Journal articles on the topic 'Truth-teller'

In this paper, we use commonsense reasoning and graph representation to study logical puzzles with three types of people. Strong Truth-Tellers say only true atomic statements, Strong Liars say only false atomic statements, and Strong Crazy people say only self-contradicting statements. Self-contradicting statements are connected to the Liar paradox, i.e., no Truth-Teller or a Liar could say “I am a Liar”. A puzzle is clear if it only contains its given statements to solve it, and a puzzle is good if it has exactly one solution. It is known that there is no clear and good Strong Truth-Teller–Strong Liar (also called SS) puzzle. However, as we prove here, there are good and clear Strong Truth-Teller, Strong Liar and Strong Crazy puzzles (SSS-puzzles). The newly investigated type ‘Crazy’ drastically changes the scenario. Some properties of the new types of puzzles are analyzed, and some statistics are also given.

Abstract The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) and the abortive November Uprising in Poland (1830–1831) were two major developments in nineteenth-century European history, and both became central to foundational narratives of European modernity. These events have, however, received scant attention by American immigration historians. Despite this neglect, both were integral to how the New York Truth Teller, the leading Irish Catholic newspaper in New York in the years before the Famine, attempted to consolidate an Irish Catholic ethnic identity in the United States. The Truth Teller's contributors interpreted the Greek and Polish conflicts through reference to a specific narrative of Irish history as one of unparalleled suffering. In doing so, the paper kept American Irish Catholics informed about contemporary events in Europe. In comparing Irish Catholic history to the contemporary struggles of Greece and Poland, the Truth Teller insisted that neither Greece nor Poland had experienced suffering comparable to the persecution of Protestant Ascendency Ireland. This article is a corrective to scholarship that has underemphasized the importance of the Truth Teller to Irish Catholic identity in the United States before the Famine and undervalued the relevance of European events for the construction of American Irish Catholic identity.

In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay with the deceptively simple title “Truth and Politics” (1967). Most scholarly discussions of her essay consider her distinction between a traditional political art of limited, deliberate, strategic lying and modern, organised, global lying and self-deception and then evaluate her qualified defence of the virtues of mendacity. This article suggests, however, that her essay has a much broader ambit: viz., to defend the political value of truth-telling. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that she formulates her essay as an apology of the truth-teller in politics and of her own truth-telling in her controversial report of the Eichmann trial. It first surveys the personal motives of Arendt’s political defence of frank speech. It shows that in developing this defence she significantly revises her scepticism about the value of truth-telling in politics. She does so by identifying three different types of truth-teller with distinctive political roles: philosophers who exemplify the truth in their own lives, citizens who see the world from other people’s perspectives, and poets and historians whose stories reconcile citizens to the past. Finally, it argues that the tragic political perspective Arendt sought to revive requires acknowledging value of the emotions in making political judgments.

The truth commission has emerged in the last thirty years as a distinct juridical form that views the production of truth as necessary, and in some cases sufficient, for achieving justice. In his history of truth-telling in juridical forms, Michel Foucault conducts a genealogy of avowal (or confession) in western judicial practice; critical to his definition of avowal is that the truth-teller and wrong-doer must be the same subject. In my analysis, I consider avowal in light of a relatively recent judicial innovation: the truth commission, with Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a particular case. The TRC’s emphasis on the testimony of victims rather than perpetrators means that truth-telling and wrong-doing are decoupled in this juridical form, suggesting that avowal is not a function of truth commissions according to Foucault’s criteria. Does this mean that truth commissions are not involved in truth production, or perhaps that they are not a juridical form in the lineage of those examined by Foucault? The truth commission is a juridical form that Foucault was unable to address because it developed only after his death, and it is possible that it challenges his core understanding of avowal; however, the truth commission also appears to be consistent with trends that he predicted about the role of truth-telling in the modern judicial system.

In recent years, many authors have observed that something is happening to the truth, pointing out that, particularly in politics and social communication, there are signs that the idea of truth is losing consideration in media discourse. This is no minor issue: Truth, understood as the criterion for the justification of knowledge, is the essential foundation of enlightened rationality. The aim of this article, based on prior research on social communication (especially as regards journalism), is to elucidate an explanation of this phenomenon, known as ‘post-truth.’ Because it is an epistemological question, the three main variables of the problem (reality, subject and truth) have been analysed by taking into account the manner in which digital social communication is transforming our perception of reality. By way of a conclusion, we propose that (a) the ontological complexity of reality as explained by the news media has accentuated the loss of confidence in journalism as a truth-teller, and that (b) truth is being replaced by sincerity, as an epistemological value, in people’s understanding of the news. The result, using Foucault’s concept of Regime of Truth, suggests a deep change in the global framework of political, economic, social and cultural relations, of which post-truth is a symptom.

AbstractThe sentences employed in semantic paradoxes display a wide range of semantic behaviours. However, the main theories of truth currently available either fail to provide a theory of paradox altogether, or can only account for some paradoxical phenomena by resorting to multiple interpretations of the language, as in (Kripke, 1975). In this article, I explore the wide range of semantic behaviours displayed by paradoxical sentences, and I develop a unified theory oftruth and paradox, that is a theory of truth that also provides a unified account of paradoxical sentences. The theory I propose here yields a threefold classification of paradoxical sentences—liar-like sentences, truth-teller–like sentences, and revenge sentences. Unlike existing treatments of semantic paradox, the theory put forward in this article yields a way of interpreting all three kinds of paradoxical sentences, as well as unparadoxical sentences, within a single model.

AbstractInfectious logics are systems that have a truth-value that is assigned to a compound formula whenever it is assigned to one of its components. This paper studies four-valued infectious logics as the basis of transparent theories of truth. This take is motivated (i) as a way to treat different pathological sentences (like the Liar and the Truth-Teller) differently, namely, by allowing some of them to be truth-value gluts and some others to be truth-value gaps and (ii) as a way to treat the semantic pathology suffered by at least some of these sentences as infectious. This leads us to consider four distinct four-valued logics: one where truth-value gaps are infectious, but gluts are not; one where truth-value gluts are infectious, but gaps are not; and two logics where both gluts and gaps are infectious, in some sense. Additionally, we focus on the proof theory of these systems, by offering a discussion of two related topics. On the one hand, we prove some limitations regarding the possibility of providing standard Gentzen sequent calculi for these systems, by dualizing and extending some recent results for infectious logics. On the other hand, we provide sound and complete four-sided sequent calculi, arguing that the most important technical and philosophical features taken into account to usually prefer standard calculi are, indeed, enjoyed by the four-sided systems.

Scholars have recognised the Canberra Press Gallery’s capacity to contribute to an inclusive, collective style of political leadership in the context of declining nostalgia for heroes of military conflict. While political leaders have signified supporting journalists in a ‘cooperative search for truth’ about a conflict, the Gallery has influenced these relations as ‘the courageous teller of a truth’. This article examines the media rhetoric and Press Gallery relations of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her identification with US President Barack Obama during the conflict in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. Gillard connected to Obama’s agenda by arguing, like him, that military sacrifices had been justified because of the need to support marginalised groups, including Afghan women and girls. This article argues that as time went by, Press Gallery journalists increasingly queried and investigated Gillard’s rationale for the conflict. The journalists portrayed their role as public defenders of the ‘truth’ about Australia’s military engagement by including Afghanistan sources countering heroic military narratives.

