Academic literature on the topic 'Translations into Japanese x History and criticism'

The Japanese novel, Kokoro (1914), offers a profound insight into early 20th-century Japanese society encompassing history, politics, and literature. Although this novel has been extensively explored in literary and translation studies, the convergence remains underexplored. This study advocates integrating literary criticism with translation practice for a more faithful representation of narratives. Applying trauma/PTSD studies theory, it meticulously analyzes Kokoro, particularly examining the English and Chinese renditions of the pivotal term “談判 (danpan; negotiation)”. The methodology involves constructing a trilingual database, incorporating the Japanese source text and seven translations in English and Chinese. By scrutinizing specific passages, the study delves into trauma-related responses and behaviors, revealing their impact on long-lasting changes in personality and relationships. Emphasis is placed on the translation of key terms, preserving cultural and linguistic nuances. This innovative approach advances both literary criticism and translation theory, emphasizing psychological elements for a nuanced portrayal of characters’ states of mind. The study underscores the significance of trauma narratives in comprehending personal and historical traumas, asserting that translators of trauma literature must blend theoretical knowledge with social responsibility. They serve as “secondary witnesses,” entrusted with accurately transmitting traumatic stories between languages, fostering empathy, and preventing the repetition of tragedies in history. This approach provides an innovative interpretation of Kokoro and its translations, bridging the realms of literary criticism and translation studies.

AbstractWe re-examine the history of the element “nipponium” discovered by a Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa in 1908. Since 1996 H.K. Yoshihara has made extensive research into Ogawa’s work and revealed evidence that nipponium proposed for the place of the atomic number of 43 was actually rhenium (75). In this paper, we provide critical re-interpretations of the existing information and confirmed that Ogawa left indisputable evidence that nipponium was in fact rhenium. We further discuss the reasons for the existing doubts and criticism against Ogawa’s discovery and Yoshihara’s interpretation, and attempt to resolve them.

Food is not a trifling matter on Japanese television. More visible than such cultural staples as sumo and enka, food-related talk abounds. Aired year-round and positioned on every channel in every time period throughout the broadcast day, the lenses of food shows are calibrated at a wider angle than heavily-trafficked samurai dramas, beisboru or music shows. Simply, more aspects of everyday life, social history and cultural values pass through food programming. The array of shows work to reproduce traditional Japanese cuisine and cultural mores, educating viewers about regional customs and history. They also teach viewers about the "peculiar" practices of far-away countries. Thus, food shows engage globalisation and assist the integration of outside influences and lifestyles in Japan. However, food-talk is also about nihonjinron -- the uniqueness of Japanese culture1. As such, it tends toward cultural nationalism2. Food-talk is often framed in the context of competition and teaches viewers about planning and aesthetics, imparting class values and a consumption ethic. Food discourse is also inevitably about the reproduction of popular culture. Whether it is Jackie Chan plugging a new movie on a "guess the price" food show or a group of celebs are taking a day-trip to a resort town, food-mediated discourse enables the cultural industry and the national economy to persist -- even expand. To offer a taste of the array of cultural discourse that flows through food, this article serves up an ideal week of Japanese TV programming. Competition for Kisses: Over-Cooked Idols and Half-Baked Sexuality Monday, 10:00 p.m.: SMAP x SMAP SMAP is one of the longest-running, most successful male idol groups in Japan. At least one of their members can be found on TV every day. On this variety show, all five appear. One segment is called "Bistro SMAP" where the leader of the group, Nakai-kun, ushers a (almost always) female guest into his establishment and inquires what she would like to eat. She states her preference and the other four SMAP members (in teams of two) begin preparing the meal. Nakai entertains the guest on a dais overlooking the cooking crews. While the food is being prepared he asks standard questions about the talento's career; "how did you get in this business", "what are your favorite memories", "tell us about your recent work" -- the sort of banal banter that fills many cooking shows. Next, Nakai leads the guest into the kitchen and introduces her to the cooks. Finally, she samples both culinary efforts with the camera catching the reactions of anguish or glee from the opposing team. Each team then tastes the other group's dish. Unlike many food shows, the boys eat without savoring the food. The impression conveyed is that these are everyday boys -- not mega CD-selling pop idols with multiple product endorsements, commercials and television commitments. Finally, the moment of truth arrives: which meal is best. The winners jump for joy, the losers stagger in disappointment. The reason: the winners receive a kiss from the judge (on an agreed-upon innocuous body part). Food as entrée into discourse on sexuality. But, there is more than mere sex in the works, here. For, with each collected kiss, a set of red lips is affixed to the side of the chef's white cap. Conquests. After some months the kisses are tallied and the SMAPster with the most lips wins a prize. Food begets sexuality which begets measures of skill which begets material success. Food is but a prop in managing each idol's image. Putting a Price-tag on Taste (Or: Food as Leveller) Tuesday 8:00 p.m.: Ninki mono de ikou (Let's Go with the Popular People) An idol's image is an essential aspect of this show. The ostensible purpose is to observe five famous people appraising a series of paired items -- each seemingly identical. Which is authentic and which is a bargain-basement copy? One suspects, though, that the deeper aim is to reveal just how unsophisticated, bumbling and downright stupid "talento" can be. Items include guitars, calligraphy, baseball gloves and photographs. During evaluation, the audience is exposed to the history, use and finer points of each object, as well as the guest's decision-making process (via hidden camera). Every week at least one food item is presented: pasta, cat food, seaweed, steak. During wine week contestants smelled, tasted, swirled and regarded the brew's hue. One compared the sound each glass made, while another poured the wines on a napkin to inspect patterns of dispersion! Guests' reasoning and behaviors are monitored from a control booth by two very opinionated hosts. One effect of the recurrent criticism is a levelling -- stars are no more (and often much less) competent (and sacrosanct) than the audience. Technique, Preparation and Procedure? Old Values Give Way to New Wednesday 9:00: Tonerus no nama de daradara ikasette (Tunnels' Allow Us to Go Aimlessly, as We Are) This is one of two prime time shows featuring the comedy team "Tunnels"3. In this show both members of the duo engage in challenging themselves, one another and select members of their regular "team" to master a craft. Last year it was ballet and flamenco dance. This month: karate, soccer and cooking. Ishibashi Takaaki (or "Taka-san") and his new foil (a ne'er-do-well former Yomiuri Giants baseball player) Sadaoka Hiyoshi, are being taught by a master chef. The emphasis is on technique and process: learning theki (the aura, the essence) of cooking. After taking copious notes both men are left on their own to prepare a meal, then present it to a young femaletalento, who selects her favorite. In one segment, the men learned how to prepare croquette -- striving to master the proper procedure for flouring, egg-beating, breading, heating oil, frying and draining. In the most recent episode, Taka prepared his shortcake to perfection, impressing even the sensei. Sadaoka, who is slow on the uptake and tends to be lax, took poor notes and clearly botched his effort. Nonetheless, the talento chose Sadaoka's version because it was different. Certain he was going to win, Taka fell into profound shock. For years a popular host of youth-oriented shows, he concluded: "I guess I just don't understand today's young people". In Japanese television, just as in life, it seems there is no accounting for taste. More, whatever taste once was, it certainly has changed. "We Japanese": Messages of Distinctiveness (Or: Old Values NEVER Die) Thursday, 9:00 p.m.: Douchi no ryori shiou: (Which One? Cooking Show) By contrast, on this night viewers are served procedure, craft and the eternal order of things. Above all, validation of Japanese culinary instincts and traditions. Like many Japanese cooking showsDouchi involves competition between rival foods to win the hearts of a panel of seven singers, actors, writers and athletes.Douchi's difference is that two hosts front for rival dishes, seeking to sway the panel during the in-studio preparation. The dishes are prepared by chefs fromTsuji ryori kyoshitsu, a major cooking academy in Osaka, and are generally comparable (for instance, beef curry versus beef stew). On the surface Douchi is a standard infotainment show. Video tours of places and ingredients associated with the dish entertain the audience and assist in making the guests' decisions more agonising. Two seating areas are situated in front of each chef and panellists are given a number of opportunities to switch sides. Much playful bantering, impassioned appeals and mock intimidation transpire throughout the show. It is not uncommon for the show to pit a foreign against a domestic dish; and most often the indigenous food prevails. For, despite the recent "internationalisation" of Japanese society, many Japanese have little changed from the "we-stick-with-what-we-know-best" attitude that is a Japanese hallmark. Ironically, this message came across most clearly in a recent show pitting spaghetti and meat balls against tarako supagetei (spicy fish eggs and flaked seaweed over Italian noodles) -- a Japanese favorite. One guest, former American, now current Japanese Grand Sumo Champion, Akebono, insisted from the outset that he preferred the Italian version because "it's what my momma always cooked for me". Similarly the three Japanese who settled on tarako did so without so much as a sample or qualm. "Nothing could taste better than tarako" one pronounced even before beginning. A clear message in Douchi is that Japanese food is distinct, special, irreplaceable and (if you're not opposed by a 200 kilogram giant) unbeatable. Society as War: Reifying the Strong and Powerful Friday, 11:00 p.m.: Ryori no tetsujin. (The Ironmen of Cooking) Like sumo this