Journal articles on the topic 'WWII, fiction'

Abstract From May to October 1944, Muriel Spark was employed by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service created by Britain during the Second World War with the mission of spreading propaganda to enemy and enemy-occupied countries. This was a formative experience which allowed her to develop an understanding of literal truth as elusive and historically contingent—even a constructed effect—as well as an interest in fictional fabrication and deception. Drawing on an account of the methods of WWII British black propaganda, Spark’s biographical accounts, and heretofore untapped archival documents from the Political Warfare Executive Papers (National Archives), this essay analyses how Spark employs the fictional equivalent of the methods of WWII black propaganda in order to examine the creation of plausibility in her novels. It explores Spark’s deployment of verifiable facts, evidence, precise information, appropriate tone, narrative coherence, targeting, covert motives, chronological disruption and repetition to construct the key elements of fiction in her novels. I argue that such fictional strategies provide a political and moral antidote to totalitarian thinking by presenting reality as necessarily contingent, and therefore open to external contestation and democratic debate. Bringing together history, biography and literary criticism, this is the first systematic and archivally supported examination of how Spark’s work for the PWE opens up a way of rethinking her fascination with the art of deception.

ABSTRACT: Wars and arms long remained a foreign phenomenon in Iceland until the country was occupied by Allied forces during WWII. Although the occupation was a “friendly” one and the army brought unprecedented wealth to the country, the presence of a foreign military was objectionable and distressing to many. Literature, historiography, and scholarship on the occupation have long been obsessed with the so-called ástandskonan (woman fraternizing with soldiers), the perceived incarnation of an invaded and polluted nation. This article examines the response of Icelandic fiction writers to the occupation through the figure of the soldier instead. A focus on fictional representations of the soldier enables us to see how writers imagine the occupation and its consequences for the nation, its culture, and, not least, for an injured sense of manhood.

AbstractThis article argues that material objects in Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short fiction both reflect socio-economic concerns of pre- and post-WWII Canadian society and complicate common conceptions of deprivation and material ambition. The analyses of “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid” demonstrate how Munro describes economic hardships, class anxieties, and social discrimination and distinction through items of material culture such as clothes, furniture, and paintings. These objects and their symbolic significance draw attention to the conflicts resulting from the interplay of her characters’ upbringings, loyalties, and their longings and aspirations.

The article is focused on the analysis of the stimulus The Great Patriotic War based on the data of both directed and free associative experiments, held among the young Russians aged 18-23, the students of the Philological faculty of RUDN University. The aim of this research is to study the ordinary language consciousness of common speakers of the Russian linguoculture through the prism of their attitude to the Great Patriotic War as a cultural phenomenon. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the experimental data allow us conclude about the mediated perception of the Great Patriotic War by young Russians, who have knowledge about the war from secondary sources: fiction and documentary films, history and literature textbooks. On the material of these associative experiments, the experimental associative fields are formed, which could potentially become a part of the associative dictionary of the contemporary Russian younger generation. In the course of the study, semantic crossings are revealed between the lexical units of the formed associative fields and the data from Russian associative dictionaries. A comparative analysis of the data from RAD and the two experiments is conducted, demonstrating minimal matching of reactions (12.5%) in the RAD and the experiments, with a higher percentage of matching reactions in the directed and free experiments (56.6%). The reactions to the stimulus Great Patriotic War obtained as a result of the experiment are semantically grouped, and their further interpretation represents a fragment of the young Russian's language consciousness regarding the events of the Great Patriotic War. Thus, semantic analysis allows us to distribute the received reactions into several semantic groups: evaluation of the events of the past; WWII as part of family history; WWII as the distant past; WWII as a reason for pride; WWII as a joint social phenomenon in the cultural context; the events and realities of that war.

My paper maps the most important representatives of the occult and esoteric currents in twentieth century Hungary. Their works and tes- timonies encompass the genesis of modern esotericism in Hungary, but their careers also demonstrate the catastrophic watershed caused by fascism and the Second World War, only to be continued (however mostly secretly) during the communist era. The paper first provides an overview of the development of major esoteric trends in modern Hungary (from the late nineteenth century to the time of the regime change in 1989), then focuses on three outstanding seekers of holistic enlightenment: Ervin Baktay (1890‒1963), Béla Hamvas (1897‒1968), Mária Szepes (1908‒2007). All three developed their philosophy after WWI; all were influenced by Theosophy and Indian mysticism; all were scholars of various fields of the humanities, at the same time as being writers of “belle lettres” – poetry as well as fiction. After WWII, all three were looked at with suspicion and were silenced; however, they also found ways of expressing themselves and gathering disciples in various interesting ways.