A central understanding of narrative scholarship is that stories are ever in process, taking shape in each recounting according to the needs, purposes, and understandings of the teller. Sometimes participants share accounts that are incomplete or inaccurate, shrink from voicing their feelings, or silence their accounting altogether. In this study, I draw on difficult stories, shared by military bandswomen who endured a traumatic government investigation into their personal lives during the McCarthy era, to examine the distinctions between empirical facts and interpretive truth, trouble the linkage between objective and subjective ways of knowing, and consider the researcher’s ethical responsibility when a participant hides the facts or refuses to voice their truths.

Abstract The Embracing Revenge account of semantic paradox avoids the expressive limitations of previous approaches based on the Kripkean fixed point construction by replacing a single language with an indefinitely extensible sequence of languages, each of which contains the resources to fully characterize the semantics of the previous languages. In this paper we extend the account developed in Cook (2008), Cook (2009), Schlenker (2010), and Tourville and Cook (2016) via the addition of intensional operators such as ``is paradoxical''. In this extended framework we are able to characterize the difference between sentences, such as the Liar and the Truth-teller, that receive the same semantic value in minimal fixed points yet seem to involve distinct semantic phenomena.

The purpose of this expository word is to demonstrate the need for churches to participate in public theology with integrity as partners in the dialog about societal issues. Within the framework of authority and responsibility, the author attempts to establish the Church’s unique position as a truth-teller, using her experience as a local parish pastor and community leader. Looking at Scripture as a role model for policy and action, this work lifts up the conviction of the primitive Church in its role as both witness and hero. Within the concert of voices in the world, the Church has to find its own voice to speak truth to power, and honor its calling by expressing its beliefs and behaving accordingly. Some of the main emerging themes in this article include secular vs divinely inspired authority, integrity as the quality of having only one identity and position, which is both private and public, and truth-telling as the ultimate action of faith and hope. This article will contribute to the extensive amount of literature that addresses the role of the Church in public life and encourage leaders to exert their authority based on the integrity of their convictions, actions, and words.

This article explores ways in which advances in genetic testing have both facilitated and democratized genealogical research for individuals in search of their “roots” or ethnic heritage. These advances coincide with the quests of people of African descent to pinpoint their precise origins and ethnic backgrounds in Africa, revelations that have been denied to many African descendants in the diaspora from slavery times to the present. Genetics and DNA as the “great truth teller”, however, frequently yield results that go contrary to expectations. In this article, the author explores at a personal level the tensions that the “Genetic Revolution” produces between biology and society.

In 1989, Steller and Köhnken presented a systematic compilation of content characteristics for distinguishing between truthful and fabricated testimonies (criteria-based content analysis – CBCA) designed to be applied within a more comprehensive overall diagnostic procedure known as statement validity assessment (SVA; Steller, 1989 ). The subsequent 25 years have seen a marked increase in knowledge about the distinction between experience-based and non-experience-based statements. This supports the SVA approach and permits a better explanation of the underlying processes. The rationale of CBCA is that a true statement differs in content quality from a fabricated account because (a) a truth teller can draw on an episodic autobiographical representation containing a multitude of details, whereas a liar has to relate to scripts containing only general details of an event; and (b) a liar is busier with strategic self-presentation than a truth teller. The present article proposes a modified model of content characteristics that pays greater attention than before to these underlying processes. SVA takes into account that content quality is influenced not only by the veracity of a statement but also by other (personal and contextual) variables that need to be considered in the individual credibility assessment. Theoretical analyses and empirical research do not indicate comparable qualitative differences between true statements and those based on false memories. Witnesses giving testimony based on false memories do not fabricate false statements actively, and they make no effort to conceal a deception; they are not deceiving but mistaken. In these cases, a noncritical application of content criteria can lead to false results. To examine the hypothesis that a statement is based on a false memory, it is necessary to focus on the way in which the statement has emerged and evolved.

Purpose The purpose of this paper, which is drawn on Indonesian academic women’s experiences, is to examine the extent to which the aesthetics of existence or true life of women academics in relation to the truth telling, played out within the interaction between philosophy and politics, is affected by the application of NPM in research and publication productivities, and the way in which women academics are voicing their opinions toward this issue. Design/methodology/approach In total, 30 women academics across two geographical region (east and west) universities took part in this research, sharing their perceptions and the way they criticize this policy to the audiences (Indonesian government), framed within the concept of parrhesia (truth telling), parrhesiastes (truth teller) of Foucault and the pariah of Arendt. Findings Using semi-structured interviews, this research finds that women academics in Indonesian universities have shown discursive voices and stances to the extent to which they agree and oppose this policy, showing the patterns similar to those of parhesiastes and pariah. The implication of this study is addressed in this paper. Originality/value This research, via the lenses of Parrhesia and Pariah, finds several kinds of philosopher roles of women academics in Indonesian universities, such as apathetic philosophers or depraved orators and Schlemihl figure of Pariah, and Parrhesiastic philosophers of Socrates and a conscious figure of Pariah.

Deception detection is becoming an interesting filed in different areas related to security, criminal investigation, law enforcement and terrorism detection. Recently non-verbal features have become essential features for deception detection process. One of the most important kind of these features is facial expression. The importance of these expressions come from the idea that Human face contain different expressions each of which is directly related to a certain state. In this research paper, facial expressions' data are collected for 102 participants (25 women and 77 men) as video clips. There are 504 clips for lie response and 384 for truth response (total 888 video clips). Facial expressions in a form of Action Units (AUs) are extracted for each frame with video clip. The AUs are encoded based on Facial Action Coding System (FACS) which are 18 AUs. These are: AU 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28 and 45. Based on the collected data, only six AUs are the most effective and have a direct impact on the discrimination process between liar and truth teller. These AUs are AU 6, 7, 10, 12, 14 and 28

AbstractThe conventions of narratological categories direct our expectations and interpretation as we read. But when these conventions are problematized, our interpretation becomes more theoretical, forcing us to contemplate why an author would choose to experiment with the category of, for example, narration. In Paul Auster’s City of glass (1985), we have what appears to be a heterodiegetic, omniscient narrator who is mostly, but not fully, unproblematic. By the end, however, we discover that this narrator is (also?) homodiegetic. Auster’s breaking of the rules of traditional narration by having a narrator who is both hetero- and homodiegetic not only leaves readers in a quandary as to how to interpret the text, it also makes us realize how much we rely on the narrator for meaning. I propose to analyze the novel in order to explore the rhetorical strategy of Auster’s refusal to maintain a stable narrator. This analysis will illustrate how the category of narration prompts an unexamined trust in the teller and is therefore essential for our understanding of truth and meaning in narrative. I contend, in other words, that Auster’s experimentation with the category of narration in City of glass is key to the text’s insistence on a revised understanding of truth.

George Orwell is most widely known as the teller of dystopian tales of oppression. A closer look at his oeuvre reveals a courageous truth seeker who frequently lived and worked with his literary subjects. In his fieldwork he used the methods of classic ethnography including participant observation, semi-structured interviews and field notes. This article argues that Orwell was an ethnographer in his research methods and that both Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are ethnographic texts with valuable insights into marginal groups in the early to mid-twentieth century in Europe. The writer’s clear-sighted and humane depiction of ‘otherness’ shows his skill as an ethnographer. His personal investment with his subject matter, reflexivity and attention to broader social and political phenomena in his narratives mark Orwell as an autoethnographer.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the development of an American Irish Catholic identity following the 1844 Philadelphia Nativist riots, as perpetuated in New York’s The Truth Teller, and the Boston Pilot. The journalists of these two papers espoused that Irish Catholics had experienced unimaginable horrors at the hands of the British state and the system of Protestant Ascendancy that Britain instituted. For them, the 1844 Nativist riots were a manifestation of Protestant Ascendancy on American soil, instigated by Irish Protestant infiltrators of the Orange Order. These journalists used the experiences of 1844 to differentiate themselves from Irish Protestants, whom they derided as Orangemen. They challenged the rise of Nativism and Whig Anglo-Saxonism, which they believed had been corrupted by a clandestine Orange movement operating in the United States. The specific Irish Catholic response of these papers deserves attention from historians.