show throws the weak into the ring with the strong for the amusement of the audience. The weak in this case being an outsider who runs his own restaurant. Usually the challengers are Japanese or else operate in Japan, though occasionally they come from overseas (Canada, America, France, Italy). Almost without exception they are men. The "ironmen" are four famous Japanese chefs who specialise in a particular cuisine (Japanese, Chinese, French and Italian). The contest has very strict rules. The challenger can choose which chef he will battle. Both are provided with fully-equipped kitchens positioned on a sprawling sound stage. They must prepare a full-course meal for four celebrity judges within a set time frame. Only prior to the start are they informed of which one key ingredient must be used in every course. It could be crab, onion, radish, pears -- just about any food imaginable. The contestants must finish within the time limit and satisfy the judges in terms of planning, creativity, composition, aesthetics and taste. In the event of a tie, a one course playoff results. The show is played like a sports contest, with a reporter and cameras wading into the trenches, conducting interviews and play-by-play commentary. Jump-cut editing quickens the pace of the show and the running clock adds a dimension of suspense and excitement. Consistent with one message encoded in Japanese history, it is very hard to defeat the big power. Although the ironmen are not weekly winners, their consistency in defeating challengers works to perpetuate the deep-seated cultural myth4. Food Makes the Man Saturday 12:00: Merenge no kimochi (Feelings like Meringue) Relative to the full-scale carnage of Friday night, Saturdays are positively quiescent. Two shows -- one at noon, the other at 11:30 p.m. -- employ food as medium through which intimate glimpses of an idol's life are gleaned.Merenge's title makes no bones about its purpose: it unabashedly promises fluff. In likening mood to food -- and particularly in the day-trip depicted here -- we are reminded of the Puffy's famous ditty about eating crab: "taking the car out for a spin with a caramel spirit ... let's go eat crab!"Merengue treats food as a state of mind, a many-pronged road to inner peace. To keep it fluffy,Merenge is hosted by three attractive women whose job it is to act frivolous and idly chat with idols. The show's centrepiece is a segment where the male guest introduces his favorite (or most cookable) recipe. In-between cutting, beating, grating, simmering, ladling, baking and serving, the audience is entertained and their idol's true inner character is revealed. Continuity Editing Running throughout the day, every day, on all (but the two public) stations, is advertising. Ads are often used as a device to heighten tension or underscore the food show's major themes, for it is always just before the denouement (a judge's decision, the delivery of a story's punch-line or a final tally) that an ad interrupts. Ads, however, are not necessarily departures from the world of food, as a large proportion of them are devoted to edibles. In this way, they underscore food's intimate relationship to economy -- a point that certain cooking shows make with their tie-in goods for sale or maps to, menus of and prices for the featured restaurants. While a considerable amount of primary ad discourse is centred on food (alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, coffees, sodas, instant or packaged items), it is ersatz food (vitamin-enriched waters, energy drinks, sugarless gums and food supplements) which has recently come to dominate ad space. Embedded in this commercial discourse are deeper social themes such as health, diet, body, sexuality and even death5. Underscoring the larger point: in Japan, if it is television you are tuned into, food-mediated discourse is inescapable. Food for Conclusion The question remains: "why food?" What is it that qualifies food as a suitable source and medium for filtering the raw material of popular culture? For one, food is something that all Japanese share in common. It is an essential part of daily life. Beyond that, though, the legacy of the not-so-distant past -- embedded in the consciousness of nearly a third of the population -- is food shortages giving rise to overwhelming abundance. Within less than a generation's time Japanese have been transported from famine (when roasted potatoes were considered a meal and chocolate was an unimaginable luxury) to excess (where McDonald's is a common daily meal, scores of canned drink options can be found on every street corner, and yesterday's leftover 7-Eleven bentos are tossed). Because of food's history, its place in Japanese folklore, its ubiquity, its easy availability, and its penetration into many aspects of everyday life, TV's food-talk is of interest to almost all viewers. Moreover, because it is a part of the structure of every viewer's life, it serves as a fathomable conduit for all manner of other talk. To invoke information theory, there is very little noise on the channel when food is involved6. For this reason food is a convenient vehicle for information transmission on Japanese television. Food serves as a comfortable podium from which to educate, entertain, assist social reproduction and further cultural production. Footnotes 1. For an excellent treatment of this ethic, see P.N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. London: Routledge, 1986. 2. A predilection I have discerned in other Japanese media, such as commercials. See my "The Color of Difference: Critiquing Cultural Convergence via Television Advertising", Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 5.1 (March 1999): 15-36. 3. The other, also a cooking show which we won't cover here, appears on Thursdays and is called Tunnerusu no minasan no okage deshita. ("Tunnels' Because of Everyone"). It involves two guests -- a male and female -- whose job it is to guess which of 4 prepared dishes includes one item that the other guest absolutely detests. There is more than a bit of sadism in this show as, in-between casual conversation, the guest is forced to continually eat something that turns his or her stomach -- all the while smiling and pretending s/he loves it. In many ways this suits the Japanese cultural value of gaman, of bearing up under intolerable conditions. 4. After 300-plus airings, the tetsujin show is just now being put to bed for good. It closes with the four iron men pairing off and doing battle against one another. Although Chinese food won out over Japanese in the semi-final, the larger message -- that four Japanese cooks will do battle to determine the true iron chef -- goes a certain way toward reifying the notion of "we Japanese" supported in so many other cooking shows. 5. An analysis of such secondary discourse can be found in my "The Commercialized Body: A Comparative Study of Culture and Values". Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 2.2 (September 1996): 199-215. 6. The concept is derived from C. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Todd Holden. "'And Now for the Main (Dis)course...': Or, Food as Entrée in Contemporary Japanese Television." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/entree.php>. Chicago style: Todd Holden, "'And Now for the Main (Dis)course...': Or, Food as Entrée in Contemporary Japanese Television," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/entree.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Todd Holden. (1999) "And now for the main (dis)course...": or, food as entrée in contemporary Japanese television. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/entree.php> ([your date of access]).

Re-Framing Participation in the Architecture Studio Recently, within design literature, significant attention has been given to collaboration across different disciplines (see for instance, Nicolini et al.; Carlile), as well as consideration of the breakdown of traditional disciplinarity and the corresponding involvement of users in co-generation (Sanders and Stappers, “Co-Creation” 11–12) through the development and deployment of structured methods and toolkits (Sanders et al., “Framework”; Sanders and Stappers, “Probes”). Relatively less attention has been paid to the workings of the “communities of practice” (Wenger) operating within the disciplinary domain of architecture. The discourse around concept design in architecture has tended to emphasise individualist approaches driven by personal philosophies, inspirations, imitation of a more experienced designer, and emphasis on latent talent or genius (for instance, Moneo). This can be problematic because without a shared language and methods there are limited opportunities for making meaning to facilitate participation between collaborators in architectural studio settings. It is worth asking then: are there things that “Architecture” might learn from “Design” about the deployment of structured methods, and might this interdisciplinary exchange promote participatory practices in studio-based cultures? We address this question by connecting and building on two important concepts relevant to design methods, meta-design as described in the open design literature (De Mul 36–37), and design frames as described by Schön and formalised by Dorst (‘Core’; Frame; see also Weedon). Through this combination, we propose a theory of participation by making shared meaning in architectural design. We animate our theoretical contribution through a design toolkit we have developed, refined, and applied over several years in typologically focused architectural design studios in Australian university contexts. One important contribution, we argue, is to the area of design theory-building, by taking two previously unrelated concepts from the design methods literature. We draw them together using an example from our own design practices to articulate a new term and concept for making shared meaning in design. The other contribution made is to the translation of this concept into the context of studio-based architectural practice, a setting that has traditionally struggled to accept structured methods. The existence of other form-metaphor design tools available for architecture and the theoretical basis of their development and connection to design literature more broadly has not always been clearly articulated (see for example Di Mari and Yoo; Lewis et al.). The rationale for giving an account of the construction and deployment of our own toolkit is to illustrate its theoretical contribution while providing the basis for future field testing and translation (including by other researchers), noting the established trajectory of this kind of work in the design literature (see, for example, Hoolohan and Browne; Visser et al.; Vaajakallio and Mattelmäki; Sanders and Stappers, “Co-Creation” and ”Probes”). In line with this issue’s thematic and epistemological agenda, we adopt what Cross identifies as “designerly ways of knowing” (223), and is at least partly a reflection on a practice in which we engage with our own disciplines and research interests to propose and deploy design