Academic literature on the topic 'The collected works of Billy the Kid'

Michael Ondaatje's second collection of poems, Rat Jelly (1973), is a crucial transitional work that simultaneously consolidates the early promise and achievement of The Dainty Monsters (1967) and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1969), articulates Ondaatje's early poetics in a handful of ambitious, sometimes almost allegorical lyrics, and in two of its poems,'Letters and Other Worlds' and 'Burning Hills,' anticipates Ondaatje's turn in the late 1970s and early 1980s towards his Sri Lankan past as a central concern in his poetry and prose. Though the collection contains some of Ondaatje's finest lyrics, it also marks the end of what might be called the modernist phase of his development as a poet, the phase in which one might still hear echoes of Edwin Muir or Wallace Stevens.

From the beginning of his writing career in the early sixties until the recent publication of In the Skin of a Lian (1987), the Canada of Michael Ondaatje had represented one thing: a geographical locale which he has selected as his home but which, fundamentally, had failed to engage his imagination. The fictional worlds he created in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family, has been located outside of Canada, each corresponding to an actual place complete with historical and geographical references. For this very reason it has been impossible - as Sam Solecki noted in his introduction to Spider Blues, »a collection of reviews and essays on Ondaatje - to place this anomalous literary presence in Canada within »specifically Canadian tradition of writing ...«, a tradition that would»include and see relationships among figures as different as Roberts, Pratt, F. R. Scott, Purdy and Atwood ...« Ondaatje's »characters, landscapes, stories and themes resist any taxonomies based on overtly Canadian thematics.« In fact, Solecki further suggested that Ondaatje, like »V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Salmon Rushdie ..., compels a rethinking of the notion of a national tradition«. Similarly, another critic from the same collection described Ondaatje's position in the context of Canadian writing as unique - a position according to which »language or audience or the identity and the role of the poet are indeterminate. «

From the beginning of his writing career in the early sixties until the recent publication of In the Skin of a Lian (1987), the Canada of Michael Ondaatje had represented one thing: a geographical locale which he has selected as his home but which, fundamentally, had failed to engage his imagination. The fictional worlds he created in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family, has been located outside of Canada, each corresponding to an actual place complete with historical and geographical references. For this very reason it has been impossible - as Sam Solecki noted in his introduction to Spider Blues, »a collection of reviews and essays on Ondaatje - to place this anomalous literary presence in Canada within »specifically Canadian tradition of writing ...«, a tradition that would»include and see relationships among figures as different as Roberts, Pratt, F. R. Scott, Purdy and Atwood ...« Ondaatje's »characters, landscapes, stories and themes resist any taxonomies based on overtly Canadian thematics.« In fact, Solecki further suggested that Ondaatje, like »V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Salmon Rushdie ..., compels a rethinking of the notion of a national tradition«. Similarly, another critic from the same collection described Ondaatje's position in the context of Canadian writing as unique - a position according to which »language or audience or the identity and the role of the poet are indeterminate. «

Although belonging to literatures spatially and traditionally very remote from each other, John Steinbeck, an American Nobel Prize winner, and Frank Hardy, an Australian novelist and story-teller, share a number of common grounds. The fact that by the time Hardy wrote his first novel, in 1950, Steinbeck was already a popular writer with a long list of masterpieces does not justify the assumption that Hardy had Steinbeck at hand when writing his best-sellers, but it does exclude the opposite direction of inheritance. Hardy's creativ impulses and appropriations may have been the unconscious results of his omnivorous reading after he realized that "the transition from short stories [in which he excelled] to the novel was an obstacle not easily surmounted" as he confessed in The Hard Way: The Story Behind "Power Without Glory" (109). Furthermore, since both were highly regarded proletarian writers in communist Russia, Hardy might have become acquainted with Steinbeck's novels on one of his frequent visits to that country between 1951 and 1969.2 Upon closer reading, inter-textual entanglements with Steinbeck's prose can be detected in several of his books, including But the Dead Are Many (1975), the Billy Borker material collected in The Yarns of Billy Barker (1965) and in The Great Australian Lover and Other Stories (1967), and in Power Without Glory (1950). My purpose in this essay is to briefly illuminate the most striking similarities between the two authors' narrative strategies in terms of their writing style, narrative technique, and subject matter, and link these textual affinities to the larger social and cultural milieu of each author. In the second part I will focus on the parallels between their central works, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Hardy's Power Without Glory.