The paper presents the linguistic image of an opposition journalist in the pragmatic perspective, i.e. taking into account the dominant image-making communicative strategies. The author defines the concept of a personal image and presents a model for describing a linguistic image. The strategic and tactical organization of the linguistic image of an opposition journalist is analyzed on two levels: communicative and textual (content). The communicative component is realized through a wide range of self-representative, phatic and fasciation strategies aimed at attracting the target recipient and involving him emotionally in the implementation of the discursive principle of dialogism. The content component is implemented through the strategy of discrediting and tactics of nomination, intensification, reductionism, fragmentation, as well as modeling the socio-political reality in the temporal aspect. As a result, the image of a categorical critic, an expert, an intellectual and truth-teller is created.

The nineteenth-century editor of Ermenrich of Ellwangen's (ca. 814–74) Vita Sualonis, Oswald Holder-Egger, dismissed the Carolingian hagiographer's sermon on the Anglo-Saxon hermit Sualo as historically unimportant because of its heavy reliance on oral traditions, its turgid prose style, and its clumsy Latin grammar. Holder-Egger found fault with the “ahistoricism” of Ermenrich's Vita—a scholarly stance no doubt influenced by the historicism of his day that privileged “the basic story as the primary object or goal of research.” For the late-nineteenth century, the recovery and reconstruction of an original source (an archetype or Urtext) from which all other derivative and secondary versions sprang was the ultimate task of historical inquiry. Such an Urtext, once unearthed, would then present the true, uncontaminated story of what had happened in the past, and the historian who successfully excavated an Urtype would assume the role of truth teller.

What is the nature of whistleblower subjectivity? In this article, we depart from current scholarly depictions of this figure as a fearless truth-teller who is fully independent of the organization. We argue for a new framing that sees the self-construction of the whistleblower as infused with passionate attachments to organizational and professional norms, even after one experiences severe reprisals. We base our claims on recently gathered empirical data and draw on Judith Butler to theorize how, contrary to existing understandings, passionate attachments to one’s organization and profession shape whistleblower subjectivity, rather than conscious risk-taking, or autonomous self-reinvention. Our second contribution is to highlight the importance of practical and material supports for this vital figure in society; until now the whistleblower has been idealized as an extraordinary hero rather than a real human in need of assistance. Overall, we propose a new theorization of the whistleblower involving passionate investments in the organization or profession that has cast one out.

Singing Ideas: Performance, Politics and Oral Poetry is a fascinating insight into the Irish tradition of singing and its potency to fuel political thought and identity, in the context of eighteenth-century Ireland. To that purpose, Tríona Ní Shíocháin takes us through an informed analysis of the lived-experience of one historical figure, the magnetic Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary). One of the greatest Irish song poets of her time, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire was born in 1774 and died during the Great Irish Famine in 1848. She is depicted as a charismatic woman who composed and sang anti-colonial ideas, mocking nobility and denouncing social exploitation in Ireland. During her life, her craft gained her the reputation of a prophetic figure, a truth-teller or parrhesiast – a Greek notion that, as Foucault (2011) holds, refers to those with the courage to address urgent political issues, in public, even if running the risk of putting their lives in danger. Parrhesia, Foucault argues, can set social and historical change in motion – and that is precisely what seems to have happened through Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire’s subversive singing. Through the unique lens of this fascinating character, Ní Shíocháin is able to paint ...

As a survivor of interpersonal violence and expert in recovery from relational abuse, I instinctively reacted with indignation when I recognized Trump as an abusive personality. Indignation advocates righteous anger in opposition to immoral, disgusting, or unfair behavior aimed at reducing the dignity of others. Accessing indignation to confront abusers is essential for the health of interpersonal relationships. In the same way, I had a moral obligation to be a truth-teller about Trump in service of the country. Prosocial emotions help manage antisocial behaviors universally judged as nonreciprocal. When Trump’s mental health was first discussed, I predicted it would be frustrating, because the medical model of psychiatry has lost its way in many regards, notably its disavowal of the role of emotions. Evolution designed emotions as essential guides for healthy human relationships. A case formulation model I designed advocates identifying those like Trump as other-blamers—people with low self-worth who manage shame and social downranking by blame-shifting. They are attracted to partners with low self-worth who readily accept blame ( self-blamers). The profession should educate on the power of shame, the widespread harms of narcissistic abuse, and help clients access indignation and assertiveness. Moral elements should be reintegrated into psychology.

The article presents a reading of the novel by M. A. Bulgakov «The Master and Margarita» as an interpretation of the philosophical problem of the connection between word and reality discussed in European thought in the second half of the 20th century in the works of J. Derrida, J. Baudrillard, R. Barthes and others. In «The Master and Margarita», the loss of a sense of reality is shown through the fine line between fiction and prophecy. The writer appears, on the one hand, as an obsessed and insane, on the other hand, as one who is able to speak truthfully when reality is fictitious, just as the ideological and bureaucratic atmosphere of the USSR in the 1930s (it is shown in the novel as a space of signs that have lost the signified, as fiction and theater). A distinctive feature of M. A. Bulgakov’s novel is attention to the destiny of the speaking person. The religious motive of personal speech as a personal response to God can be opposed to the philosophical concept of the «death of the author» by R. Barthes and M. Foucault. This personality of speech is important in the situation of the Stalinist period, when a person could disappear forever. Interpretations of the key figures of the novel are given: Woland as a liar-teller, the Master as a writer, capable of telling not a lie, but the truth through his fiction, Margarita as a force of love, capable of recklessly choosing her subject and giving it meaning even among general nonsense. The images of the execution of Pontius Pilate and the Master's award reflect the two destinys of the ambiguous speaker: the torment of a coward who does not dare to speak openly and a cosy space for creativity that gives freedom and hope.

Abstract Few philosophers of history ever recognized the profundity of Peter Munz’s The Shapes of Time that came out in 1977. In this book Munz upheld the view that no part or aspect of the past itself provides us with the solid fundament of all historical knowledge. For him, the historian’s most fundamental logical entity is what he calls the Sinngebild. The Sinngebild consists of two events defined and held together by a covering law. These CL’s can be anything from simple truisms, the regularities we know from daily life to truly scientific laws. But ‘underneath’ these Sinngebilde there is nothing. Hence, Munz’s bold assertation: ‘the truth of the matter is that there is no ascertainable face behind the various masks every story-teller is creating’ and his claim that his philosophy of history is ‘an idealism writ small’. Next, Munz distinguishes between ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’. We ‘explain’ the past by taking seriously the historical agent’s self-description and ‘interpret’ it by stating what it looks like from our present perspective. ‘Explanation’ and ‘interpretation’ may ‘typologically’ be more or less similar. Relying on a number of very well-chosen examples from his own field (Munz was a medievalist), this enables Munz to argue why one historical interpretation may be superior to another. In his later life Munz developed a speculative philosophy of history inspired by Popper’s fallibilism.