thinking as a kind of critical “reflection-in-action” (Robertson and Simonsen 2). Meta-Framing: Combining Meta-Design and Framing Meta-design is a term used in open design literature to describe approaches aimed toward orchestration of a project in such a way that people are afforded the agency to become effective co-designers, regardless of their pre-existing skills or design-specific knowledge (De Mul 36). According to a meta-design approach, design is conceived of as a shared project of mutual learning instead of an individualistic expression of singular genius. Through the establishment of shared protocols and formats, what Ehn (1) calls “infrastructuring”, individuals with even very limited design experience are provided scaffolds that enable them to participate in a design project. One important way in which meta-design helps “create a pathway through a design space” is through the careful selection and adoption of shared guiding metaphors that provide common meanings between co-designers (De Mul 36). The usefulness of metaphors is also recognised in the context of design frames, the second concept on which we build our theory. Conceptualised as “cognitive shortcuts” for making “sense of complex situations” (Haase and Laursen 21), design frames were first conceived of by Schön (132) as a rational approach to design, one guided by “epistemological norms”. Frames have subsequently been further developed within the design methods literature and are defined as a system of counterfactual design decision-making that uses metaphors to provide a rationale for negotiating ill-structured problems. According to Dorst, frames involve: the creation of a (novel) standpoint from which a problematic situation can be tackled … . Although frames are often paraphrased by a simple metaphor, they are in fact very complex sets of statements that include the specific perception of a problem situation, the (implicit) adoption of certain concepts to describe the situation, a ‘working principle’ that underpins a solution and the key thesis: IF we look at the problem situation from this viewpoint, and adopt the working principle associated with that position, THEN we will create the value we are striving for. (525) Despite Schön choosing to illustrate his original conception of framing through the example of a student’s architectural design project, there has been limited subsequent consideration of framing in architectural studio contexts—an exception being Eissa in 2019. This may be because formalised design methods have tended to be treated with suspicion within architectural culture. For instance, Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language is one such “highly systemised design process” (Dawes and Ostwald 10) that despite its potential to guide participatory design has had an “uneven reception” (Bhatt 716) within architecture itself. One way architecture as a disciplinary domain and as a profession has attempted to engage with design method is through typology, which is one of the few persistent and recurring notions in architectural discourse (Bandini; Grover et al.). As a system of classification, typology categorises “forms and functions as simply and unequivocally as possible” (Oechslin 37). In addition to being used as a classification system, typology has also been positioned as “a process as much as an object”, one with the potential for an “active role in the process of design” (Lathouri 25). Type and typology have been conceptualised as a particular way of projecting architecture’s “disciplinary agency” (Jacoby 936), and this goes some way to explaining their enduring value. A potentially valid criticism of framing is that it can tend toward “design fixation”, when a pre-existing assumption “inadvertently restricts the designers’ imagination” (Crilly). Similarly, typology-as-method—as opposed to a classification tool—has been criticised for being relatively “inflexible” or “reductive” (Shane 2011) and responsible for perpetuating “conservative, static norms” (Jacoby 932) if applied in a rote and non-reflexive way. We deal with these concerns in the discussion of the deployment of our Typekit below. We are drawing here on our experience teaching in the first two years of undergraduate architecture degrees in Australian university settings. As well as being equipped with a diversity of educational, social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, students typically have divergent competencies in the domain-specific skills of their discipline and a limited vocabulary for making shared meaning in relation to an architectural proposal. The challenge for studio-based collaborative work in such a context is developing shared understandings and a common language for working on a design project to enable a variety of different design solutions. The brief for a typical studio project will specify a common site, context, and program. Examples we have used include a bathhouse, fire station, archive, civic centre, and lifesaving club. There will then be multiple design solutions proposed by each studio participant. Significantly we are talking about relatively well-structured problems here, typically a specific building program for a specified site and user group. These are quite unlike the open-ended aims of “problem frames” described in the design thinking literature “to handle ill-defined, open-ended, and ambiguous problems that other problem-solving methodologies fail to handle” (Haase and Laursen 21). However, even for well-structured problems, there is still a multitude of possible solutions possible, generated by students working on a particular project brief. This openness reduces the possibility of making shared meaning and thus hinders participation in architectural design. Designing the Typekit The Typekit was developed heuristically out of our experiences teaching together over several years. As part of our own reflective practice, we realised that we had begun to develop a shared language for describing projects including that of students, our own, precedents and canonical works. Often these took the form of a simple formal or functional metaphor such as “the building is a wall”; “the building is an upturned coracle”; or “the building is a cloud”. While these cognitive shortcuts proved useful for our communication there remained the possibility for this language to become esoteric and exclusionary. On the other hand, we recognised the potential for this approach to be shared beyond our immediate “interpretive community” (Fish 485) of two, and we therefore began to develop a meta-design toolkit. Fig. 1: Hybrid page from the Typekit We began by developing a visual catalogue of formal and functional metaphors already present within the panoply of constructed contemporary architectural projects assembled by surveying the popular design media for relevant source material. Fig. 2: Classification of contemporary architectural built work using Typekit metaphors We then used simple line drawings to generate abstract representations of the observed building metaphors adopting isometry to maintain a level of objectivity and a neutral viewing position (Scolari). The drawings themselves were both revelatory and didactic and by applying what Cross calls “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross 223) the toolkit emerged as both design artefact and output of design research. We recognised two fundamentally different kinds of framing metaphors in the set of architectural projects we surveyed, rule-derived and model-derived—terms we are adapting from Choay’s description of “instaurational texts” (8). Rule-derived types describe building forms that navigate the development of a design from a generic to a specific form (Baker 70–71) through a series of discrete “logical operators” (Choay 134). They tend to follow a logic of “begin with x … perform some operation A … perform some operation B … end up with y”. Examples of such operations include add, subtract, scale-translate-rotate, distort and array. Model-derived framing metaphors are different in the way they aim toward an outcome that is an adapted version of an ideal initial form. This involves selecting an existing type and refining it until it suits the required program, site, and context. Examples of the model-derived metaphors we have used include the hedgehog, caterpillar, mountain, cloud, island, and snake as well as architectural Ur-types like the barn, courtyard, tent, treehouse, jetty, and ziggurat. The framing types we included in the Typekit are a combination of rule-derived and model-derived as well as useful hybrids that combined examples from different categories. This classification provides a construct for framing a studio experience while acknowledging that there are other ways of classifying formal types. Fig. 3: Development of isometric drawings of metaphor-frames After we developed a variety of these line drawings, we carried out a synthesis and classification exercise using a version of the KJ method. Like framing, KJ is a technique of abduction developed for dealing objectively with qualitative data without a priori categorisation (Scupin; Kawakita). It has also become an established and widely practiced method within design research (see, for instance, Hanington and Martin 104–5). Themes were developed from the images, and we aimed at balancing a parsimony of typological categories with a saturation of types, that is to capture all observed types/metaphors and to put them in as few buckets as possible. Fig. 4: Synthesis exercise of Typekit metaphors using the KJ method (top); classification detail (bottom) Deploying the Typekit We have successfully deployed the Typekit in architectural design studios at two universities since we started developing it in 2018. As a general process participants adopt a certain metaphor as the starting point of their design. Doing so provides a frame that prefigures other decisions as they move through a concept design process. Once a guiding metaphor is selected, it structures other decision-making by providing a counterfactual logic (Byrne 30). For instance, if a building-as-ramp is chosen as the typology to be deployed this guides a rationale as to where and how it is placed on the site. People should be able to walk on it; it should sit resolutely on the ground and not be floating above it; it should be made of a massive material with windows and doors appearing to be carved out of it; it can have a green occupiable roof; quiet and private spaces should be located at the top away from street noise; active spaces such as a community hall and entry foyer should be located at the bottom of the ramp … and so on. The adoption of the frame of “building-as-ramp” by its very nature is a crucial and critical move in the design process. It is a decision made early in the process that prefigures both “what” and “how” types of questions as the project develops. In the end, the result seems logical even inevitable but there are many other types that could have potentially been explored and these would have posed different kinds of questions and resulted in different kinds of answers