This paper surveys some of the developments in apocalyptic writing in recent decades, and then examine the use of apocalypse in George Turner's science fiction novels. Global events such as World War Two, terrorism, the Cold War, and increasing environmental problems have contributed to a growth in apocalyptic fictions. While novels warning about the dangers of nuclear war were prolific in post-WWII speculative literature, other issues such as technological and ecological disaster have since become dominant threats. Apocalypse literally means revelation, but the popular imagination more frequently associates it with widespread destruction. The form therefore offers a useful approach for writers keen to protest against political systems, harmful environmental policies, and reckless technological and scientific experimentation. Apocalypse allows authors to extrapolate from current events and imagine a terrible future should certain actions be taken. In Turner's novels, seemingly utopic societies have arisen after future catastrophes have devastated the world. Yet in reality these new societies are brutal and totalitarian regimes. Turner utilises apocalyptic themes and imagery to interrogate scientific, social and environmental policies and warn about looming environmental catastrophes if society does not address current problems of complacency and short-sighted governing.

The commitment of the MP Théo Dejace to the Communist Party cell Bensberg, 1951-1961 This contribution uses a political fiction written by Théo Dejace, a Belgian communist MP, as a starting point. Through this story, Dejace outlines why he thinks it is essential to be involved in his neighbourhood and tells about the revival of a cell (the lowest structure in the Belgian Communist Party), called ‘cellule Bensberg’ (Liège). The first part reveals how fiction and biography are closely related, then gives some personal explanations of Dejace’s decision to take in charge the local cell. This commitment has also to be seen in the context of the political decrease of the Belgian communism after WWII. The core of the text describes first the socioeconomic environment of the Bensberg cell. It then focusses on the membership recruitment and the various activities to support the Party but also to retain members. This allows the reader to approach the local communist culture from below.

As a novelist preoccupied with the sexualized gothic conventions haunting Irish fiction since the eighteenth century, Bowen persistently turns to the fraught concept of British and Irish women's consent during periods of twentieth-century political violence. This article considers Bowen's use of gothic tropes of consent in The Last September (1929) as well as a more sustained engagement with the Irish gothic, citizen-subjecthood, and the political valence of consent in her WWII thriller, The Heat of the Day (1948). It argues that in formulating consent in relation to knowledge, and in articulating the necessarily contractual nature of consent, Bowen seeks to define the ethics of individual rights and responsibility during and after World War Two.

What is the value of a book? Is hope worth dying for? In this work of philosophical WWII era short fiction, three prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp find a bible. A book in Birkenau. They know that if it is found in their position they will be punished, if not killed, and yet, they decide to hide and keep this hidden treasure. They know, for their own safety, they should burn the evidence. Or, should they trade it for food? Or read it? While the risks are great, they decide they will die before giving up the book. They also consider sharing it with others, at least, until they day comes they are caught.

Marina Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021) is her second work belonging to the genre of life writing, more particularly the memoir. She had already written a biography, The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1980, about a Chinese empress in 1972, but her memoir is more personal, rather focused on her parents’ marriage, life itineraries and travels through Italy, England and Egypt during and after WWII. Interestingly, many characteristics of her memoir fit with another life writing genre, identified by the French theorist Dominique Viart in the eighties as the ‘filiation narrative,’ initially in reference to French fiction of the same period. The filiation narrative focuses on a self-reflexive search for parental images, reconstructing the mother’s or father’s life through the excavation of documentation and archives, as well as speculation. This article will attempt to show how such thematic and structural features of the filiation narrative as ‘archeological’ narration, the use of archival documents and objects to restore a parent’s ‘lost’ life and, most importantly, the metabiographical aspect of the ‘enterprise’ are reflected, in various degrees, in Warner’s memoir, making it waver between fiction and non-fiction. These same features may thus pave the way for the English counterpart of the French ‘récit de filiation’ and build a pertinent generic continuity between both memoir and filiation narrative.