The concept of transmedia storyworlds unfolding across complex serial narrative structures has become increasingly important to the study of modern media industries and audience communities. Yet, the precise connections between transmedia networks, serial structures, and narrative processes often remain underdeveloped. The dispersion of potential story elements across a diverse collection of media platforms and technologies prompts questions concerning the function of seriality in the absence of fixed instalments, the meaning of narrative when plot is largely a personal construction of each audience member, and the nature of storytelling in the absence of a unifying author, or when authorship itself takes on a serial character. This special issue opens a conversation on the intersection of these three concepts and their implications for a variety of disciplines, artistic practices, and philosophies. By re-thinking these concepts from fresh perspectives, the collection challenges scholars to consider how a wide range of academic, aesthetic, and social phenomena might be productively thought through using the overlapping lenses of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity. Thus, the collection gathers scholars from life-writing, sport, film studies, cultural anthropology, fine arts, media studies, and literature, all of whom find common ground at this fruitful crossroads. This breadth also challenges the narrow use of transmedia as a specialized term to describe current developments in corporate mass media products that seek to exploit the affordances of hybrid digital media environments. Many prominent scholars, including Marie-Laure Ryan and Henry Jenkins, acknowledge that a basic definition of transmedia as stories with extensions and reinterpretations in numerous media forms includes the oldest kinds of human expression, such as the ancient storyworlds of Arthurian legend and The Odyssey. Yet, what Jenkins terms “top-down” transmedia—that is, pre-planned and often corporate transmedia—has received a disproportionate share of scholarly attention, with modern franchises like The Matrix, the Marvel universe, and Lost serving as common exemplars (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny; Hadas; Mittell; Scolari). Thus, many of the contributions to this issue push the boundaries of what has commonly been studied as transmedia as well as the limits of what may be considered a serial structure or even a story. For example, these papers imagine how an autobiography may also be a digital concept album unfolding in reverse, how participatory artistic performances may unfold in unpredictable instalments across physical and digital space, and how studying sports fandom as a long series of transmedia narrative elements encourages scholars to grapple with the unique structures assembled by audiences of non-fictional story worlds. Setting these experimental offerings into dialogue with entries that approach the study of transmedia in a more established manner provides the basis for building bridges between such recognized conversations in new media studies and potential collaborations with other disciplines and subfields of media studies.This issue builds upon papers collected from four years of the International Transmedia Serial Narration Seminar, which I co-organized with Dr. Claire Cornillon, Assistant Professor (Maîtresse de Conférences) of comparative literature at Université de Nîmes. The seminar held sessions in Paris, Le Havre, Rouen, Amsterdam, and Utrecht, with interdisciplinary speakers from the USA, Australia, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As a transnational, interdisciplinary project intended to cross both theoretical and physical boundaries, the seminar aimed to foster exchange between academic conversations that can become isolated not only within disciplines, but also within national and linguistic borders. The seminar thus sought to enhance academic mobility between both people and ideas, and the digital, open-access publication of the collected papers alongside additional scholarly interlocutors serves to broaden the seminar’s goals of creating a border-crossing conversation. After two special issues primarily collecting the French language papers in TV/Series (2014) and Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (2017), this issue seeks to share the Transmedia Serial Narration project with a wider audience by publishing the remaining English-language papers, accompanied by several other contributions in dialogue with the seminar’s themes. It is our hope that this collection will invite a broad international audience to creatively question the meaning of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity both historically and in the modern, rapidly changing, global and digital media environment.Several articles in the issue illuminate existing debates and common case studies in transmedia scholarship by comparing theoretical models to the much more slippery reality of a media form in flux. Thus, Mélanie Bourdaa’s feature article, “From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines,” examines theories of narrative complexity and transmedia by scholars including Henry Jenkins, Derek Johnson, and Jason Mittell to then propose a new typology of extensions to accommodate the lived reality expressed by producers of transmedia. Because her interviews with artists and writers emphasize the co-constitutive nature of economic and narrative considerations in professionals’ decisions, Bourdaa’s typology can offer researchers a tool to clarify the marketing and narrative layers of transmedia extensions. As such, her classification system further illuminates what is particular about forms