during the process. The selection of a guiding metaphor also allows students to engage with historical and contemporary precedents to offer further insights into the development—as well as refinement—of their own projects within that classification. Even given the well-structured nature of the architectural project, precedents provide useful reference points from which to build domain-specific knowledge and benchmarks to measure the differences in approaches still afforded within each typological classification. We believe that our particular meta-framing approach addresses concerns about design fixation and balances mutual learning with opportunities for individual investigation. We position framing less about finding innovative solutions to wicked problems to become more about finding ways for a group of people to reason together through a design problem process by developing and using shared metaphors. Thus our invocation of framing is aligned to what Haase and Laursen term “solution frames” meaning they have an “operational” meaning-making agenda and provide opportunities for developing shared understanding between individuals engaged in a given problem domain (Haase and Laursen 20). By providing a variety of opportunities within an overarching “frame of frames” there are opportunities for parallel design investigation to be undertaken by individual designers. Meta-framing affords opportunities for shared meaning-making and a constructive discourse between different project outcomes. This occurs whether adopting the same type to enable questions including “How is my building-as-snake different from your building-as-snake?”, “Which is the most snake-like?”, or different types (“In what ways is my building-as-ramp different to your building-as-stair?”) By employing everyday visual metaphors, opportunities for “mutual learning between mutual participants” (Robertson and Simonsen 2) are enhanced without the need for substantial domain-specific architectural knowledge at a project’s outset. We argue that the promise of the toolkit and our meta-framing approach more generally is that it actually multiples rather than forecloses opportunities while retaining a shared understanding and language for reasoning through a project domain. This effectively responds to concerns that typology-as-method is a conservative or reductive approach to architectural design. It is important to clarify the role of our toolkit and its relationship to our theory-building agenda. On the basis of the findings accounted for here we do claim to draw specific conclusions about the efficacy of our toolkit. We simply did not collect experimental data relevant to that task. We can, however, use the example of our toolkit to animate, flesh out, and operationalise a model for collaboration in architectural design that may be useful for teaching and practicing architecture in collaborative, team-based contexts. The contribution of this account, therefore, is theoretical. That is, the adaptation of concepts from design literature modified and translated into a new domain to serve new purposes. The Promise of Meta-Framing through Typology Through our work, we have outlined the benefits of adopting formalised design methods in architecture as a way of supporting participation, including using toolkits for scaffolding architectural concept design. Meta-framing has shown itself to be a useful approach to enable participation in architectural design in a number of ways. It provides coherence of an idea and architectural concept. It assists decision-making in any given scenario because a designer can decide which out of a set of choices makes more sense within the “frame” adopted for the project. The question becomes then not “what do I like?” or “what do I want?” but “what makes sense within the project frame?” Finally and perhaps most importantly it brings a common understanding of a project that allows for communication across a team working on the same problem, supporting a variety of different approaches and problem-solving logics a voice. By combining methodologies and toolkits from the design methods literature with architecture’s domain-specific typological classifications we believe we have developed an effective and adaptive model for scaffolding participation and making shared meaning in architecture studio contexts. References Baker, Geoffrey H. Design Strategies in Architecture: An Approach to the Analysis of Form. Taylor and Francis, 2003. Bandini, Micha. “Typology as a Form of Convention.” AA Files 6 (1984): 73–82. Bhatt, Ritu. “Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language: An Alternative Exploration of Space-Making Practices.” Journal of Architecture 15.6 (2010): 711–29. Byrne, Ruth M.J. The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality. MIT P, 2005. Carlile, Paul R. “Transferring, Translating, and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge across Boundaries”. Organization Science 15.5 (2004): 555–68. Choay, Françoise. The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism. MIT P, 1997 [1980]. Crilly, Nathan. “Methodological Diversity and Theoretical Integration: Research in Design Fixation as an Example of Fixation in Research Design?” Design Studies 65 (2019): 78–106. Cross, Nigel. “Designerly Ways of Knowing”. Design Studies 3.4 (1982): 221–27. Dawes, Michael J., and Michael J. Ostwald. “Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Analysing, Mapping and Classifying the Critical Response.” City, Territory and Architecture 4.1 (2017): 1–14. De Mul, Jos. “Redesigning Design”. In Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive, eds. Bas Van Abel, Lucas Evers, Roel Klaassen, and Peter Troxler. BIS Publishers, 2011. 34–39. Di Mari, Anthony, and Nora Yoo. Operative Design. BIS Publishers, 2012. Dorst, Kees. “The Core of ‘Design Thinking’ and Its Application”. Design Studies 32.6 (2011): 521–32. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.006>. ———. Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. Design Thinking, Design Theory. MIT P, 2015. Ehn, Pelle. “Participation in Design Things.” In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2008. Bloomington, Indiana, 2008. 92–101 Eissa, Doha. “Concept Generation in the Architectural Design Process: A Suggested Hybrid Model of Vertical and Lateral Thinking Approaches.” Thinking Skills and Creativity 33 (2019). Fish, Stanley E. “Interpreting the ‘Variorum’.” Critical Inquiry 2.3 (1976): 465–85. Grover, Robert, Stephen Emmitt, and Alex Copping. “The Language of Typology.” Arq 23.2 (2019): 149–56. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135519000198>. Haase, Louise Møller, and Linda Nhu Laursen. “Meaning Frames: The Structure of Problem Frames and Solution Frames”. Design Issues 35.3 (2019): 20–34. <https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00547>. Hanington, Bruce, and Bella Martin. Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions. Rockport Publishers, 2012. Hoolohan, Claire, and Alison L Browne. “Design Thinking for Practice-Based Intervention: Co-Producing the Change Points Toolkit to Unlock (Un)Sustainable Practices.” Design Studies 67 (2020): 102–32. Jacoby, Sam. “Typal and Typological Reasoning: A Diagrammatic Practice of Architecture.” Journal of Architecture 20.6 (2015): 938–61. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1116104>. Kawakita, Jiro. “The KJ Method and My Dream towards the ‘Heuristic’ Regional Geography.” Japanese Journal of Human Geography 25.5 (1973): 493–522. Lathouri, Marina. “The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies.” Architectural Design 81.1 (2011): 24–31. Lewis, Paul, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J Lewis. Manual of Section. Princeton Architectural P, 2016. Moneo, José Rafael. Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects. MIT P, 2004. Nicolini, Davide, Jeanne Mengis, and Jacky Swan. “Understanding the Role of Objects in Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration”. Organization Science (Providence, R.I.) 23.3 (2012): 612–29. Oechslin, Werner. “Premises for the Resumption of the Discussion of Typology.” Assemblage 1 (1986): 37–53. Panzano, Megan. “Foreword.” In Operative Design: A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs, by Anthony Di Mari and Nora Yoo. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2012. 6–7. Robertson, Toni, and Jesper Simonsen. “Participatory Design: An Introduction”. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, eds. Toni Robertson and Jesper Simonsen. Taylor and Francis, 2012. 1–18. Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N., Eva Brandt, and Thomas Binder. “A Framework for Organizing the Tools and Techniques of Participatory Design.” Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. ACM, 2010. 195–98. DOI: 10.1145/1900441.1900476. Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N., and Pieter Jan Stappers. “Co-Creation and the New Landscapes of Design.” Co-Design 4.1 (2008,): 5–18. ———. “Probes, Toolkits and Prototypes: Three Approaches to Making in Codesigning.” CoDesign 10.1 (2014): 5–14. Schön, Donald A. “Problems, Frames and Perspectives on Designing.” Design Studies 5.3 (1984): 132–36. <https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X(84)90002-4>. Scolari, Massimo. Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective. MIT P, 2012. Scupin, Raymond. “The KJ Method: A Technique for Analyzing Data Derived from Japanese Ethnology.” Human Organization, 1997. 233–37. Shane, David Grahame. "Transcending Type: Designing for Urban Complexity." Architectural Design 81.1 (2011): 128-34. Vaajakallio, Kirsikka, and Tuuli Mattelmäki. “Design Games in Codesign: As a Tool, a Mindset and a Structure.” CoDesign 10.1 (2014): 63–77. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.881886>. Visser, Froukje Sleeswijk, Pieter Jan Stappers, Remko van der Lugt, and Elizabeth B.N. Sanders. “Contextmapping: Experiences from Practice.” CoDesign 1.2 (2005): 119–49. Weedon, Scott. “The Core of Kees Dorst’s Design Thinking: A Literature Review.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 33.4 (2019): 425–30. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651919854077>. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice : Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Learning in Doing. Cambridge UP, 1988. Yaneva, Albena. The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. 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This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