This article aims to investigate the controversial concept of Juristocracy that has been widely analysed recently. This theory claims that lobbyists representing a liberal ideology have formed an oligarchy of lawyers in EU institutions. These juristocratic networks seek to limit the sovereignty of post-liberal, legitimate national governments. The concept extends to other supranational institutions as well as NGOs and academic networks. This study discusses the political ambition of lawyers of EU institutions and their existence as political protagonists i.e. Juristocracy. However, the theory of Juristocracy addresses some historical phenomena. The EU’s bureaucracy has become a “power institution” and tends to compete with national governments. In this socio-evolutionary struggle, both legal and political theories can easily become “power theories”. The concept of Juristocracy reflects the weakening global influence of neoliberal values as well as the changing role of post-WWII supranational institutions. In this respect, juristocratic networking can be seen as a historical necessity as much as it has to do with the conflict of supranational and national governance, in particular within the EU. The legitimacy and public trust of supranational institutions is more and more challenged, thus the study concludes the need for a new, win–win deal between national governments and supranational institutions. Otherwise, in the long-term, nation states will only survive if relying on historical and socio-psychological foundations.

The film Downfall, released in 2004 at the height of an unprecedented "Hitler wave," has to be seen in a long tradition of literary and cinematic attempts to deal with Germany's "unmasterable past." The filmmakers claimed that by focusing on Hitler's final days before the end of WWII they had discovered "new territory" and presented the "facts behind the guilt." This article points out, however, that the film is historiographically based on the account by Joachim Fest's book Downfall-in which the author, as in his earlier work, follows a methodological approach that personalizes history and focuses on Hitler as "singular personality," rejecting any systematic analysis of political and social context. The film goes even further in its unscrupulous blurring of fact and fiction and simplistically juxtaposes a very small group of perpetrators (basically Hitler and Goebbels) and the large group of victims, i.e., the general population that only wanted to survive. Such an attempt to focus on a tragically failing, isolates Hitler, who alone is to blame for nation's "Downfall" is hardly suitable to help Germans to step out of the shadow of their past.

A literary text can be a propagator of values- both explicitly and implicitly. As Edward Said claims in his book, Orientalism (1978), for centuries Eurocentrism pervades Western literary pieces; they somehow justify and/or uplift European values and perspectives as superior ones while portraying lands, people and cultures of the colonized nations elsewhere, especially in the East. Sometimes, it may become more oblique as the apparent issues dominating the text seem to be something very different, but the writing, however, in the undercurrent, portrays things in a Eurocentric way, often by “othering” the non-Europeans. Said famously terms, this process of creation of an alter ego of the West in the East as “Orientalism”. Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter (1948), set in West Africa’s Sierra Leone, a then British colony during WWII, summons rethinking of its presentation of the non-White people and the land of Africa. This study would like to take the focus away from the dominating themes of religion, sin, pity, mercy, responsibility, love, etc. in this piece of fiction to assess its underlying colonial issues which often go unnoticed. The novel portrays a variety of characters- both the British colonizers and the colonial subjects- though the roles and space occupied by the non-British characters are mostly marginal. The “Whites” are portrayed sympathetically, whereas the “non-Whites” are presented as evil, naïve, weak and mystic. This study, thus, argues that the portrayal of Africa (Sierra Leone), the Africans, and the major “non-White” characters in the novel, in contrast to the empathetic presentation of the major “White” European characters, indicate an obvious “othering” of “non-Whites” and the marginalization of non-Europeans in the narrative of the novel. The paper further opines that this process of “othering” and marginalization underlines the operation of an underlying Eurocentric attitude in the representation of the Europeans and non-Europeans in Greene’s fiction.