P. Kulish as a person is most fully revealed in the autobiographical texts, as they project a real picture of the author's views on the world, its conceptualization and categorization. Throughout his life, the writer turned to autobiographical work. The literary works in which the author reconstructs his “self” on the basis of his own memories of his real life events, create a kind of autobiographical paradigm, a special place in which belongs to a personal diary. The article proves that P. Kulish's diary allows to understand the historical and cultural conditions that influenced the development of his personality and creative intentions. This is facilitated by the analysis of the author's communication with the Ukrainian and Russian creative intelligentsia, in particular with the rector of St. Petersburg University P. Pletnyov, and the described love stories of the writer with Olga Pletnyova, daughter of his patron, and Alexandra Bilozerska, the writer's future wife. The autobiographical narrative is created by the following techniques: retrospective vision of events, chronological principle of presentation of material, psychological disclosure of the author's personality. P. Kulish's diary testifies to a kind of self-creation of the writer, because the author relied on its publication, so he was not always sincere in expressing his own thoughts or describing situations. Among the objective reasons for self-mythologizing were P. Kulish's plans to occupy a high place in the St. Petersburg circle of intellectuals. On the other hand, the reasons for self-idealization in the diary were the psychological features of P. Kulish's personality: painful selfishness, vulnerability, ambition, passion. The image of “self” by P. Kulish is interesting from the point of view of self-objectification and self-expression of the author, because his own private life is only a proto-plot, and the author himself is a prototype of the main character: artistic image and real personality are close but not identical. Analysis of the autobiographical image of P. Kulish proves that the author sought to emphasize the importance of his scientific and cultural activities. So, the writer built an autobiographical image as a literary portrait of an active and at the same time unique representative of the era, which claims to be a leader in the national and cultural space of Ukraine. P. Kulish's personal myth is transmitted through several microimages: on the one hand, the image of an intellectual, truth-teller, high moral person, who has authority among famous figures of the time, and on the other – a romantic image of the hero of a love novel, sensual and at the same time ironic refers to the object of their sympathies. Self-analysis, self-reflection are the key ways of self-disclosure of the writer in the diary, which allow to view P. Kulish as a person with an inflammatory character, decisive, principled, self-sufficient, purposeful, and at the same time sensual and vulnerable. Thus, the diary of P. Kulish represents a subjective portrait of the author, created by him in the context of a particular historical time. The author of the diary symbolizes and mythologizes his “self”, and the basis of these processes is the identification world which correlates with the one of mental, national, aesthetic and ethical values and meanings of P. Kulish as a Ukrainian patriot and humanist.

AbstractThe present experiment examined how the interaction between senders’ communicative competence, veracity and the medium through which judgments were made affected observers’ accuracy. Stimuli were obtained from a previous study. Observers (N = 220) judged the truthfulness of statements provided by a good truth teller, a good liar, a bad truth teller, and a bad liar presented either via an audio-only, video-only, audio-video, or transcript format. Log-linear analyses showed that the data were best explained via the saturated model, therefore indicating that all the four variables interacted, G2(0) = 0, p = 1, Q2 = 1. Follow-up analyses showed that the good liar and bad liar were best evaluated via the transcript (z = 2.5) and the audio-only medium (z = 3.9), respectively. Both the good truth teller and the bad truth teller were best assessed through the audio-video medium (z = 2.1, good truth teller, z = 3.4, bad truth teller). Results indicated that all the factors interacted and played a joint role on observers’ accuracy. Difficulties and suggestions for choosing the right medium are presented.

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama gyvenimo samprata Kanto praktinėje filosofijoje. Ši samprata yra lyginama su ta šiuolaikine gyvenimo samprata, kurią aptinkame H. Fielding romane „Bridžitos Džouns dienoraštis“. Santykis tarp šių dviejų sampratų analizuojamas kaip santykis tarp dviejų paradigmų: proto ir širdies. Svajonių žudiko įvaizdis pasitelkiamas tam, kad būtų parodyta, jog ne visada pareiga faktinei tiesai yra tai, kas svarbu gyvenimo praktikoje, nes ne visada faktinė tiesa išsemia visą tiesos sąvoką. Galiausiai yra parodomas būdas susieti Kanto ir Bridžitos Džouns paradigmas.Reikšminiai žodžiai: gyvenimas, pareiga, optatyvas, svajonė, tiesos sakytojas, svajonių žudikas. THE ‘KILLER OF DREAMS’ OR THE LIMITS OF KANT’S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHYSaulenė Pučiliauskaitė Summary The article investigates the notion of ‘life’ in Kant’s practical philosophy. This notion is being compared with the notion of ourday life, which we find in the novel of Helen Fielding ‘Bridget Jone’s Diary’. The relation between these two notions is being analyzed as a relation between two paradigms: the paradigm of reason and the paradigm of heart. The image of the ‘killer of dreams’ is requested to show that the duty to state factual truth is not always, what is of cruicial importance to our lives. Factual truth is only part of the concept of truth, not all of it. A dream is also a fact. At the end, life and reason meat each other in the practice of writing.Keywords: life, morality, duty, categorical imperative, optative, dream, the ‘teller of truth’, the ‘killer of dreams’, writing.

The article discusses supernatural experiences within the wider culture of the supernatural as a discourse in communication and performance in the liminal area between the credible and the incredible. The interviews analysed in the article were recorded within the context of research into the paranormal that includes several themes, for example apparitions of ghosts, humanoids, dowsing. The concept of belief pervades vernacular discussion and takes the form of the performance of truth in various forms. The teller’s position to the truth of the story can be seen from their narrative strategies, which present the teller as an expert in the supernatural, or on the contrary as an individual struggling in the face of the unknown. Paranormal enthusiasts give social legitimation to single experiences and to networks of thinking, along within the wider culture of the supernatural. Moreover, the places of these encounters can become experiential evidence for meeting the supernatural through dowsing practices that shape the spiritual worldview of those engaged. Thus, single experiences and stories will be woven into a wider story about the intervention of the supernatural in everyday life.

Abstract One way to deal with the liar paradox is the paracomplete approach to theories of truth, which gives up proofs by contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. This allows one to reject both the liar sentence and its negation. The simplest paracomplete theory of truth is $\textit {KFS}$ due to Saul Kripke. At face value, this theory suffers from the problem that it cannot say anything about the liar paradox, so a defender of this theory cannot explain their rejection of the liar sentence within the language of $\textit {KFS}$. This was one of the motivations for Hartry Field to extend $\textit {KFS}$ with a conditional that is not definable within $\textit {KFS}$. With the help of this conditional, Field defines a determinateness operator that can be used to explain one’s rejection of the liar sentence within the object language of his theory. Field’s determinateness operator can be transfinitely iterated to create stronger notions of determinateness required to explain the rejection of paradoxical sentences involving the determinateness operator. In this paper, we show that Field’s complex extension of $\textit {KFS}$ is not required in order to express rejection of paradoxical sentences like the liar sentence. Instead, one can work with a transfinite hierarchy of determinateness operators that are definable in $\textit {KFS}$. This allows for Field’s philosophically appealing treatment of the liar sentence, the truth-teller and strengthenings of the liar sentence to be reproducible within the theory $\textit {KFS}$, which is semantically much simpler than Field’s extension of $\textit {KFS}$ with a conditional.

There is an emerging debate about the role and importance of women in right-wing nationalist movements. Drawing on research that highlights the need to study such women as active and complex political agents, this article examines a phenomenon that has previously received little attention—the activism of female Japanese nationalists. We approach the question of how such activism is practiced by analyzing a group interview with female nationalists, a nationalist manga centering on women’s experiences, and autobiographic books on such activism by and for Japanese women. The article contributes by arguing that female nationalist agency in Japan is a complex phenomenon, which is enacted through everyday micro-practices. It outlines how female nationalist activism draws upon and enhances, as well as challenges and transcends, a traditional Japanese “housewife identity.” As such, the female Japanese nationalist is imagined as having access to certain truths. She takes on the role of “truth-teller,” who is playing a strategic role in “waking people up” to the nationalist cause by voicing anger but also making space for a more “joyful,” “cute,” and inconspicuous everyday activism.