of corporate transmedia with a profit orientation, which may not be shared by non-profit, collective, and independently produced transmedia projects.Likewise, Radha O’Meara and Alex Bevan map existing scholarship on transmedia to point out the limitations of deriving theory only from certain forms of storytelling. In their article “Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations,” O’Meara and Bevan argue that scholars have preferred to focus on examples of transmedia with a strong central author-figure or that they may indeed help to rhetorically shore up the coherency of transmedia authorship through writing about transmedia creators as auteurs. Tying their critique to the established weaknesses of auteur theory associated with classic commentaries like Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?”, O’Meara and Bevan explain that this focus on transmedia creators as authority figures reinforces hierarchical, patriarchal understandings of the creative process and excludes from consideration all those unauthorized transmedia extensions through which audiences frequently engage and make meaning from transmedia networks. They also emphasize the importance of constructing academic theories of transmedia authorship that can accommodate collaborative forms of hybrid amateur and professional authorship, as well as tolerate the ambiguities of “authorless” storyworlds that lack clear narrative boundaries. O’Meara and Bevan argue that such theories will help to break down gendered power hierarchies in Hollywood, which have long allowed individual men to “claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries.”Dan Hassler-Forest likewise considers existing theory and a corporate case study in his examination of analogue echoes within a modern transmedia serial structure by mapping the storyworld of Twin Peaks (1990). His article, “‘Two Birds with One Stone’: Transmedia Serialisation in Twin Peaks,” demonstrates the push-and-pull between two contemporary TV production strategies: first, the use of transmedia elements that draw viewers away from the TV screen toward other platforms, and second, the deployment of strategies that draw viewers back to the TV by incentivizing broadcast-era appointment viewing. Twin Peaks offers a particularly interesting example of the manner in which these strategies intertwine partly because it already offered viewers an analogue transmedia experience in the 1990s by splitting story elements between TV episodes and books. Unlike O’Meara and Bevan, who elucidate the growing prominence of transmedia auteurs who lend rhetorical coherence to dispersed narrative elements, Hassler-Forest argues that this older analogue transmedia network capitalized upon the dilution of authorial authority, due to the distance between TV and book versions, to negotiate tensions between the producers’ competing visions. Hassler-Forest also notes that the addition of digital soundtrack albums further complicates the serial nature of the story by using the iTunes and TV distribution schedules to incentivize repeated sequential consumption of each element, thus drawing modern viewers to the TV screen, then the computer screen, and then back again.Two articles offer a concrete test of these theoretical perspectives by utilizing ethnographic participant-observation and interviewing to examine how audiences actually navigate diffuse, dispersed storyworlds. For example, Céline Masoni’s article, “From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience,” documents fans’ highly strategic participatory practices. From her observations of and interviews with fans, Masoni theorizes the types of media literacy and social as well as technological competencies cultivated through transmedia fan practices. Olivier Servais and Sarah Sepulchre’s article similarly describes a long-term ethnography of fan transmedia activity, including interviews with fans and participant-observation of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) Game of Thrones Ascent (2013). Servais and Sepulchre find that most people in their interviews are not “committed” fans, but rather casual readers and viewers who follow transmedia extensions sporadically. By focusing on this group, they widen the existing research which often focuses on or assumes a committed audience like the skilful and literate fans discussed by Masoni.Servais and Sepulchre’s results suggest that these viewers may be less likely to seek out all transmedia extensions but readily accept and adapt unexpected elements, such as the media appearances of actors, to add to their serial experiences of the storyworld. In a parallel research protocol observing the Game of Thrones Ascent MMORPG, Servais and Sepulchre report that the most highly-skilled players exhibit few behaviours associated with immersion in the storyworld, but the majority of less-skilled players use their gameplay choices to increase immersion by, for example, choosing a player name that evokes the narrative. As a result, Servais and Sepulchre shed light upon the activities of transmedia audiences who are not necessarily deeply committed to the entire transmedia network, and yet who nonetheless make deliberate choices to collect their preferred narrative elements and increase their own immersion.Two contributors elucidate forms of transmedia that upset the common emphasis on storyworlds with film or TV as the core property or “mothership” (Scott). In her article “Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games,” Joyce Goggin maps the history of intersections between experimental literature and ludology. As a result, she questions the continuing dichotomy between narratology and ludology in game studies to argue for a more