The feeling is widespread in the West that the post wwii normative international order has been under severe challenge since Russia’s seizure of Crimea, now exacerbated by statements from the American president casting doubt on the institutions that underpin that order. Is there a future role for osce mediation as this order erodes? Study of the Ukraine crisis in light of other protracted conflicts on the territory of the former Soviet Union shows that the same challenges have existed for a generation. Because the conflicts were small, however, the international community chose to accept a fiction of convenience to isolate them from an otherwise functioning international order: the narrative that the separatists sought independence, not (as in reality) a re-drawing of post-Soviet borders. This isolation is under pressure both from the new experience in Ukraine and from the extension of ever-greater Russian control over the separatists, amounting to crypto-annexation, despite a backlash from Moscow’s clients, including in Armenia. There is little likelihood of a resolution to the Ukraine crisis, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and prospects for mediation to resolve the conflicts remain dim. However, continued talks may resolve some humanitarian issues and provide a release valve to prevent pressures boiling over into renewed open warfare. In 2015 the present author published an article outlining some effects of the Ukraine crisis on protracted conflicts in the osce area and on osce mediation in those conflicts. 1 He has been asked to revisit his assessment of that time in light of subsequent events in world politics (in particular the advent of a new administration in the United States) and in the region. The new developments give little cause for optimism that settlement in any of the conflicts is closer. Rather, the question for the osce is whether the international community, in view of the challenges posed by the Ukraine crisis, should continue to engage in the fictions that have allowed it to manage the conflicts since their beginnings in the collapsing Soviet Union.

Some years have already passed since the book Summer of dead dreams by Harry Thürk (2015) was published. Some inhabitants of Prudnik County have treated the German perception as presented in its pages and interwoven in the historicists’ motifs, as a non-fiction and as a reliable source. This is why it has become essential to take some steps to present this multithreaded post-war event more honestly. One of the museums’ functions is their multi-dimensional educational activity, achieved through exhibitions and publications. Consequently, the Prudnik County Museum in Prudnik town has undertaken the task of showing the chequered history of this region from 1945 to 1947 by: a) preparing and elaborating a permanent exhibition entitled “Seen through a net curtain. The multiculturality of Upper Silesia based on Prudnik County”; b) publishing a book of the same title which brings closer the intangible heritage of Prudnik county, seen in its traditions and folk rituals of various social and cultural groups which together form its current “ethnos”; c) publishing a collection of eyewitness accounts by people who remember the years 1945–1947. The issue of changing borders and resettlements still evokes emotions for both the Polish and German communities. Although, the Polish and German tragedy of the civilian population had different origins, the tragedy itself was the same: extermination, forcing people to abandon their homes, going into the unknown, exile, illnesses and death are the common denominators of those sad events at the end of WWII. The museum’s role is to familiarise the public with a very frequently difficult and tragic history which would be free of stereotypes and subjectivity.

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.

Abstract Like many other world literatures, the English literature of the last few decades has been marked by an intensive search for new narrative techniques, for innovative ways and means of arranging a plot and portraying characters. The search has resulted, among other things, into merging literature with visual arts like painting, film and photography. This phenomenon got the name of ekphrasis and has become a popular field of literary research lately. Suffice it to cast a glance at several of the novels published around the year 2000 to see that incorporation of photographic images into fiction allows writers to use new means of organizing literary texts, to employ non-conventional devices of structuring a plot and delineating personages as well as to pose various problems of aesthetic, ethical, ideological nature. We suggest to look briefly at seven novels published in the last three decades to see the various roles assigned to photography by their authors: Out of this World (1988) by Graham Swift, Ulverton (1992) by Adam Thorpe, Master Georgie (1998) by Beryl Bainbridge, The Dark Room (2001) by Rachel Seiffert, The Photograph (2003) by Penelope Lively, Double Vision (2003) by Pat Barker and The Rain Before It Falls (2007) by Jonathan Coe. The scenes of the novels are set widely apart and have time spans of various duration. Ulverton and Master Georgie have a mid-19th century setting, The Dark Room is centered round WWII, Out of this World and The Rain before It Falls contain their heroes’ long life stories, while The Photograph and Double Vision are set at the end of the last century and their characters are our contemporaries. The novels also differ by the particular place photographs occur in the novels, by the roles they play there, as well as by the issues associated with them.