Voice synthesising software Vocaloid (Yamaha Corporation) is a popular tool for professional and amateur music production. At the time of writing, there are over 770,000 videos tagged ‘vocaloid’ on Niconico; karaoke chain Karatez displays the top five thousand tracks on its Website (Karatetsu); Hatsune Miku Wiki has over 59,000 pages, while the Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki has over 90,000. Vocaloid is part of Japan’s unique media mix, comprising of the software and music but also official collaborations and a significant amount of fan culture. However, while there is academic research on the way that Vocaloid music is produced and consumed (Sousa; Hamasaki et al.; Leavitt et al.; Kobayashi and Taguchi), there is a lack of research into the content of Vocaloid songs and music videos: that is, what kinds of themes and messages are present and what this might suggest for producers and consumers. This article highlights the importance of the content of Vocaloid music. To this end, I have focussed on Vocaloid composer/producer Neru’s 2018 album CYNICISM. Not to be confused with the Vocaloid Akita Neru, Neru’s music tends to focus on negative affect such as depression, loneliness, and anxiety. Documenting such themes helps to illustrate some of the struggles that producers and consumers experience. I provide a brief explanation of Vocaloid, followed by a reflection on their personas and functioning as a Body without Organs (Annett; Lam; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus). Then I introduce Small’s concept of musicking to provide a framework for the way that music transmits certain affects. In the second half of the article, I unpack Neru’s album and its use of imagery, lyrics, and sound. Vocaloids Voice synthesising software Vocaloid was initially released in 2004, the result of a collaboration between Japan’s Yamaha Corporation and Spain’s Pompeu Fabra University (Voctro Labs; Yamada 17). This software allows the user to create singing audio, drawing from recordings of real people called “voicebanks”. These voicebanks are produced by third-party companies, and are typically provided with a persona with an appearance and personality. For instance, the most well-known Vocaloid is Hatsune Miku, while Kagamine Rin and Kagamine Len are those most used by Neru. Essentially anyone who uses the Vocaloid software can become producers – the term used in Vocaloid cultures for composer. Vocaloid is an example of Japan’s “unique media mix”, where the media are produced not just by “the original company”, but also via “commercial collaborations with media franchises”, and “by a creative collective of individuals on the internet” (Leavitt et al. 204 & 211; see also Steinberg). As well as producers there are songwriters, lyricists, tuners, illustrators, and animators. Some people edit Vocaloid videos, creating compilations, ranking them, and so on (Hamasaki et al. 166). There is also a vibrant fan culture of database managers, fan translators, artists, and fiction writers, as well as human cover artists (utaite), such as Mafumafu, who became popular in part due to his covers of Neru’s music. Official corporate production mostly involves Hatsune Miku, and includes concerts, video games, and collaborations for consumer products. Such branding and collaboration illustrates the creation of a complex Vocaloid narrative. Accordingly, most researchers who examine Vocaloid discuss the complex relationships between various content creators and their methods of collaboration (Yamada), as well as Vocaloid as fan-generated media, examining issues such as commercial interest and exploitation (Bell; Sousa; Jørgensen et al.; To; Kobayashi and Taguchi). However, in this article I am interested in why fans strongly enjoy Vocaloid music and find meaning in it; as I will explore below, such fan collaboration is both a symptom and a cause. Personas and Bodies without Organs Although Vocaloid has a crowd-sourced and collaborative production environment, its use of digital voicebanks and significant consumer culture has led to criticism. For instance, Lam (1110–11) describes voicebanks as being “devoid of originality”, suggests that “all Vocaloid works are derivative”, and also that Vocaloid simply allows users “to indulge … within the virtual space of fabricated authenticity and depthlessness”. However, it is evident from comments on Niconico, YouTube, Reddit, the aforementioned Wikis, Vocaloid Discord servers, and any other space where fans socialise that listeners are emotionally moved by Vocaloid music. Zaborowski, for instance, describes two Japanese boys enthusiastically singing to ryo/Supercell’s Melt. Strikingly, Zaborowski (107) noted that the boys repeatedly told him that “precisely because the voice is the same, the listener can appreciate the quality of the melody and the lyrics”, and that a Vocaloid “sounds different when you are sad. Or when you are away from home”. Listeners are experiencing something when they engage with Vocaloid music, and it would be hasty to simply dismiss their experiences as “depthless”. One factor that makes Vocaloid music particularly authentic and affective for its audiences is the attachment of crowdsourced, constructed personas to Vocaloids. Authenticity here is not necessarily evaluated by the virtual nature of the artist (or instrument) itself, but the producers’ effort to create the work (Zaborowski 107). In this sense there is a need to consider the people involved in producing and listening to Vocaloid music, who find meaning in the songs and characters. Aside from Vocaloids, producers and utaite often also establish a character or imagery as a persona. Neru for instance is recognisable through his avatar—a closed eye with eyelashes and a single tear, and the various characters featured in his videos. The practice of creating a persona for non-human items is unique to Japanese culture, visible in the way that yuru kyara or “wobbly characters” are created to represent entities such as events, corporations, locations, policies, and so on (Occhi 77). These characters can be human-like or creature-like, drawing on Shinto’s anthropomorphism (Jensen and Blok 97). Kyara help minimise the separation between humans and nature, as well as humans and technology (Occhi 80–81). The attachment of kyara to voicebanks, which would otherwise have no face, helps to facilitate a sense of humanisation and connection with the software. It may be that the synthetic nature of the music as well as the use of personas in Vocaloid music means that the listener feels that the song is sung by the Vocaloid, but also processes the creator’s emotion. Kenmochi (4), for instance, suggests that since synthetic voices hold less emotion, it is the persona that functions as a symbol to connect the creator and listener. The producer is able to “impose their own values and perceptions on the virtual character” (Lam 1111), and in doing so, the persona functions as what Deleuze and Guattari call a Body without Organs (Anti-Oedipus 9; A Thousand Plateaus 151). That is, the persona has “no fixed identity” (Lam 1117), and can stratify or destratify, depending on what people do with it (Annett 172). They can become whatever the listener or creator wants, and so there is an emotional connection. Vocaloid music is meaningful to listeners, then, not despite its digital, virtual, constructed nature, but in fact because of what these elements facilitate. Musicking Christopher Small’s work Musicking also provides a framework useful to consider the emotional impact of Vocaloid music. Small argues that “the fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects … but in action”, and therefore proposes a definition of ‘musicking’; to “take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance” (8–9, emphasis omitted). Importantly, for Small (77) simply listening to a recording is to take part in music, and “we may be sure that somebody's values are being explored, affirmed, and celebrated in every musical performance”. Small’s comments here provide a framework for focussing on the experiences of the people involved in producing and listening to Vocaloid music, rather than getting caught up in negative beliefs around the digital nature of production. Further, reflecting on remix, a significant aspect of Vocaloid music, Small (214) notes that relationships are “open to reinterpretation over and over again as listeners create new contexts for their reception and their ritual use of it”. Further, Small (134) suggests that the act of musicking functions as a powerful “means of social definition and self-definition”. Small’s suggestions here that music can be recycled, reinterpreted, and used for self-definition aligns with many aspects of Vocaloid music; tracks are frequently covered by producers using other Vocaloids, or utaite; the meanings of lyrics are frequently discussed in comment sections of YouTube videos and Wikis, and fans often align themselves with certain Vocaloids or producers that they enjoy and relate to. Such self-definition is an important theme to keep in mind when I consider Neru’s CYNICISM album as it touches on societal issues such as loneliness, nihilism, and low self-esteem. CYNICISM Vocaloid producer Neru, also known as z’5 or Oshiire-P, is quite popular. At the time of writing, he has 124,000 followers on Japanese video-sharing site Niconico (Neru, "Neru"), 242,000 on Chinese video-sharing site BiliBili (Neru, "Neru_Official"), 388,000 monthly listeners on Spotify (Spotify), and 560,000 subscribers on YouTube (Neru, "Neru OFFICIAL"). He released his first Vocaloid song in 2009, and to date has three major albums. CYNICISM is the latest, released in 2018. The standard edition contains 14 tracks, and all aside from one use the Vocaloids Kagamine Rin or Kagamine Len. Fig. 1: CYNICISM standard edition, illustrated by Sudou Souta (Apple Music) Fig. 2: Tracklist All quotes from songs are my own translations from the original Japanese. The CYNICISM album communicates a strong sense of nihilism. Nihilism is an ambiguous concept (Nietzsche 76; Diken 6; Marmysz 61). However, Marmysz (71) summarises that nihilists have three claims: that humans are alienated from the world; that this should not be the case; and that “there is nothing we can do” about this situation. As explored below, Neru’s nihilism appears to align with Kant’s “existential nihilism (believing that life has no meaning)” (Gertz, ch. 2, emphasis omitted). It is worth noting that Neru’s music has some commonalities with other genres. For instance, Prinz (584–85) suggests that punk music is irreverent, challenging social norms, and is nihilistic, reflecting on themes such as “decay, despair, suicide, and societal collapse”. As explored below, CYNICISM projects feelings including disappointment with society, poor self-esteem, and themes of irreverence. Irreverence and Society The namesake of the album is important to note within the context of nihilism, as cynicism can be understood as “a passive nihilist affect” (Diken 61). Cynicism is the attitude that comes about when one has failed “to come to terms with loss”, “to realize that something has been lost”, or understand exactly what has been lost. It incited a state of melancholy, trapping the cynic, who suffers an “utterly debilitating sense of disappointment, the root cause of which it cannot identify or move beyond” (Allen, ch. 7). In numerous ways Neru exhibits a lack of faith in humanity and society. Just the title of the track What a Terrible Era communicates a sense of hopelessness, particularly the line “強いて言うとするなら人類は失敗作だった” (“if I had to say, humanity was a work of failure”). The album’s lyrics repeatedly refer to the negative state of the world; “本日の世界予報向上性低迷後退” (“today’s