Ethnicity: an involving topic demanding expressive caution – Young male crime victim’s narrativesThis article analyses some young men’s specific ways of retelling victims’ experience when the perpetrators have an immigrant background. In qualitative interviews with twenty young med, fear of being seen as intolerant was distinguished by their expressive caution. This involved using various aligning actions: presenting disclaimers and accounts, but also in terms of hesitant speak, re-takes and throat clearing, and in some case refraining to talk about the attackers or robbers’ ethnic background. Even if the subject was delicate, it was engaging. The topic of ethnicity associated with crime is used as a resource in several ways: to present oneself as a tolerant person (sometimes in contrast to others having the same experiences) but also as a truth-teller who criticizes what men describe as a societally prescribed way of discussing these matters publicly.

This article analyses how the Australian current affairs programme, Four Corners, which follows a style modelled on the BBC programme Panorama, has represented Australian military history in two of its programmes, Gallipoli: The Fatal Shore and No Prisoners on Australian deserters at the fall of Singapore. Chris Masters was the reporter on both programmes. These historical documentaries claim to investigate Australian Anzac mythology. Four Corners is noted for its rigorous pursuit of issues in current affairs. Programmes construct argument that the journalists steadfastly pursue in order to ‘expose the truth’. Rather than neutrally representing both sides of a debate, the programmes tend to take the side that the journalists perceive to be in the public interest. Examining how Four Corners has applied its own style of investigative journalism to the Anzac mythology is explored by outlining whether the programmes follow Ken Burn’s ideas of documentary-makers as ‘tribal story-teller’ crafting stories that uphold national identity or Bill Nichols’ view that documentary is an argument that is representative of reality rather than reflects reality. Examining the history of Gallipoli and the fall of Singapore in the Four Corners programmes tends suggest that the journalists working on the programmes preferred to reaffirm the assumptions of the Anzac legend, but attack or ignore historians and evidence that questions it. The programmes appear to be a mixture of Burns’s and Nichols’ ideas of documentary making.

Kate, Lauren. Teardrop. New York: Delacorte Press, 2013. Print.This Young Adult fantasy novel explores the compelling story of Eureka Boudreaux who was taught at a young age to never, ever cry. Ever since her mother drowned in an accident by the force of a rogue wave, Eureka no longer has the desire to live.Not long after the terrifying incident, a mysterious boy, Ander, enters her life. Although she has never seen Ander before, he feels strangely familiar and has an unusual talent for appearing in front of Eureka when she least expects him. He appears to know everything about her and warns her that she is in grave danger. Not long after their first encounter, Eureka discovers that Ander is the only person who has come close to making her cry.As she learns to cope with her new reality, Eureka finds solace in Brooks, her oldest friend with whom she can share anything. Together they try to solve the mystery of the strange inheritance from her mother – a locket, a letter, a stone, and an ancient book that no one understands. Eureka recruits a fortune teller who is able to translate the text and finds that the book is a story about a girl who had her heart broken and cried the ancient world of Atlantis into the sea. Characters from the book have an uncanny similarity to the people whom she shares a deep connection in her own life. The more of the book that she uncovers, the stranger her life becomes. Soon Eureka discovers that the story is more than an ancient tale and Ander may be telling the truth about her safety. This book is the first in a trilogy, which leaves readers waiting in anticipation for the next installment. It explores themes of depression from the loss of a parent and the author weaves an intricate plot that helps the heroine overcome her grief. Overall, it is a fast-paced story that is well suited to young adult audiences, featuring complex characters, love, and dark magic.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Janice KungJanice Kung is an Academic Library Intern at the University of Alberta’s John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. She obtained her undergraduate degree in commerce and completed her MLIS in 2013. She believes that the best thing to beat the winter blues is to cuddle up on a couch and lose oneself in a good book.