<p><span>The Old Man And The Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, went in printing in 1952, a year later was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1954, Hemingway was given the Nobel Prize in Literature. After such a big success and a long and well accomplished career, a few years later, on a Sunday, the morning July 2nd 1961, Hemingway committed suicide. The paradox of the author’s ending with the ending of his most famous novel The Old Man And The Sea is that Ernest Hemingway, the man, gave up, whereas his character in the novel Santiago never gave up, was never defeated, emerging triumphant with the struggle against larger forces. This paradox raises the question: is The Old Man And The Sea a reflection of the author’s personal life and agony, as most commentators believe, or is it much more than that? A novel that depicts and represents the constant struggle of human kind in every era? Why was Hemingway in agony? Ernest Hemingway was a writer that belonged to the Lost Generation. One can imagine living the horrors of WWI, known as the Great War, being a personal witness in the Civil Spanish War, then WWII, living the entire adult life in and between wars. One looses hope and only dwells in the despair of loss, and agonizing in every breath. But as painful as his life was, Hemingway wrote this novel not just like a reflection of his own agony, not just as an expression of his own voice, but more than that, he portrayed the constant human struggle throughout the centuries, speaking in the voice of all humanity, past, present and future. This approach is the key what makes the novel so great. And the style and symbolism used in it make it a masterpiece therefore reading it a very thrilling experience. In this paper I will analyze the symbolism used in The Old Man And The Sea as well as make a comparison with a flow of historical and literary memory and conscience of the human kind, the world at large and of its author Ernest Hemingway. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis on why this novel goes beyond the voice of the author. It is a universal work that represents the struggle and calling of humanity throughout the ages.</span></p><p><span><strong>Keywords:</strong> Hemingway, Old Man, sea, symbolism, Santiago, Manolin, Marlin, sharks, lions, fish, humankind, struggle, universal.</span></p>

For Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, the question of his own roots was a very private matter; he treated them as if they were not present in his life and wrote explicitly about Jewishness or Shoah only in his non-fiction work. Nevertheless, the themes of the historical anti-Judaic persecution and conversion to Christianity are constantly present in his literary work, with allusions to the twentieth century’s massacres. Numerous characters of Jewish origin, belonging to a harassed and destroyed community, appear in many of his literary texts. Certain victims, especially males, are infected by evil, others resist it: over the years, the opposition between these two categories became increasingly noticeable, while the topic of Shoah is faced in a more veiled way. It is indeed not a coincidence that Herling’s first tale about the persecutions of Jews, The Second Coming, was written in 1961, at the time of the Eichmann trial, and that later Don Ildebrando, The Bell-Ringer’s Toll and The Legend Of A Converted Hermit, showing Jewish opposing strategies toward evil, were composed after his visit to Majdanek in 1991. Herling looks at the post-Arendt discussion on complicity in evil, polarizing the opposition between good and bad victims alreadyexpressed in his narration of the Gulag: he does not envisage any intermediate category analogous to Levi’s Grey zone and does not examine in depth the manipulation of the victims in extreme conditions. He prefers to grasp some analogies between persecutions in different historical ages, showing them in a universal perspective of a human “dormant” tendency to evil. Based on Herling’s narrative work, intimate diary, essays and the Journal Written at Night, my article treats his tormented relationship with Jewishness not so much as an isolated case, but rather associates it with some strategies of drastic distancing from Jewishness by members of pre-WWII assimilated Jewish intelligentsia who yearned to be seen as more Polish than Poles themselves.

The article addresses the presentation of the mass murder of Jews during WWII in the Soviet printed production. An overall trend of ignoring the topic of the Holocaust in the Soviet media discourse is unquestioned. Yet, (non)presentation of the mass destruction of Jews in the Soviet literature, which is commonly emphasized by the researches, needs clarification. If we look at the Soviet literature on the Great Patriotic War (including fiction prose), we can trace a phenomenon described in this article through war memoirs. Alongside official ignoring of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, the whole post-war period experienced mass publishing and re-publishing of memoir books which provided direct references to the murder of Jews by the Nazis during the war. Herewith, combatants’ memoirs would often touch very briefly on the murders of Jews, but give no explanations. Such reference style implies that the authors targeted the readers’ background awareness. Detailed descriptions of Jewish discrimination, segregation, getthoisation and murder are found in the memoirs of former prisoners of war and partisans. The account of Nazi persecution of the Jews is an integral part of the stories of everyday life in the occupied territory, which often represents the major piece of the narrative. Under certain ideology, the mention of the murders of Jews was intentionally instrumentalized by the Soviet memoir writers seeking to demonstrate a criminal nature of Nazi collaborators. As can be inferred from the Soviet war memoirs, we are not supposed to simplify a clear-cut attitude of ignoring and should conceptualize the phenomenon of «non-nipped memory» in semi-official narratives. Soviet narratives, particularly war memoirs, did not highlight Nazi persecution of the Jews as a separate phenomenon; although described in detail, it was seen only as a part of the «new order». In the Soviet setting, we do encounter ignoring of the Holocaust (as a separate phenomenon), but at the same time, although with certain limitations, the memory of the mass murder of the Soviet Jews was quite actively reflected in war memoirs.