broadly transmedia strategy, in which the same storyworld may be simultaneously narrative and ludic. Such a theory can incorporate a great deal of what might otherwise be unproblematically treated as literature, opening up the book to interrogation as an inherently transmedial medium.L.J. Maher similarly examines the serial narrative structures that may take shape in a transmedia storyworld centred on music rather than film or TV. In her article “You Got Spirit, Kid: Transmedial Life-Writing Across Time and Space,” Maher charts the music, graphic novels, and fan interactions that comprise the Coheed and Cambria band storyworld. In particular, Maher emphasizes the importance of autobiography for Coheed and Cambria, which bridges between fictional and non-fictional narrative elements. This interplay remains undertheorized within transmedia scholarship, although a few have begun to explicate the use of transmedia life-writing in an activist context (Cati and Piredda; Van Luyn and Klaebe; Riggs). As a result, Maher widens the scope of existing transmedia theory by more thoroughly connecting fictional and autobiographical elements in the same storyworld and considering how serial transmedia storytelling structures may differ when the core component is music.The final three articles take a more experimental approach that actively challenges the existing boundaries of transmedia scholarship. Catherine Lord’s article, “Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as Serial and Trans-serial,” explores the unique storytelling structures of a cluster of independent films that traverse time, space, medium, and gender. Although not a traditional transmedia project, since the network includes a novel and film adaptations and extensions by different directors as well as real-world locations and histories, Lord challenges transmedia theorists to imagine storyworlds that include popular history, independent production, and spatial performances and practices. Lord argues that the main character’s trans identity provides an embodied and theoretical pivot within the storyworld, which invites audiences to accept a position of radical mobility where all fixed expectations about the separation between categories of flora and fauna, centre and periphery, the present and the past, as well as authorized and unauthorized extensions, dissolve.In his article “Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport,” Markus Stauff extends the concept of serial transmedia storyworlds to sport, focusing on an audience-centred perspective. For the most part, transmedia has been theorized with fictional storyworlds as the prototypical examples. A growing number of scholars, including Arnau Gifreu-Castells and Siobhan O'Flynn, enrich our understanding of transmedia storytelling by exploring non-fiction examples, but these are commonly restricted to the documentary genre (Freeman; Gifreu-Castells, Misek, and Verbruggen; Karlsen; Kerrigan and Velikovsky). Very few scholars comment on the transmedia nature of sport coverage and fandom, and when they do so it is often within the framework of transmedia news coverage (Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia; McClearen; Waysdorf). Stauff’s article thus provides a welcome addition to the existing scholarship in this field by theorizing how sport fans construct a user-centred serial transmedia storyworld by piecing together narrative elements across media sources, embodied experiences, and the serialized ritual of sport seasons. In doing so, he points toward ways in which non-fiction transmedia may significantly differ from fictional storyworlds, but he also enriches our understanding of an audience-centred perspective on the construction of transmedia serial narratives.In his artistic practice, Robert Lawrence may most profoundly stretch the existing parameters of transmedia theory. Lawrence’s article, “Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art,” details his decades-long interrogation of transmedia seriality through performative and participatory forms of art that bridge digital space, studio space, and public space. While theatre and fine arts have often been considered through the theoretical lens of intermediality (Bennett, Boenisch, Kattenbelt, Vandsoe), the nexus of transmedia, seriality, and narrative enables Lawrence to describe the complex, interconnected web of planned and unplanned extensions of his hybrid digital and physical installations, which often last for decades and incorporate a global scope. Lawrence thus takes the strategies of engagement that are perhaps more familiar to transmedia theorists from corporate viral marketing campaigns and turns them toward civic ends (Anyiwo, Bourdaa, Hardy, Hassler-Forest, Scolari, Sokolova, Stork). As such, Lawrence’s artistic practice challenges theorists of transmedia and intermedia to consider the kinds of social and political “interventions” that artists and citizens can stage through the networked possibilities of transmedia expression and how the impact of such projects can be amplified through serial repetition.Together, the whole collection opens new pathways for transmedia scholarship, more deeply explores how transmedia narration complicates understandings of seriality, and constructs an international, interdisciplinary dialogue that brings often isolated conversations into contact. In particular, this issue enriches the existing scholarship on independent, artistic, and non-fiction transmedia, while also proposing some important limitations, exceptions, and critiques to existing scholarship featuring corporate transmedia projects with a commercial, top-down structure and a strong auteur-like creator. These diverse case studies and perspectives enable us to understand more inclusively the structures and social functions of transmedia in the pre-digital age, to theorize more robustly how audiences experience transmedia in the current era of experimentation, and to imagine more broadly a complex future for transmedia seriality wherein professionals, artists, and amateurs all engage in an iterative, inclusive process of creative and civic storytelling, transcending artificial borders imposed by discipline, nationalism, capitalism, and medium.ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. "It’s Not Television, It’s Transmedia Storytelling: Marketing the ‘Real’World of True Blood." True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic. Ed. Brigid Cherry. New York: IB Tauris, 2012. 157-71.Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1988. 142-48.Bennett, Jill. "Aesthetics of Intermediality." Art History 30.3 (2007): 432-450.Boenisch, Peter M. "Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance." (2006): 103-116.Bourdaa, Melanie. "This Is Not Marketing. This Is HBO: Branding HBO with Transmedia Storytelling." Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 7.1 (2014).Cati, Alice, and Maria Francesca Piredda. "Among Drowned Lives: Digital Archives and Migrant Memories in the Age of Transmediality." a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 628-637.Flanagan, Martin, Andrew Livingstone, and Mike McKenny. The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.Foucault, Michel. "Authorship: What Is an Author?" Screen 20.1 (1979): 13-34.Freeman, Matthew. "Small Change – Big Difference: Tracking the Transmediality of Red Nose Day." VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5.10 (2016): 87-96.Gambarato, Renira Rampazzo, Geane C. Alzamora, and Lorena Peret Teixeira Tárcia. "2016 Rio Summer Olympics and the Transmedia Journalism of Planned Events." Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2018. 126-146.Gifreu-Castells, Arnau. "Mapping Trends in Interactive Non-fiction through the Lenses of Interactive Documentary." International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Berlin: Springer, 2014.Gifreu-Castells, Arnau, Richard Misek, and Erwin Verbruggen. "Transgressing the Non-fiction Transmedia Narrative." VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5.10 (2016): 1-3.Hadas, Leora. "Authorship and Authenticity in the Transmedia Brand: The Case of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD." Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 7.1 (2014).Hardy, Jonathan. "Mapping Commercial Intertextuality: HBO’s True Blood." Convergence 17.1 (2011): 7-17.Hassler-Forest, Dan. "Skimmers, Dippers, and Divers: Campfire’s Steve Coulson on Transmedia Marketing and Audience Participation." Participations 13.1 (2016): 682-692.Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 31 July 2011. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>. ———. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 21 Mar. 2007. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html>. ———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York UP, 2013.Karlsen, Joakim. "Aligning Participation with Authorship: Independent Transmedia Documentary Production in Norway." VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5.10 (2016): 40-51.Kattenbelt, Chiel. "Theatre as the Art of the Performer and the Stage of Intermediality." Intermediality in Theatre and Performance 2 (2006): 29-39.Kerrigan, Susan, and J. T. Velikovsky. "Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives through The Living History of Fort Scratchley Project." Convergence 22.3 (2016): 250-268.Van Luyn, Ariella, and Helen Klaebe. "Making Stories Matter: Using Participatory New Media Storytelling and Evaluation to Serve Marginalized and Regional Communities." Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion and the Arts. Intellect Press, 2015. 157-173.McClearen, Jennifer. "‘We Are All Fighters’: The Transmedia Marketing of Difference in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)." International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 18.Mittell, Jason. "Playing for Plot in the Lost and Portal Franchises." Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 6.1 (2012): 5-13.O'Flynn, Siobhan. "Documentary's Metamorphic Form: Webdoc, Interactive, Transmedia, Participatory and Beyond." Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 141-157.Riggs, Nicholas A. "Leaving Cancerland: Following Bud at the End of Life." Storytelling, Self, Society 10.1 (2014): 78-92.Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today, 34.3 (2013): 361-388. <https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2325250>.Scolari, Carlos Alberto. "Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production." International Journal of Communication 3 (2009).Scott, Suzanne. “Who’s Steering the Mothership: The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling.” The Participatory Cultures Handbook. Eds. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson. New York: Routledge, 2013. 43-53.Sokolova, Natalia. "Co-opting Transmedia Consumers: User Content as Entertainment or ‘Free Labour’? The Cases of STALKER. and Metro 2033." Europe-Asia Studies 64.8 (2012): 1565-1583.Stork, Matthias. "The Cultural Economics of Performance Space: Negotiating Fan, Labor, and Marketing Practice in Glee's Transmedia Geography." Transformative Works & Cultures 15 (2014).Waysdorf, Abby. "My Football Fandoms, Performance, and Place." Transformative Works & Cultures 18 (2015).Vandsoe, Anette. "Listening to the World. Sound, Media and Intermediality in Contemporary Sound Art." SoundEffects – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 1.1 (2011): 67-81.