The western world has an enthusiasm for blondes that amounts to a cultural fetish. As a signifier the blonde is loaded: blondes have more fun, blondes are dumb, blondes are more sexually available, blondes are less capable, less serious, less complicated. The blonde is, in modern day patriarchy, often portrayed as the ideal woman. The Oxford Dictionary defines a Goddess as a female deity or a woman who is adored for her beauty. The Blonde Goddess then is the ultimate contemporary female, worshipped for her appearance, erotically idolised. She may be a Playboy bunny, the hot girl on the beach or the larger than life billboard, but everywhere her image haunts mere mortals: the men who can’t have her and the women who can’t be her. During the second wave of feminism the Blonde Goddess was vilified as an unrealistic illusion and exploitive fantasy and our enthusiasm for her was roundly challenged. She was a stereotype, feminists cried, a site of oppression, a phoney construct. Men were judged harshly for desiring her and women were discouraged from being her. Well beyond hair colour and its power as signifier the very notion of Goddessness, of being adored for one’s beauty, was considered repressive. Women were called upon to refuse participation in blondeness (in its signifying sense) and Goddessness (in the sense of being revered for attractiveness) and men were chastised for being superficial and chauvinistic.Nevertheless, decades later, many men continue to lust after her, women (and increasingly younger girls) work ever harder at being her — bleaching, shaving, breast augmenting and botoxing — and the media promotes endless representations of her. If the second wave thought the Blonde Goddess would give up the ghost easily it was mistaken but what their enthusiastic critique did enable is the birth of a new type of Blonde Goddess, one generally considered to be stronger, more empowered and a better role model for the 21st century Miss. Though the likes of Mae West hinted at this type of Blonde Goddess well before Madonna it was not until Madonna’s generation that she went mainstream. There have been many Blonde Goddess “It girls” — Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield and Debbie Harry (singer of the band Blondie) to name a few, but two in particular stand out as the embodiment of these types; their bodies and identities going beyond the image-making machinery to become a kind of Blonde Goddess performance art. They are Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The enthusiasm for blondeness and Goddessness routinely gives rise to faddish cultural enthusasisms. In Monroe’s day her curvaceous figure was upheld as the model female form. After Madonna appeared with her bangles and layered tops girls all across America and around the world dressed like her. Drawing on Angela Carter’s feminist readings of De Sade in The Sadeian Woman and envisioning Monroe and Madonna, two of the most fêted examples of Blonde Goddessness in history, as De Sade’s Justine and Juliette reveals their erotic currency as both couched in patriarchal gender relations and binding us to it. Considering Monroe and Madonna with the Marquis De Sade characters Justine and Juliette in mind illustrates that Goddessness as I’m defining it here — the enthusiasm which with women rely on beauty for affirmation and men’s enthusiastic feeding of that dependence — amounts to a feminine masquerade that disempowers women from a real experience of femaleness, emancipation and eroticism. When feminists in the 60s and 70s critiqued the Blonde Goddess as the poster-child for good old-fashioned sexism it was women like Monroe they had in mind. What feminists argued for they largely got — access to life beyond the domestic domain, financial autonomy, self-determination — but, as a De Sadian viewing of Madonna will show, we’re still compromised. While many feminists, most notably Andrea Dworkin, rejected the Marquis De Sade, notorious libertine and writer, as a dishonourable pornographer, others, such as Luce Irigaray and Angela Carter, felt he accurately reflected the social structures and relations of western civilisation and was therefore fertile ground for the exploration of what it is to be a woman in our culture. Justine and Juliette are erotic novels that recount the very different fortunes of two dissimilar sisters. They are beautiful (of course) and as such they are Goddesses, even while being defiled and defiling. Monroe and Madonna are metaphorical sisters in a man's world (and it was an infamous touch of video genius when Madonna acknowledged as much by doing Monroe in the video for “Material Girl” early on in her career). Yet one is a survivor and one isn't. One is living and one is long dead. Monroe is the Blonde Goddess as victim; Madonna is the Blonde Goddess as Villain. Monroe cast a shadow; Madonna has danced with the shadow. Both Marilyn and Madonna assumed a feminine masquerade so successful, so omnipotent, that they became not just Goddesses, desired by men, admired by women, and emulated by girls, but the most iconic and celebrated Blonde Goddesses of their age. It was, and in Madonna’s case still is, a highly sexualised masquerade that utilises and promotes itself as a commodity. Both women milked this masquerade to achieve notoriety and wealth in a world where women are disadvantaged in the public sphere. Some read this kind of exploitation of erotic desire as a mark of subjugation while others see it as a feminist act: a knowing usage of means toward a self-possessed end, but as Carter will help demonstrate, masquerade is, either way, an artificial construct and our enthusiasm for trading in it comes at a high price. Monroe, the sexy, fragile child-woman, was the firstborn of the sisters. Her star rose in the moralistic fifties, and by all accounts she spent most of her time in the limelight frustrated by her career and by the studio’s control of it. She was “owned”, and she rebelled against it, fleeing to New York City to study acting at the renowned Actors Studio. She became a devoted student of method acting, a technique that encourages actors to plumb their emotional depths and experiences, though her own psychological instability threatened her career. She was scandalously difficult to work with: chronically late, forgetful, and self-indulgent; and she died alone, intoxicated and naked. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems likely that a cocktail of mental disturbance, man trouble, and substance addiction led to her premature death by overdose in 1962. Monroe’s traditional take on blondeness and Goddessness embodied the purely feminine masquerade and translated to the classic Justine trajectory.Madonna can be thought of as Monroe’s post-modern younger sister, the next generation of Blonde Goddessness. Known for her self-determination, business savvy and self-control Madonna’s self-parody and decades long survival and triumph in a male dominated industry is remarkable. Perhaps this is where the sisters differ most: Madonna challenges the dominant semiotic code of traditional gender roles in that she combines her feminine masquerade with masculinity, witness the pointy cone bra worn with pinstripe trousers and monocle on the “Blonde Ambition” tour. Madonna is the new blonde — shrewder, more forceful, more man-like. She plays girly in her feminine masquerade, but she does so self-consciously, with a wink, as the second sister who has observed and learned the lesson of the first. In Carter’s exploration of the characters of Justine and Juliette she notes that when the orphaned girls are turned out of the convent to fend for themselves, Justine, the sister whose goodness and innocence is constantly met with the brutality and betrayal of men, "embarks on a dolorous pilgrimage in which each preferred sanctuary turns out to be a new prison and all the human relations offered her are a form of servitude" (39). During Monroe’s pilgrimage from foster care, to young wife, to teen model, to star she found herself trapped in an abusive studio system that could not nurture her and instead raped her over and over again in the sense that it thwarted her personal aspirations as an actor and her desire for creative autonomy by overpowering her with its demands. Monroe did not own her own life and sexuality so much as function as a site of objectification, a possession of the Tinsel Town suits. In her personal life she was endowed with the “feminine” trait of feeling; she was, like Justine, "the broken heart, the stabbed dove, the violated sepulcher, the persecuted maiden whose virginity is perpetually refreshed by rape” (Carter 49).In real life and in most of her characters Monroe was kind hearted, generous, caring and compassionate. It is this heart that Justine values most; whatever happens to the body, no matter how impure it becomes, the heart remains sacred. The victim with heart is morally superior to her masters. In a suffering that becomes second nature, "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity” (57).Conspiracy theories and rumors of Monroe's suffering and possible murder at the hands of the Kennedys (cast as evil Sadian masters) abound. Suicide attempts, drug dependency, and nervous breakdowns were the order of the day in her final years. The continuing fascination with Monroe lies in the fact that she was the archetypal sullied virgin. Feminine virtue and goodness require sexual innocence and purity. If Monroe’s innocence (a feature of films like Some Like it Hot) was too often confused with stupidity she made the most of it by cornering the market on bimbo roles (Gentleman Prefer Blondes is her ultimate dumb blonde performance). But even those who thought she couldn’t act realised that her appeal was potent because her innocence was infused with the potentiality of an uncontainable libidinous energy. Like