AbstractThe relation between war and cinema, propaganda and cinema is a most intriguing area, located at the intersection of media studies, history and film aesthetics. A truly tragic moment in human history, the First World War was also the first to be fought before film cameras. And while in the field, airborne reconnaissance became cinematic (Virilio), domestic propaganda occupied the screen of the newly emergent national cinemas, only to see its lucid message challenged and even subverted by the fast-evolving language of cinema. Part one of this paper looks at three non-fiction films, released in 1916:Battle of Somme, With Our Heroes at the Somme(Bei unseren Helden an der Somme) andBattle of Somme(La Bataille de la Somme), as paradigmatic propaganda takes on the eponymous historical battle from British, German and French points of view. Part two analyses two war-time Hollywood melodramas, David Wark Griffith’sHearts of the World(1918) and Allen Holubar’sThe Heart of Humanity(1919), and explains the longevity of the former with the powerful “text effect” of the authentic wartime footage included. Thus, while these WWI propaganda works do validate Virilio’s ideas of the integral connections between technology, war and cinema, and between cinema and propaganda, they also herald the emancipation of post-WWI film language.

Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in France in 1843, was rediscovered by Henri Massis in 1946. Massis re-introduced Custine’s by then long forgotten letters on Russia to the French public. Once American Cold Warriors such as George Kennan and General Walter Bedell-Smith discovered the book, they promptly promoted it to the status of the most prophetic book on the “Russian soul.” Denounced as “fictional,” by many nineteenth-century writers and by a host of twentieth-century scholars, Custine’s book was accepted as canonical by a large reading public and, more importantly, by successive generations of us policy makers. This article contributes to the historiography of Cold War propaganda by looking first at the context in which the book was initially resurrected by Massis, and then by analyzing the ways in which Cold War propaganda constructed its “relevance,” “actuality” and “prophetic” character. The article begins by taking a look at the way in which Massis, the first popularizer of the book, fitted it into his own ideological pattern. In a second movement, the article analyzes the ways in which the book functioned in the post-wwii ideological context, seeking to discover if the alleged relevance of the book had anything to do with the survival into the postwar world of the European Right’s interwar tangle of received ideas and patterns of prejudice.

Claire G. Coleman’s science fiction novel The Old Lie (2019) evokes the blemished chapters of Australia’s history as the basis of a dystopian futuristic Earth. By using the metaphor of a secular apocalypse (Weaver) wrapped in the form of a space opera, she interrogates historical colonialism on a much larger scale to bring to the fore the distinctive Indigenous experience of Australia’s terra nullius and its horrific offshoots: the Stolen Generations, nuclear tests on Aboriginal land and the treatment of Indigenous war veteran, but this time experienced by the people of the futuristic Earth. Following a brief introduction of the concept of the “Native Apocalypse” (Dillon) in the framework of Indigenous futurism, the paper discusses Coleman’s innovative use of space opera embedded in Wilfred Owen’s famous WWI poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The analysis focuses on four allegedly separate stories in the novel which eventually interweave into a single narrative about “the old lie”. In keeping with the twenty-first-century Indigenous futurism, Coleman’s novel does not provide easy answers. Instead, the end brings the reader to the beginning of the novel in the same state of disillusionment as Owen’s lyrical subject.

Abstract This essay studies scenes that focus on food and eating in the films Chocolat (2000) and I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2006). To assess whether or not they constitute food porn we compare and contrast such scenes with the description of an unwholesome recipe for cannibalistic eating in Titus Andronicus, which anticipates our contemporary food obsession. At its most basic (and controversial), food porn names the alluring visualisation of certain foodstuffs, which renders food the object of erotically tinged desire. Serving different purposes in the two films, such eroticisation of food can be more than self-referential insofar as it indicates human interactions framed as power relations. Showing chocolate making and eating, in Chocolat, actually visualises a woman’s exertion of power over the women and their husbands in a bigoted French village in 1959, intended to awaken the people’s benumbed desire. Not food proper is the object of desire in the Czech film, but the young woman served up as ocular side dish to the moguls dining in a stylish Prague restaurant before the outburst of WWII. By contrast, food eroticisation is completely absent in Shakespeare; at stake is a verbal (and implicitly visual) concern with the transformation of flesh and body parts into ingredients for seemingly festive consumption. Visualising food, in Titus, implicitly visualises the reclaim and exertion of power in the fictional Roman polity. In all these cases, the concern with food vectorises power relations and may fluidise gendered hierarchies, an issue which food porn scholarship rarely addresses.