world forecast: Progress is stagnant and regressing”) (Hey, Rain). SNOBBISM asks “バグ塗れの人類のデバッグはいつ終わる” (“humanity is stained with bugs; when will debugging end?”). Neru repeatedly laments the state of humanity and his disappointment with the world. Further, cynicism is an attitude of scorn towards “sincerity and integrity”, which are viewed as “a cover for self-interest” (Allen, ch. 1). In line with this, reflecting the cynic’s embrace of untruthfulness (Gertz, ch. 3), in SNOBBISM Neru states “一生、ブラフを威すがいいさ” (“it’s okay to threaten to bluff through your entire life”). Further, Diken (59) suggests that “capitalism is the age of cynicism”, and the Law-Evading Rock (Neru OFFICIAL, "Law-Evading Rock") music video, illustrated and animated by Ryuusee, exhibits such a critique of capitalism. The video is quite chaotic, designed to appear as a Japanese TV channel. Meme-style characters are superimposed onto photographic backgrounds to depict absurd advertisements and news programmes with flashing and dancing, as the lyrics call for the viewer to escape from reality. The character in this video, Datsu, appears to enter a state of nirvana when Neru’s CD is inserted into him. Here we can see how personas are particularly affectual in Vocaloid music, with fans stating that they relate to Datsu, among other forms of affectation, in comments on his Wikia page (Neru Wikia). Further, CYNICISM frequently calls for the self-identified ‘losers’ to band together, breaking the norms of society. Whatever Whatever Whatever, with its upbeat tune, bright colours, and proclamation of “能天気STYLE” (“Carefree STYLE”) exhibits a strong sense that ‘nothing matters so do whatever’. Let’s Drop Dead’s “僕等はきっとあぶれ者” (“we are surely hooligans”), Law-Evading Rock’s “負け犬になって 吠えろ 吠えろ” (“become a loser, roar, roar”) indicate a sense of knowing that one is ‘useless’ but attempting to take pride in or band together in spite (or indeed, because of this). These lyrics ascribe to a nihilistic notion that nothing matters, but are also a call to arms in a sense – a call for losers to band together for strength, and to act with irreverence. Some encourage the listener to become someone unfit for society (Law-Evading Rock), or to turn back on and break away from morals that are designed to get one into heaven (March of Losers). The music video for SNOBBISM (Neru OFFICIAL, "SNOBBISM"), illustrated and animated by Ryuusee, features Bizu, a demon man wearing a formal suit and top hat. The video has a retro style and is bright but muted with blurry backgrounds, streaking, and graininess. Bizu appears to take on a retro rubber hose animation style, dancing and sometimes hitting objects while calling on the viewer to “make a scene”; to be irreverent and break the norms of society. Personal Failure CYNICISM also in numerous ways refers to personal failures and a lack of faith in the future. Some lyrics refer to a plan or manual (SNOBBISM, Song of Running Away), or a future being wrecked or torn (Spare Me My Inferiority, What a Terrible Era). Corresponding with the nihilistic tone of the album, Whatever Whatever Whatever describes being lazy today, and putting effort in tomorrow, while Let’s Drop Dead simply states “明日はくたばろうぜ” (“tomorrow let’s drop dead”). Yet continuing forward into the future seems mandatory, as in Whatever Whatever Whatever Neru describes himself as being too much of a wimp to commit suicide, and March of Losers repeats the refrain “進め進め” (“forward, forward”), calling for the losers to continue even though “this kind of life has no meaning”. Some tracks indicate a more raw or vulnerable state, with Nihil and the Sunken City’s “もっとちょーだい ちょーだい 承認をちょーだい” (“more, give it to me, give it to me, please give me approval”). Importantly, Neru identifies himself as a loser, engaging in self-irreverence, making fun of himself (Kroth 104), referring to himself and his social group as ‘losers’. The music videos for Whatever Whatever Whatever (Neru OFFICIAL, "Whatever Whatever Whatever") and Let’s Drop Dead (Neru OFFICIAL, "Let’s Drop Dead"), illustrated and animated by Terada Tera, exhibit self-irreverent themes. The former uses vapourwave aesthetics, and both exhibit bright colours, with cartoonish characters I and Yaya dancing and drinking alcohol. I wears a Space Invaders jacket and grill glasses, while Yaya wears a t-shirt featuring a marijuana leaf and a pink animal-eared beanie; together in the video they communicate a ‘slacker’, partying attitude. What is particularly interesting here is the way that nihilistic lyrics have been employed alongside upbeat, catchy, pop-style music and flashy colours. Such dissonance is attention-grabbing and also reflects a sarcastic, careless sense of cynicism, one that is “irreverent” and “playful” – a style that Nietzsche adopted (Allen, ch. 7). Relatedly, Marmysz (4) suggests that humour is a useful response to nihilism because it shatters expectations. It is important to understand CYNICISM within the Japanese context. Discussing the Meiji Period, Nishitani (175) points out that Buddhism and Confucianism lost their power, and that with modernisation Japan became Europeanised and Americanised to the extent that there is a spiritual void. More recently, various economic crises and disasters throughout the 1990s and 2000s have contributed to national trauma (Roquet 89). Due to significant societal pressure, many Japanese people feel anxiety, sensitivity, vulnerability, and alienation (Ren 29). Accordingly, much Japanese anime engages with feelings of nihilism (Lozano-Méndez and Loriguillo-López; Tsang). In some respects Vocaloid culture is interrelated with hikikomori, a form of social withdrawal associated with various psychological, social, and behavioural factors (Li and Wong 603). Much academic literature exists on hikikomori, which in many ways is a Japanese phenomenon, being influenced by “culture, society and history”, and having come about in Japan during a period of “very rapid socioeconomic changes” (Kato et al. 1062). Many Vocaloid producers and utaite identify as hikikomori, including Mafumafu. However, studies on hikikomori outside Japan have shown that feelings of isolation, anxiety, and social exclusion are a global concern (Krieg and Dickie 61; Kato et al. 1062), contributing to Neru’s popularity among English-speaking audiences Conclusion My goal in this article is to point out that a significant number of people find Vocaloid music relatable and affectual, and it would be hasty to dismiss such music as “depthless” due to its use of voicebanks and connection to consumer culture. Vocaloid music is particularly affective in part due to the way that Vocaloids, producers, and utaite make use of personas which function as bodies without organs: something that listeners are able to project their own feelings onto. Further, Small’s concept of musicking encourages us to pay attention to what producers are saying as well as what listeners and fans are engaging with: what values are being explored and how they are being used for self-definition. It is important to consider not just the economic aspects of participatory culture and the networks of production surrounding Vocaloid, but the content of the music and the meanings that listeners get out of it. Neru’s CYNICISM album is particularly interesting in this regard. The combination of upbeat music, bright and garish imagery, and nihilistic lyrics communicates a strong sense of disappointment with society and a lack of self-worth in a dissonant manner – there is a sense of playfulness that is attention-grabbing and uses humour to communicate these negative themes. Given the breadth of Vocaloid content that is produced, further research into other producers, fan groups, and pieces of media will provide insight into this varied and rich phenomenon. References Allen, Ansgar. Cynicism. Cambridge: MIT P, 2020. Annett, Sandra. "What Can a Vocaloid Do? The Kyara as Body without Organs." Mechademia 10 (2017): 163–77. Bell, Sarah A. "The dB in the .Db: Vocaloid Software as Posthuman Instrument." Popular Music and Society 39.2 (2016): 222–240. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. 11th ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. ———. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. 10th ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Diken, Bulent. Nihilism. London: Routledge, 2009. Gertz, Nolen. Nihilism. Cambridge: MIT P, 2019. Hamasaki, Masahiro, et al. "Network Analysis of Massively Collaborative Creation of Multimedia Contents – Case Study of Hatsune Miku Videos on Nico Nico Douga." Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video (UXTV '08). New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2008. 165–168. Hatsune Miku Wiki. Page List [ページ一覧]. 15 Mar. 2024 <https://w.atwiki.jp/hmiku/list>. Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Anders Blok. "Techno-Animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-Network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-Human Agencies." Theory, Culture & Society 30.2 (2013): 84–115. Jørgensen, Stina Marie Hasse, et al. "Hatsune Miku: An Uncertain Image." Digital Creativity 28.4 (2017): 318–331. Karatetsu. Vocaloid Monthly Karaoke Ranking TOP5,000 [ボカロ月間カラオケランキング TOP5,000]. 15 Mar. 2024 <https://www.karatetsu.com/vocala/pickup/ranking.php>. Kato, Takahiro A., et al. "Hikikomori: Multidimensional Understanding, Assessment, and Future International Perspectives." PCN Frontier Review 73 (2019): 427–440. Kenmochi, Hideki. "VOCALOID and Hatsune Miku Phenomenon in Japan." Proceedings of the First Interdisciplinary Workshop on Singing Voice (InterSinging 2010) (2010): 1–4 <https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/intersinging_2010/kenmochi10_intersinging.html>. Kobayashi, Hajime, and Takashi Taguchi. "Virtual Idol Hatsune Miku: Case Study of New Production/Consumption Phenomena Generated by Network Effects in Japan’s Online Environment." Markets, Globalization & Development Review 3.4 (2018): 1–17. Krieg, Alexander, and Jane R. Dickie. "Attachment and Hikikomori: A Psychosocial Developmental Model." International Journal of Social Psychiatry 59.1 (2013): 61–72. Kroth, Michael. "Irreverence." Human Resource Development Review 16.1 (2017): 100–108. Lam, Ka Yan. "The Hatsune Miku Phenomenon: More than a Virtual J-Pop Diva." Journal of Popular Culture 49.5 (2016): 1107–1124. Leavitt, A., et al. "Producing Hatsune Miku: Concerts, Ommercialisation, and the Politics of Peer Production." Media Convergence in Japan. Eds. Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason Carlin. New Haven: Kinema Club, 2016. 200–229. Li, Tim M.H., and Paul W.C. Wong. "Youth Social Withdrawal Behavior (Hikikomori): A Systematic Review of Qualitative and Quantitative Studies." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 49.7 (2015): 595–609. Lozano-Méndez, Artur, and Antonio Loriguillo-López. "Nihilistamina: Gloomy Heroisms in Contemporary Anime." Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transition. Eds. Forum Mithani and Griseldis Kirsch. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2022. 124–139. Marmysz, John. Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism. Albany: State U of New York P, 2003. Neru. CYNICISM. NBC Universal Japan, 2018. 15 Mar. 2024 <http://nbcuni-music.com/neru/cynicism/detail/index.html>. ———. "Neru". Nico Nico Douga, 15 Mar. 2024 <https://www.nicovideo.jp/user/112798/>. ———. "Neru OFFICIAL". YouTube, 15 Mar. 2024 <https://www.youtube.com/user/NeruSleepOfficial>. ———. "Neru_Official". BiliBili, 15 Mar. 2024 <https://space.bilibili.com/243955530/>. Neru OFFICIAL. "Neru - Law-Evading Rock (脱法ロック) Feat. Kagamine Len." YouTube, 19 June 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5mHVUwDf_0>. ———. "Neru - Let’s Drop Dead Feat. Kagamine Rin & Kagamine Len." YouTube, 29 Dec. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJirzFqSp-A>. ———. "Neru & z’5 - SNOBBISM Feat. Kagamine Rin & Kagamine Len." YouTube, 21 Mar. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5jDVFmEIVQ>. ———. "Neru & z’5 - Whatever Whatever Whatever (I~ya I~ya I~ya) Feat. Kagamine Rin & Kagamine Len." YouTube, 10 Nov. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8-6QPEes1k>. Niconico. Tag: VOCALOID. 15 Mar. 2024 <https://www.nicovideo.jp/tag/VOCALOID>. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s. Trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti. London: Penguin, 2017. Nishitani, Keiji. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. Albany: State U of New York P, 1990. Occhi, Debra J. "Consuming Kyara 'Characters:' Anthropomorphization and Marketing in Contemporary Japan." Comparative Culture 15 (2010): 78–87. Neru Wikia. "Datsu." 16 Mar. 2024 <https://neru-oshiirep.fandom.com/wiki/Datsu>. Prinz, Jesse. "The Aesthetics of Punk Rock." Philosophy Compass 9.9 (2014): 583–593. Ren, Jiawen. "Analysis of the Japanese Iyashikei Films and the Culture behind These Films." Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange (ICLACE 2020). Xiamen: Atlantis Press, 2020. Roquet, Paul. "Ambient Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm: Mood Regulation in Contemporary Japanese Fiction." The Journal of Japanese Studies 35.1 (2009): 87–111. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1998. Sousa, Ana Matilde. "Beauty Is in the Eye of the 'Produser': Virtual Idol Hatsune Miku from Software, to Network, to Stage." In Post Screen: Intermittence + Interference, eds. Ana Moutinho et al. Lisbon: Edicoes Universitarias Lusofonas, 2016. 117–128. Spotify. "Neru." Spotify, 15 Mar. 2024 <https://open.spotify.com/artist/0rhcL1Mw7J9YJRDpD6mhXr>. Steinberg, Marc. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. To, Kit Yan. The Voice of the Future: Seeking Freedom of Expression through VOCALOID Fandom. Master’s Thesis. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2014. Tsang, Gabriel F.Y. "Beyond 2015 : Nihilism and Existentialist Rhetoric in Neon Genesis Evangelion." Journal of International and Advanced Japanese Studies 8 (2016): 35–43. Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki. Home. 15 Mar. 2024 <https://vocaloidlyrics.fandom.com/wiki/Vocaloid_Lyrics_Wiki>. Voctro Labs. Vocaloid Libraries. 2020. <https://www.voctro-vocaloid.com/>. Yamada, Keisuke. Supercell Featuring Hatsune Miku. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Yamaha Corporation. Vocaloid. Microsoft Windows, macOS. 2004–2022. Zaborowski, Rafal. "Fans Negotiating Performer Personas: 'Melt' by Ryo Feat. Hatsune Miku." Suomen Antropologi 43.2 (2019): 104–108.

In the contemporary era, media spectacle organizes and mobilizes economic life, political conflict, social interactions, culture, and everyday life. My recently published book Media Spectacle explores a profusion of developments in hi-tech culture, media-driven society, and spectacle politics. Spectacle culture involves everything from film and broadcasting to Internet cyberculture and encompasses phenomena ranging from elections to terrorism and to the media dramas of the moment. For ‘Logo’, I am accordingly sketching out briefly a terrain I probe in detail in the book from which these examples are taken.1 During the past decades, every form of culture and significant forms of social life have become permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs, computers networks, and extravagant concerts. The Internet encircles the world in the spectacle of an interactive and multimedia cyberculture. Media culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports championships, political conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Death of Princess Diana, or the sex or murder scandal of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party politics, as the political battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36 Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays define the politics of the time, and attract mass audiences to their programming, hour after hour, day after day. The concept of "spectacle" derives from French Situationist theorist Guy Debord's 1972 book Society of the Spectacle. "Spectacle," in Debord's terms, "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1970: #10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, and dreams and nightmares, putting on display dominant hopes and fears. They serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its conflicts and modes of conflict resolution. They include sports events, political campaigns and elections, and media extravaganzas like sensational murder trials, or the Bill Clinton sex scandals and impeachment spectacle (1998-1999). As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming ever more technologically dazzling and are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life. Under the influence of a postmodern image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, a semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and drama, which deeply influence thought and action. For Debord: "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society" (#18). Today, however, I would maintain it is the multimedia spectacle of sight, sound, touch, and, coming to you soon, smell that constitutes the multidimensional sense experience of the new interactive spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative praxis. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. Since Debord's theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.2 Via the "entertainmentization" of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).3 In a competitive business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites." To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace. Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s. Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways. Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama, and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models our shaping of our bodies; and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.4 Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. An ever-expanding public relations industry hypes certain figures, elevating them to celebrity status, and protects their positive image in the never-ending image wars and dangers that a celebrity will fall prey to the machinations of negative-image and thus lose celebrity status, and/or become figures of scandal and approbation, as will some of the players and institutions that I examine in Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003). Sports has long been a domain of the spectacle with events like the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl, World Soccer Cup, and NBA championships attracting massive audiences, while generating sky-high advertising rates. These cultural rituals celebrate society's deepest values (i.e. competition, winning, success, and money), and corporations are willing to pay top dollar to get their products associated with such events. Indeed, it appears that the logic of the commodity spectacle is inexorably permeating professional sports which can no longer be played without the accompaniment of cheerleaders, giant mascots who clown with players and spectators, and raffles, promotions, and contests that feature the products of various sponsors. Sports stadiums themselves contain electronic reproduction of the action, as well as giant advertisements for various products that rotate for maximum saturation -- previewing environmental advertising in which entire urban sites are becoming scenes to boost consumption spectacles. Arenas, like the United Center in Chicago, America West Arena in Phoenix, on Enron Field in Houston are named after corporate sponsors. Of course, after major corporate scandals or collapse, like the Enron spectacle, the ballparks must be renamed! The Texas Ranger Ballpark in Arlington, Texas supplements its sports arena with a shopping mall, office buildings, and a restaurant in which for a hefty price one can watch the athletic events while eating and drinking.5 The architecture of the Texas Rangers stadium is an example of the implosion of sports and entertainment and postmodern spectacle. A man-made lake surrounds the stadium, the corridor inside is modeled after Chartes Cathedral, and the structure is made of local stone that provides the look of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Inside there are Texas longhorn cattle carvings, panels of Texas and baseball history, and other iconic signifiers of sports and Texas. The merging of sports, entertainment, and local spectacle is now typical in sports palaces. Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, Florida, for instance, "has a three-level mall that includes places where 'fans can get a trim at the barber shop, do their banking and then grab a cold one at the Budweiser brew pub, whose copper kettles rise three stories. There is even a climbing wall for kids and showroom space for car dealerships'" (Ritzer 1998: 229). Film has long been a fertile field of the spectacle, with "Hollywood" connoting a world of glamour, publicity, fashion, and excess. Hollywood film has exhibited grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, and stylish hi-tech film. While epic spectacle became a dominant genre of Hollywood film from early versions of The Ten Commandments through Cleopatra and 2001 in the 1960s, contemporary film has incorporated the mechanics of spectacle into its form, style, and special effects. Films are hyped into spectacle through advertising and trailers which are ever louder, more glitzy, and razzle-dazzle. Some of the most popular films of the late 1990s were spectacle films, including Titanic, Star Wars -- Phantom Menace, Three Kings, and Austin Powers, a spoof of spectacle, which became one of the most successful films of summer 1999. During Fall 1999, there was a cycle of spectacles, including Topsy Turvy, Titus, Cradle Will Rock, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, and Magnolia, with the latter featuring the biblical spectacle of the raining of frogs in the San Fernando Valley, in an allegory of the decadence of the entertainment industry and deserved punishment for its excesses. The 2000 Academy Awards were dominated by the spectacle Gladiator, a mediocre film that captured best picture award and best acting award for Russell Crowe, thus demonstrating the extent to which the logic of the spectacle now dominates Hollywood film. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films of 2001 are also hi-tech spectacle, such as Moulin Rouge, a film spectacle that itself is a delirious ode to spectacle, from cabaret and the brothel to can-can dancing, opera, musical comedy, dance, theater, popular music, and film. A postmodern pastiche of popular music styles and hits, the film used songs and music ranging from Madonna and the Beatles to Dolly Parton and Kiss. Other 2001 film spectacles include Pearl Harbor, which re-enacts the Japanese attack on the U.S. that propelled the country to enter World War II, and that provided a ready metaphor for the September 11 terror attacks. Major 2001 film spectacles range from David Lynch’s postmodern surrealism in Mulholland Drive to Steven Spielberg’s blending of his typically sentimental spectacle of the family with the formalist rigor of Stanley Kubrick in A.I. And the popular 2001 military film Black-Hawk Down provided a spectacle of American military heroism which some critics believed sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in Somalia, causing worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports, however, that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed American soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world against Bush administration policies. Television has been from its introduction in the 1940s a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion, home appliances, and other commodities along with consumer life-styles and values. It is also the home of sports spectacle like the Super Bowl or World Series, political spectacles like elections (or more recently, scandals), entertainment spectacle like the Oscars or Grammies, and its own spectacles like breaking news or special events. Following the logic of spectacle entertainment, contemporary television exhibits more hi-tech glitter, faster and glitzier editing, computer simulations, and with cable and satellite television, a fantastic array of every conceivable type of show and genre. TV is today a medium of spectacular programs like The X-Files or Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and spectacles of everyday life such as MTV's The Real World and Road Rules, or the globally popular Survivor and Big Brother series. Real life events, however, took over TV spectacle in 2000-2001 in, first, an intense battle for the White House in a dead-heat election, that arguably constitutes one of the greatest political crimes and scandals in U.S. history (see Kellner 2001). After months of the Bush administration pushing the most hardright political agenda in memory and then deadlocking as the Democrats took control of the Senate in a dramatic party re-affiliation of Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, the world was treated to the most horrifying spectacle of the new millennium, the September 11 terror attacks and unfolding Terror War that has so far engulfed Afghanistan and Iraq. These events promise an unending series of deadly spectacle for the foreseeable future.6 Hence, we are emerging into a new culture of media spectacle that constitutes a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes of experience. It is producing an ever-proliferating and expanding spectacle culture with its proliferating media forms, cultural spaces, and myriad forms of spectacle. It is evident in the U.S. as the new millennium unfolds and may well constitute emergent new forms of global culture. Critical social theory thus faces important challenges in theoretically mapping and analyzing these emergent forms of culture and society and the ways that they may contain novel forms of domination and oppression, as well as potential for democratization and social justice. Works Cited Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1967. Gabler, Neil. Life the Movie. How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Kellner, Douglas. From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. Thousand Oaks, Cal. and London: Sage, 1998. Wolf, Michael J. Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces are Transforming Our Lives. New York: Times Books, 1999. Notes 1 See Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 2 Wolf's book is a detailed and useful celebration of the "entertainment economy," although he is a shill for the firms and tycoons that he works for and celebrates them in his book. Moreover, while entertainment is certainly an important component of the infotainment economy, it is an exaggeration to say that it drives it and is actually propelling it, as Wolf repeatedly claims. Wolf also downplays the negative aspects of the entertainment economy, such as growing consumer debt and the ups and downs of the infotainment stock market and vicissitudes of the global economy. 3 Another source notes that "the average American household spent $1,813 in 1997 on entertainment -- books, TV, movies, theater, toys -- almost as much as the $1,841 spent on health care per family, according to a survey by the US Labor Department." Moreover, "the price we pay to amuse ourselves has, in some cases, risen at a rate triple that of inflation over the past five years" (USA Today, April 2, 1999: E1). The NPD Group provided a survey that indicated that the amount of time spent on entertainment outside of the home –- such as going to the movies or a sport event – was up 8% from the early to the late 1990s and the amount of time in home entertainment, such as watching television or surfing the Internet, went up 2%. Reports indicate that in a typical American household, people with broadband Internet connections spend 22% more time on all-electronic media and entertainment than the average household without broadband. See “Study: Broadband in homes changes media habits” (PCWORLD.COM, October 11, 2000). 4 Gabler’s book is a synthesis of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Neil Poster, Marshall McLuhan, and other trendy theorists of media culture, but without the brilliance of a Baudrillard, the incisive criticism of an Adorno, or the understanding of the deeper utopian attraction of media culture of a Bloch or Jameson. Likewise, Gabler does not, a la cultural studies, engage the politics of representation, or its economics and political economy. He thus ignores mergers in the culture industries, new technologies, the restructuring of capitalism, globalization, and shifts in the economy that are driving the impetus toward entertainment. Gabler does get discuss how new technologies are creating new spheres of entertainment and forms of experience and in general describes rather than theorizes the trends he is engaging. 5 The project was designed and sold to the public in part through the efforts of the son of a former President, George W. Bush. Young Bush was bailed out of heavy losses in the Texas oil industry in the 1980s by his father's friends and used his capital gains, gleaned from what some say as illicit insider trading, to purchase part-ownership of a baseball team to keep the wayward son out of trouble and to give him something to do. The soon-to-be Texas governor, and future President of the United States, sold the new stadium to local taxpayers, getting them to agree to a higher sales tax to build the stadium which would then become the property of Bush and his partners. This deal allowed Bush to generate a healthy profit when he sold his interest in the Texas Rangers franchise and to buy his Texas ranch, paid for by Texas tax-payers (for sources on the scandalous life of George W. Bush and his surprising success in politics, see Kellner 2001 and the further discussion of Bush Jr. in Chapter 6). 6 See Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kellner, Douglas. "Engaging Media Spectacle " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>. APA Style Kellner, D. (2003, Jun 19). Engaging Media Spectacle . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>

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

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. 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The detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu) genre is one that came into Japan from the West around the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), and soon became wildly popular. Again in recent years, detective fiction has experienced a popularity boom in Japan, and there has been an outpouring of new detective fiction books as well as various television and movie adaptations. It is not a revelation that the Japanese detective fiction genre, while rife with imitation and homage to Western works, took a dramatic turn somewhere along the line, away from celebrated models like Poe, Doyle, and Christie, and developed into a unique subgenre of Japanese prose. However, despite its popularity and innovation, Japanese detective fiction has often been categorized as popular literature (taishū bungaku), which is historically disregarded as vulgar and common. My thesis first consists of a brief introductory history oftantei shōsetsugenre in Japan. This includes a discussion of Japanese writers' anxiety concerning imitation of Western forms and their perception of themselves as imposters and imitators. Following this, I examine the ways in whichtantei shōsetsuwriters--particularly Edogawa Ranpo (1894 - 1965), the grandfather of the genre in Japan--began to deviate from the Western model in the 1920's. At the same time, I investigate the bias againsttantei shōsetsuas a vulgar or even pornographic genre. Through a discussion of literary critic Karatani Kōjin's ideas on the construction of depth in literature, I will demonstrate how Edogawa created, through his deviance from the West, a new kind of construction in detective fiction to bring a different sort of depth to what was generally considered merely a popular and shallow genre. This discussion includes a look at the ideas of Tsubouchi Shōyō on writing modern novels, and Japanese conceptions of "pure" (junsui) and "popular" (taishū) literature. Through an examination of several of Edogawa's works and his use of psychology in creating interiority in his characters, I propose that the depth configuration, put forth by Karatani in his critique of canonical modern Japanese literature, is also present in popular fiction, like Edogawa'stantei shōsetsu. When viewed through the lens of Karatani's depth paradigm, we discover how detective fiction and the vulgarity therein may actually have more in common with "pure" fiction created by those writers who followed Shōyō's prescriptions. In the final section of the introduction, I propose a definition of Japanese detective fiction that links Edogawa's works from the 1920's to the contemporary Japanese detective novel After-Dinner Mysteries (Nazotoki wa dinaa no ato de, 2010), by Higashigawa Tokuya. Thus we see that many of the themes and conventions present in Edogawa remain prevalent in contemporary writing. Finally, I present my translation of the first two chapters of After-Dinner Mysteries.