Justine, Juliette was a woman born into a man's world, but in her corruption Juliette decided beat men at their own game, to transcend her destiny as woman at any cost. Carter says of Juliette: She is rationality personified and leaves no single cell of her brain unused. She will never obey the fallacious promptings of her heart. Her mind functions like a computer programmed to produce two results for herself — financial profit and libidinal gratification. (79)Indeed, it could be said that it is financial profit and libidinal gratification that most defines Madonna in the public’s eye. She is obscenely rich and often cited for her calculated re-inventions and assertive sexuality (which peaked in the early nineties with the album Erotica and the graphic Sex book). Madonna, like Juliette, is a story-teller. Even if she isn’t always the author of her songs she creates narrative interplay using song, fashion, and video. Like Juliette Madonna takes control of her destiny. She heads her own production company and is intimately involved with the details of her multi-faceted career. Like Monroe Madonna is said to have slept around strategically in her pre-stardom years, but unlike Monroe she was not passed around. The men in Madonna’s life early in her career were critical to advancing it. From Dan Gilroy, who helped form her first rock band, the Breakfast Club to DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who remixed tracks on her debut album Madonna took every step up the ladder of success guided by a precision instinct for self-preservation and promotion. She was not used up as she used others. Her trail leaves no sign of weakness, just one envelope-pushing accomplishment after another, with a few failures along the way, most notably in film. Though very different central to both Monroe and Madonna’s lives and careers is a mega-watt erotic appeal, an appeal that has everything to do with their respective differential repetitions of being blonde.In Eroticism Georges Bataille defines eroticism as the fusion of separate objects involving the play of discontinuity and continuity. In Bataille’s work these words have a specific and unconventional meaning. Discontinuity describes our individuality, our separateness from each other, a separateness that reigns in our social and work-a-day lives. Continuity refers to dissolution of separateness that is most associated with death but which is also experienced by way of exalted living through a taste of transcendence. Bataille posits three types of eroticism: physical, emotional and religious and he claims that they all “substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (15).Here Bataille meets De Sade. In the Introduction to Eroticism Bataille speaks of De Sade’s assertion that we come closest to death (continuity) through the “licentious image.” Further, Bataille declares that eroticism is not just an enthusiasm; it is the enthusiasm of humankind. “It seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions,” he says. “I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions” (12). He goes on to state that our enthusiasm/eroticism is not just an aspect of our being, but its driving force: “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear.” (15).Human beauty is, Bataille suggests, measured by its distance from the animal — the more ethereal (light and unearthly) the female shape and texture, and the less clear its relation to animal reality, the more beautiful — the erotic moment lies in profaning that beauty, reducing it to its animal essence. Perhaps this is another reason why blondeness matters and signifies sex, conferring as it does a halo, an ethereal “light” which evokes the sacredness of continuity while denying the animal (the hairy and base reality of the body). This is the invitation The Blonde Goddess makes to defilement, her begging to be reduced to her private parts. Juliette/Madonna subverts her blonde invitation to be profaned by actively taking part in the profanation. Madonna has openly embraced gay culture, S & M, exhibitionism, fetishism, role-play and religious symbolism placing herself centre stage at all times. Justine/Monroe attracted erotic victimisation while Juliette/Madonna refused it by sleight of hand, and here again De Sade can help make sense of this. The works that illustrate this difference between Justine/Monroe and Juliette/Madonna most clearly are The Misfits and Truth or Dare. The Misfits is a beautiful and delicate film, written by Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller. The role of Roslyn is rumored to be based on Monroe's own character and her relationship with its three metaphorically dying cowboys reveals an enchanting and pale Justine broken by the dysfunctional and dominating masculinity around her. In contrast, Truth or Dare is a self styled documentary of Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour. It portrays Madonna striking a pose as the tough-talking Queen of the castle, calling the shots, with a bevy of play-thing pawns scuttling beneath her. But, opposite as these characterisations are, some sameness emanates from the two women in these works. Something haunts the screen and it is this: the sisters’ unavoidable cultural roots as women. Even as Madonna sucks on a bottle in faux fellatio, even as she simulates masturbation on stage or scolds her messy young dancers there is something melancholic about her, a vague relationship to Monroe. And here Carter helps solve the mystery: "She [Juliette] is just as her sister is, a description of a type of female behavior rather than a model of female behavior and her triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine's disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis” (79).In other words, in Carters’ view Justine/Monroe as heart personified maintains the traditional role of woman as body, as one belonging to the private sphere who pays dearly for entering public life, while Juliette/Madonna as reason personified infiltrates the male dominated territory of culture. Unlike Monroe, Madonna gets away with being a public figure, flourishes even, but as Carter’s Juliette, this victory has required her to betray herself in some way. It is “ambivalent” and Madonna doesn’t quite get off scot free. Madonna has been progressive in that she moved away from the traditional feminine role of body in a forbidding industry, but even though her lucrative maneuvering is more sophisticated than Monroe’s careening, she walks a fine line. In De Sade the sexuality of a libertine is a male identified desire in which women are objectified and exploited. Madonna’s trick is to manifest in feminine masquerade then take an ironic turn in objectifying and exploiting herself in what amounts to a split persona, half woman, half man. In other words she seduces herself under our gaze, and she dares to enjoy it. Ultimately, neither sister can escape the social structure into which she was born. Monroe, who was unable to live as a real woman, lives on as a legend, a Blonde Goddess in the eternal feminine masquerade. Madonna is reborn every time she re-invents herself but it’s hard to tell, with all the costume changing, who the real Madonna is. It was the unactualised real woman that the second wave tried to free by daring to suggest that she existed and was valuable beyond signification and Goddessness and that she had a right to her own experience of enthusiasm/eroticism rather than being relegated to the role of being the “licentious image” for the male gaze. The attack on the Blonde Goddess underestimated the deeply rooted psychic/emotional conditioning at play on both sides of the Blonde Goddess game. Here we are in a new millennium in which the ‘pornified’ Blonde Goddess is everywhere but even if she’s more unfettered and sexually active that deeply rooted conditioning remains. For Carter neither Justine nor Juliette is a worthy role model for the women of today and it would seem to follow that neither are Monroe nor Madonna. However, Carter does speak of “a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” (79). Blondeness as a signifier and Goddessness as a function inhibit an experience of shared enthusiasm and eroticism between men and women. When Bataille speaks of nakedness he means eroticism as the destruction of the self-contained character that gives rise to an experience of continuity. This kind of absolute nakedness is impossible for those trapped in the cycle of signification and functional relations. I suggest that the liberation project of the second wave of feminism stalled when in our desire to not be Justines we simply became more akin to Juliette. Blondeness as a signifier is still problematic, and Goddessness of the kind I have spoken of here — women’s attachment to using beauty to garner adoration in place of an innate sense of self and worth and men’s willingness to patronise it — is still rampant and both the Justine and Juliette feminine masquerades produce a false economy of enthusiasm and eroticism that denies the experience of authenticity and the true potential of relationship. The challenge now is one that most needs to be met not in the spotlight but in the privacy of our own beings and the forum of our lives as the struggle for synthesis continues in those of us, female and male, blonde, brunette, redhead, black or grey-haired, who long for an experience of ourselves and each other that transcends masquerade. ReferencesCarter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago Press, 1979.Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1987.Madonna. Erotica. Warner Bros, 1992.———. “Material Girl.” Like a Virgin. WEA/Warner Bros, 1984.——— and Steven Meisel. Sex. Warner Bros, 1992. The Misfits. Dir. John Huston.. MGM, 1961. Some Like It Hot. Dir. Billy Wilder, Billy. MGM, 1959. Truth or Dare. Dir. Alek Keshishian. Live/Artisan, 1991.