The analytical literature posits a dichotomy between Copland’s “popular” and “serious” music. Despite different motivic and hannonic structures on the surface, however, these styles are consistent in their underlying use of tonality. Tonics in both styles are defined by the same set of tonicizing techniques; and tonics in both styles serve the same function — to define the changing scale-degree function of pcs that are emphasized in various ways as common to the collections of successive tonics. The most important of these changes in scale-degree function are summarized in pitch-class continuity graphs that show the relation of the changes to thematic and harmonic form. Detailed analyses, which cover two “popular” and two “serious” works by Copland, demonstrate the consistency between the two styles. Besides demonstrating an underlying stylistic consistency these graphs provide useful information about structure in Copland’s music because they confirm striking features of Copland’s thematic and tonal designs.

The second chapter traces in detail how Ondaatje’s text engages in what Askin terms disfiguration—the very process of disfiguring its representational surface both in terms of content and form—in order to unearth its constitutive sensations. Disfiguration makes tangible what otherwise remains intangible, the very constitution and genesis of actual narratives from virtual sensations. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid disfiguration is most prominently on display in a series of becomings the protagonist undergoes culminating in his metaleptic account of his own death where his brain breaks apart and thus literally kills off representation. It is in staging such acute moments of representational crisis that the narrative reaches the impersonal and nonhuman beyond of personal and human experience. By the same token the beyond of actual narratives is attained: the sensations and forces that make up the death of Billy are those that make up the narrative at hand in so far as it is the narrative that assembles and composes the figure of Billy. It is thus that The Collected Works of Billy the Kid can be said to be a Deleuzian monument of sensation.

The chimera of form featured in my fourth chapter is the archival legend, which I use to classify Billy the Kid and Sailor from Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970; extended reissue, 2008) and Anil’s Ghost (2000) respectively. Combining theories of the archive as a space of material collection and artifactual remains and theories of the legend as a genre of storytelling that cultivates the unreal and the unknowable, I argue that Ondaatje uses archival legends to broach the tensions between isolationism and internationalism, cultural particularity and the universal norms of justice associated with human rights. While some critics have argued that Ondaatje’s collage aesthetics are irresponsible and compound injustice because they obscure the cause and effect of historicist narratives (a criticism that will recall for many Georg Lukács’ famous disregard for modernism), this chapter shows that Ondaatje’s work subjects the norms of both international justice and historicist causality to criticism for being inadequately sensitive to cultural memory. Rejecting both the disembodying abstractions of human rights dicta and the embodying practices of historical identification, he uses archival legends as figure of semi-embodiment brought into being by formal strategies of artifact collection, fragment accretion, and loose assembly. These legends situate universal norms and historical facts within the foggier, but actually-existing realms of national myth and transnational memory. Without attending to these dominant and emergent domains of cultural memory, Ondaatje suggests that internationalism forsakes the domain of sentiment and risks becoming tone deaf to the cosmological gaps that persist in how members of “strong” versus “weak” nations view colonialism’s impact on the global present.

