she is murdered by the male figures of her love. Her costume and appearance —iconic 1960’s swimsuits, pantsuits and big hairstyles in National Anthem— portray something of the retro pin-up. Buszek argues that at one time “young feminists may poke fun at the pin-up, but they do so in ways that betray affinities with, even affection for, the genre itself” (3). Del Rey simultaneously adheres to and confronts these normative gender roles, as is characteristic of the Gothic mode (Botting, Gothic). These very Gothic contradictions are also evident in Del Rey’s often ironic or mocking song delivery, undermining apparent heteronormative sexual and gender positioning. In National Anthem she sings, as if parodying women who might sincerely ask, “do you think he’ll buy me lots of diamonds?”. Her conformity is however, subverted. In Del Rey’s videos, clear evidence exists in her facial expressions where she consistently portrays Gothic elements of uncertainty, sorrow, grief and a pervading sense that she does not belong in this world (Botting, Gothic). Whilst depicted as a brooding and mourning widow —simultaneously playing the mistress luxuriating on a lion skin rug— in National Anthem Del Rey sings, “money is the anthem of success” without a smile or sense of any attachment to the lyrics. In the same song she sings “God you’re so handsome” without a trace of glee, pleasure or optimism. In the video for Blue Jeans she sings, “I will love you til the end of time” staring sorrowfully into the distance or directly at the camera. This confident yet ‘dead stare’ emphasises the overall juxtaposition of the largely positive lyrical expression, with the sorrowful facial expression and low sung notes. Del Rey signifies repeatedly that something is amiss; that the American dream is over and that even with apparent success within this sphere, there exists only emptiness and isolation (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Further contradictions exist as Lana Del Rey walks this blurred line —as is the Gothic mode— between heteronormative and ambiguous gender roles (Botting, Gothic; Edwards and Monnet). Lana Del Rey oscillates between positions of strength and independence —shown in her deadpan to-camera delivery— to that of weakness and subjugation. As she plays narrator, Del Rey symbolically reclaims some power as she retells the tragic story of Born to Die from her throne. Represented here Del Rey’s persona exerts a troubled malevolence, with two tigers calmly sat by her side: her benevolent pets, or symbols of contrived excess. She simultaneously presents the angelic —resplendent in sheer white dress and garland ‘crown’ headdress of the spurned bride in the story— and the stoic as she stares down the camera. Del Rey is powerful and in many senses threatening. At one point she draws a manicured thumbnail across her neck in a cut-throat gesture; a movement echoed later by her lover. Her character ultimately walks symbolically —and latently— to her death. She neither remedies her position as subservient, subordinate female nor revisits any kind of redemption for the excessive male dominance in her videos. The “excess is countered by greater excess” (Botting Love Your Zombie 27) and leads to otherness. In this reading of Del Rey’s work, there are representations that remain explicitly Pop Gothic, eliciting sensations of paranoia and fear, overloading her videos with these signs (Yeo). These signs elicit the otherness of the Gothic mode; expressed in visual symbols of violence, passion or obsession (Botting, Gothic). In our digital visual age, subjecting an eager viewer to this excess of signs creates the conditions for over-reading of a growing gender or consumerist paranoia, enabled by the Gothic, “paranoia stems from an excessive over-reading of signs and is a product of interpretation, misinterpretation and re-interpretation based on one’s knowledge or lack of it” (Yeo 22). Del Rey stimulates these sensations of paranoia partly through interlaying intertextual references. She does this thematically —Gothic melancholy— and pop culturally channelling Marilyn Monroe and other fashion iconography, as well as through explicit textual references, as in her most recent single Ultraviolence. In Ultraviolence, Del Rey sings “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”. Effortlessly and simultaneously she celebrates and lays bare her pain; however the intertextual reference to the violent controversy of the film A Clockwork Orange serves to aestheticise the domestic violence she describes. With Del Rey it may be that as meaning is sought amongst the texts as Macfarlane wrote about Lady Gaga, Del Rey’s “truth is ultimately irrelevant in the face of its interlayed performance” (130). Del Rey’s Gothic mode of ambiguity, of transgressed boundaries and unclear lines, shows “this ambience of perpetually deferred climax is no stranger to contemporary culture” (Hoffie 15) and may go some way to expressing something of the “lived experience of her audience” (Vigier 1). Hermes argues that in post-feminist pop culture, strong independent post-feminist women can be characterised by their ability to break traditional taboos, question or hold up for interrogation norms and traditions, but that ultimately narrative arches tend to restore the patriarchal norm. Edwards and Monnet assert that the Gothic in Pop Gothic cultural representation can become “post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender” (6). In places Del Ray exhibits this postmodernism but through the use of Gothic mode goes outside political debates and blurs clear lines of feminist discourse (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Whilst a duality in the texts exists; comments on consumerism, the emptiness of capitalist society and a suicidal expression of hopelessness, are undermined as she demonstrates conformity to subservient gender roles and her ambiguously ironic need to be “young and beautiful”. To be consumed by her man thus defines her value as an object within a consumerist neo-liberal trope (Jameson). This analysis goes some way to confirming Hermes’ assertion that in this post-feminist climate there has been a “loss of a political agenda, or the foundation for a new one, where it signposts the overcoming of unproductive old distinctions between feminist and feminine” (79). Hermes further argues, with reference to television shows Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, that presentation of female characters or personas has moved forward; the man is no longer the lone guarantor of a woman’s happiness. Yet many of the tropes in Del Rey’s work are familiar; overwhelming love for her companion equal only to the emphasis on physical appearance. Del Rey breaks taboos —she is powerful, sexual and a romantic predator, without being a demon seductress— and satirises consumerist excess and gender inequality; yet she remains sexually and politically subservient to the whim and sometimes violently expressed or implied male gaze (Mulvey). Del Rey may well represent something of Vigier’s assertion that whilst society has clear direction for the ‘success’ of women, “that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them” (1). In closing, there is no clear answer as to whether Del Rey is a Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess; she is neither and she is both. In Vigier’s words, “self-exploitation or self-destruction cannot be the only choices open to young women today” (13). Del Rey’s work is provocative on multiple levels. It hints at the pull of rampant consumerism and the immediacy of narcissistic desires, interlinked with contradictions which indicate the potential for social crises. This is shown in Del Rey’s use of the Gothic — otherness, the monstrous, darkness and death— and its juxtaposition with heteronormative gender representations which highlights the persistent commodification of the female body, its subjugation to male power and the potential for deep anxieties in 21st-century identity. References Blue Jeans. Dir. Yoann Lemoine. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2014. Botting, Fred. "Love Your Zombie." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Edwards, Justin and Agnieszka Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 19-36. Buszek, Maria. Pin-Up Grrrls Feminism, Sexuality and Popular Culture. London: Duke University Press, 2006. Cooper, Duncan. "Lana Del Rey Cover Interview." Fader, June 2014. Edwards, Justin, and Agnieszka Monnet. "Introduction." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 1-18. 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