“The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature ‘dirty’. That is part of their productive power…” (Enzensberger qtd. in Hartley 23) “Why do people have to be so ugly? Write about such ugly characters? It’s perverted. I know you all think that I’m being prissy but I don’t care. I was brought up in a certain way and this is … mean-spirited.” (Writing student, Storytelling). In 1986 David Lynch brought the suburbs into focus. Before Lynch they had remained slightly bland and indistinct, white picket fences and lush green lawns in the background of Doris Day comedies, Douglas Sirk films and television sitcoms. But in the opening shots of Blue Velvet (1986) Lynch announced that he was going to do something quite different. He skipped through the stock suburban footage of vibrant colours – the red roses, the blue skies, the happy, smiling faces of the children – preferring instead, to track through the grass. There, through a series of grotesque close-ups of seething, warring insects, Lynch revealed the anomalies and ambiguities beneath the bright and shiny surface of suburbia. Recalling his childhood of “elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman… Middle America as it is supposed to be” (Rodley 10), Lynch explains: “I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath… I saw life in extreme close-ups” (Rodley 11). In Blue Velvet Lynch offers us an extreme close-up of suburbia by focussing on the dirt. In her seminal work Purity and Danger anthropologist Mary Douglas studied the way some substances are classified as dirt because they are (following William James) “matter out of place” (Douglas 36), something that is considered inappropriate in a given context. “Dirt” is therefore an indication of what is taboo and disruptive, an idea Douglas goes on to link to notions of ambiguity and anomaly. Blue Velvet’s “matter out of place” begins with the warring insects beneath the lawn, continues with the discovery of an amputated ear and goes on to include fellatio at knife-point, sex acts with velvet, kidnapping, murder and torture, all juxtaposed against an adolescent romance, a Hardy Boys mystery and the blue skies and birdsong of the opening. On its release Blue Velvet was considered part of a wave of mid-eighties films that were re-evaluating suburbia, amongst them True Stories (1986), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), River’s Edge (1986) and the thematically similar Something’s Wild (1986). But Lynch’s ability to make the ordinary strange, through his juxtaposition of image and sound (Chion), meant that Blue Velvet went further than its contemporaries because in this film the suburban as a whole took on the “strange and threatening” characteristics of something without a stable identity (Douglas). Just as critics proclaimed Blue Velvet “leaves us altered, for good or ill – forever” (Total Film 96) so too does Lynch soil our very perception of the suburban, his “red ant” view of the world suggesting disorder where there was order, desperation where there was happiness, filth where there was cleanliness. In this way Blue Velvet inaugurates a genre of “corrupted idealism in the suburbs” (Total Film 97) that would include The Virgin Suicides (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), American Beauty (1999) and the works of Todd Solondz, together with television series like Lynch’s own Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Picket Fences (1992-1996), Dead like Me (2003-2004), Close to Home (2005-), Weeds (2005-) and Desperate Housewives (2004-). John Hartley applies Douglas’ notion of dirt to both ‘television’ and its ‘audience’, referring to them as ‘dirty’ categories. This is because “television texts do not supply the analyst with a warrant for considering them either as unitary or as structurally bounded into an inside and outside” (Hartley 22). Similarly what sense an audience might make of television “depends… on the discursive resources available” some of which the audience will “identify” with and some of which will “marginalize”, “deny” or be “more obvious, well-worn and time-honoured than others” (Hartley 23). Hartley draws on the work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Edmund Leach (discussing the ‘dirtiness’ of television and individuals respectively) to conclude that “power is located in dirt” (Hartley 23) because dirt creates “ambiguous boundaries” between the media and its readers. While film may be a more bounded, unitary medium (delineated at the very least by its running time) the “ambiguous boundaries” that dirt creates are something Lynch toys with in Blue Velvet. In a similar fashion to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), the viewer is made complicit in the voyeuristic tendencies of his protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan). But Lynch goes a step further, turning the camera back on his voyeur in answer to a concern voiced by the nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), in that earlier film: “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is look in for a change.” Lynch offers us Jeffrey as a potential source of identification but also makes us witness to Jeffrey’s own moral failings. In this way Jeffrey becomes as ambiguous as his sadomasochistic relationship with singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), simultaneously abuser and abused, truth-teller and deceiver. As his girlfriend Sandy (Laura Dern) states: “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” Here, the ambiguity offered by dirt results in the examination – the making visible – of both the voyeur and the audience as (complicit) voyeurs. Both are called into question – “detective or pervert?” – continually blurring the boundaries between subject and object, viewer and participant. By movie’s end Jeffrey can return to Sandy and the alluring veneer of suburbia, but he has murdered, molested and (impliedly) been raped. Dirt sticks. Jeffrey is forever changed and so is our perception of the suburban. If Lynch’s Blue Velvet revealed the rich vein of dirt running through suburbia, then perhaps it is Todd Solondz who has mined it most extensively. While Lynch was to return to suburbia in his television series Twin Peaks his attention has frequently turned to other more extreme and experimental ideas. In contrast Solondz has focussed almost exclusively on the suburban in four of his projects: Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001) and Palindromes (2004). It is Happiness that provides the clearest sense of the “imagined community” of suburbia because its multiple storylines suggest multiple lives being conducted simultaneously. Like Blue Velvet it presents a veneer of suburban life which it then goes on to soil, particularly through the Maplewood family (whose story provides the climax for the film). In the first shot of the Maplewood’s home a cleaner is seen at the rear of the shot scrubbing the floor; dirt is presented as a threat to order and Trish Maplewood (Cynthia Stevenson) refers to “having it all”. By the film’s end the focus will have shifted to masturbation, homicide, dismemberment, various perverse sexual acts and the revelation that her husband is a paedophile. Uniting these disparate streams are the searches for happiness each of the nine central characters undertakes, with only character, the boy Billy Maplewood (Rufus Reed), achieving his happiness, through a successful ejaculation that provides the denouement of the film. Much like Blue Velvet, Happiness was decried as “sick” upon its release. But Happiness’s dirtiness goes further than its subject matter; it also resides in the “ambiguity of its boundaries with its media neighbours” (Hartley 25). Whereas Hartley finds that television is “characterized by a will to limit its own excess, to settle its significations into established, taken-for-granted, common senses, which viewers can be disciplined to identify and to identify with” (37) the dirty filmic text makes no effort to limit its excess (rather limitation is applied through censorship and ratings); Happiness is simultaneously scary, repellant and poignant. Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) the obscene phone-caller, Kristina (Camryn Manheim) the lonely woman who dismembers her rapist and Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) the loving father and paedophile all elicit moments of horror, humour and sympathy. Indeed, Happiness successfully “scandalizes the overlaps” between categories without attempting to clarify their ambiguities (Hartley 38) by constantly deflecting and redirecting the audience’s identification with any one character by revealing more about that character (he is shallow, she kills, he is a serial rapist) or simply through the constant narrative shifts between characters. As Hartley notes: “the point about dirt, crudely, is that it encompasses notions of ambiguity, contradiction, power and social relations all in one” (39). In the context of the suburban these ideas of dirt are frequently equated with sex. Lynch had previously depicted sex as “the site of domestic trauma, fear, power and – on occasion – euphoria” (Rodley 125): Jeffrey experiences all four of these aspects in his encounters with Dorothy, something that leaves him profoundly shamed and shaken. Sex is similarly ancillary to dirt in Happiness where Allen, Kristina and Bill’s own predilections and pleasures lead them into ambiguous power and social relations that are alternatively thwarted, indulged and constrained. This lends “Happiness” itself to being read as an ironic title for the film, but while Billy is the only character to achieve the euphoria promised, many of the characters enjoy (brief) moments of happiness, be it Joy Jordan’s (Jane Adams) one night stand or Allen and Kristina’s date (and possibility of redemption). Similarly, even the paedophile father Bill confesses to his son that sex with young boys is “great”, some small measure of happiness even as he admits to being sick. “Happiness” itself is therefore also a dirty, subjective, embodied and ambiguous term; one man’s happiness is another’s shame, another’s pain, another’s crime. Solondz actually comments on the power of dirt in the “Nonfiction” segment of his next feature Storytelling. In many respects a parody of the suburban genre (through its obvious digs at American Beauty) “Nonfiction” chronicles the efforts of documentarian Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti) to construct a film around disaffected teenager Scooby Livingstone (Mark Webber). The end product, “American Scooby”, reveals that Oxman cannot move beyond the surface. Unlike Lynch or Solondz, the dirtiness of his subject slips by unnoticed. Oxman’s documentary can only provoke laughter through its exploitation of Scooby as it ignores the subtleties occurring in the Livingstone family’s lives, most notably Scooby’s relationship with his friend Stanley and the rising resentment of Consuelo the maid (culminating in her gassing the family to death as they sleep, perhaps the ultimate statement on the ambiguity of happiness). This probable commercial success/social failure of “American Scooby” confirms the power of dirt implicit in Lynch and Solondz’s films. By soiling suburbia Lynch and Solondz have exnominated the middle-class, making visible the minutiae, the motives and the pleasures of a social grouping traditionally under-represented on film. Typically, Hartley says, we identify the “power of dirt” as being “of the negative kind – it infects and corrupts the rising generation” (25), arguments levelled at both of these films. But as Douglas argues, a culture’s taboos can tell us a great deal about its sense of its own identity. Blue Velvet and Happiness can therefore be understood in Douglas’s terms as part of a “dirt-affirming ritual” that accesses the power “residing in what is excluded from [the traditional] ordering of things” (165), thus exnominating the middle-class and revealing our complicity in the voyeurism of their characters. This then is the true power of dirt. It makes visible all the ambiguities and anomalies we try to exclude from our lives – and our suburbs. That this is currently the formula for one of the most popular series on television (Desperate Housewives), albeit in a slightly cleaner “network friendly” formula, suggests that Lynch and Solondz’s soiling of suburbia will have resonance for some time to come. References Atkinson, Michael. Blue Velvet. London: BFI, 1997. Chion, Michael. David Lynch. Trans. Robert Julian. London: BFI, 1995. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002 [1966]. Drazin, Charles. blue velvet. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” In Denis McQuail, ed. Sociology of Mass Communication. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Hartley, John. “Television and the Power of Dirt.” Tele-ology: Studies in Television. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Leach, Edmund. Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Lynch, David. Blue Velvet. 1986. Rodley, Chris, ed. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Solondz, Todd. Happiness. 1998. ———. Happiness. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. ———. Storytelling. 2001. ———. Palindromes. 2004. ———. Welcome to the Dollhouse. 1995. Total Film: The Decades Collection: The Eighties. London: Future Publications, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bainbridge, Jason. "Soiling Suburbia: Lynch, Solondz and the Power of Dirt." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/11-bainbridge.php>. APA Style Bainbridge, J. (Nov. 2006) "Soiling Suburbia: Lynch, Solondz and the Power of Dirt," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/11-bainbridge.php>.

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. 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