Janet Reed moves to New York City to join Eugene Loring’s company, Dance Players, as a principal dancer alongside Lew Christensen. The company put on shows such as Billy the Kid and City Portrait. Reed eventually works with American Concert Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, which Todd Bolender also joins.

The objective of the article is a deliberation on the activity of women in the role of everyday life organizers, who run their own households. The author analyzes in detail the practice undertaken by women in the Polish People’s Republic era (mainly in the 1970s and 1980s), and her research materials include fragments of notes that come from the collection of household bills which were collected by a clerk from Lodz between 1954 and 2004, and detailed ethnographical interviews with women running households in Lodz in the 1970s and 1980s. The author notices that the respondents treated their work in their households in the period of the Polish People’s Republic as an important element of their own life experience and the source of satisfaction. They had an important role which was worth recognition, they derived pleasure from the fact that they were able to create good conditions of life (as much as it was possible then) for themselves and their closest ones. In the situation of the overall social crisis they would demonstrate bigger determination than men and the will to fight for a better fate. In the author’s opinion, reconstructing women’s experiences of that kind constitutes a great way to have a deep understanding of a local cultural tradition and helps to show the impact of “ordinary” women on the creation of cultural daily life.

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education sector in unprecedented ways. As with many other countries around the world, the Ethiopian government closed schools following the first identified case in the capital city, Addis Ababa, on the 16th of March 2020. Across the country, these closures resulted in more than 26 million learners staying at home for almost eight months (UNESCO, 2021). In addition to this hiatus in their education, pupils were promoted automatically to the next grade with only 45 days of catch-up classes (Ministry of Education, 2020). In other words, those attending a specific school grade in March 2020 were then promoted to the next grade when school resumed in October 2020. For a significant proportion of Ethiopian pupils, learning during school closures was extremely limited despite the government’s efforts to create educational programmes via national television and radio stations (Kim et al., 2021a; Yorke et al., 2020). School closures, combined with barriers to accessing remote educational resources, meant potential learning losses for a significant number of pupils. Several studies have already indicated that COVID-19 resulted in learning losses, especially among the poorest and most disadvantaged groups. A study in Indonesia found that pupils lost 11 points on the PISA3 reading scale due to the four-month school closure from March to July 2020 (Yarrow, Masood & Afkar, 2020). It was also estimated that Grade 4 pupils in South Africa experienced losses equivalent to more than 60 percent of an academic year (Ardington, Wills & Kotze, 2021), while pupils in the UK lost a third of their expected learning during pandemic-related school closures (Major, Eyles & Machin, 2021). It is anticipated that school closures in Ethiopia could similarly result in learning losses and challenges for pupils to catch up with their learning, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our related emerging findings in Ethiopia have indicated that school closures exacerbated pre-existing inequalities in education, where progress was much lower for rural students compared to those in urban areas who were tracked from Grade 4 to Grade 6 (Kim et al., 2021b; Bayley et al., 2021). Building on this work in Ethiopia, this Insight Note provides a new perspective on numeracy achievements of Grade 1 and Grade 4 pupils by comparing learning at the start of each academic year and the gains over the course of the year across two academic years: 2018-19 and 2020-21. During the 2018-19 academic year, the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Ethiopia programme collected data on students’ numeracy achievement from 168 schools. After schools reopened in October 2020, and with additional support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, data on students’ numeracy achievements were collected for two new cohorts of pupils in Grades 1 and 4 in the same schools using the same instruments. This has enabled us to compare learning patterns between two cohorts in the same grades and schools before and during the pandemic. More specifically, in this Insight Note, we aim to: -Compare foundational numeracy levels of pupils entering Grade 1 in the 2020-21 academic year relative to those in 2018-19. -Compare progress in foundational numeracy for Grade 1 pupils over the course of the 2020-21 academic year relative to that seen during the 2018-19 academic year. -Compare numeracy levels of pupils entering Grade 4 in the 2020-21 academic year relative to those entering the same grade in 2018-19. -Compare progress in numeracy for Grade 4 pupils over the course of the 2020-21 academic year relative to the progress seen during the 2018-19 academic year. -Estimate the magnitude of learning loss attributable to the pandemic by calculating the difference in numeracy levels and progress between the two cohorts.