This paper explores the portrayal of violence and gender in its relation to different historical periods, countries, cultures, and religions. The aim is to determine the role these different aspects have in forming of characters’ identities and more specifically how it is all related to gender. The research will focus on Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Elena Ferrante’s Tetralogy My Brilliant Friend, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. All three novels, regardless of the different periods they fictionalize and discuss, and the literature they belong to, are connected by the captivating darkness that runs deeply through their fictional fiber and portrays the horrible conditions and struggles women have to go through because of the violence they were succumbed to, but also the violence they have to resort to to survive and even thrive in the ever-changing, but always firmly men’s world. Morrison’s novel is set in the early stages of the slave trade in America when racial, religious, and class tensions were just beginning to form, Ferrante’s tetralogy focuses on the post-WWII Italy, poverty-stricken and violent neighborhoods of the outskirts of Naples, and Purple Hibiscus is set in postcolonial Nigeria, a country struggling with political instability and economic difficulties. All three authors with their respective novels render vibrant pictures of the lives of young girls and grown women, mothers, daughters, and friends, across times, countries, but also classes, that offer plenty of space for comparative research focusing on the presence and role of violence in their lives.

Drawing on recent scholarship on transcultural memory and its role in peacebuilding, this paper explores the implications of entangling memories that belong to different pasts, places, and cultural groups in Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls (2007) and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013). Both novels, written by authors interested in the notions of oppression and suppression of stories, are polyphonic texts that disrupt any single linear narrative by interweaving multiple storylines through constant movements across time and space. McCann’s focus shifts from the aftermath of WWI to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, while O’Connor’s novel deals with the American Civil War and Irish nationalism; both recount episodes of the Great Famine, the ensuing emigration, and the history of Abolitionism. Hence, painful memories of the Irish mingle with the mnemonic repertoires of those who suffered the abominations of slavery or internecine conflict in an attempt to give voice to the marginalised and highlight bonds between (apparently unrelated) groups of people. Moreover, this convergence of inherited memories binds the past with the present and the future, as the recollections have echoes of contemporary conflicts and global phenomena involving Ireland, whose role in them is implicitly interrogated. By fusing significant cultural memories across generations and spaces, these novels assert the ‘historical duty’ to remember to promote negotiation and mutual understanding between different cultural groups today. This paper, therefore, will first offer an overview of contemporary Irish fiction, characterised by an original world-facing, rather than nation-focused, outlook. Second, it will undertake the analysis of the selected novels to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the potential of literature to build sound knowledge of diverse human experiences and, as a consequence, promote peace.

Tensions in U.S-Russia relations have been on the rise over the last years. This article attempts to examine them through the prism of the clash between two different world order paradigms. While Russia has been promoting the concept of multipolarity as the next step from unipolarity, the U.S. abides by the concept of a ‘rule-based order built after the WWII with the American singular leadership’. The author argues that among public diplomacy instruments one of the most powerful in terms of promoting the American-centric paradigm of the world order are blockbusters – ‘popcorn diplomacy’. The paper offers an insight into how Hollywood movies are linked with Washington’s narrative of the world order. First of all, author explains why cinema should be considered a part of the U.S. public diplomacy’s arsenal, presenting several examples of both official and unofficial collaboration between American government and movie pictures’ industry. Using the methods of the popular geopolitics theory and cultural hegemony theory and applying content-analysis to several American popular blockbusters (chosen on the basis of their global popularity and popularity in Russia in particular), the author identifies certain techniques that help advance the American perception of the world and manipulate the public opinion in U.S. national interests. Specifically, article pays attention to what kind of picture is being presented to audience through movies via multiplication of geopolitical clich&#233;s, manipulation of historical facts and exploiting the symbolism of fictional plots that can be easily interpreted in terms of the U.S. national interests and foreign policy doctrine. In conclusion, the article discusses what risks and opportunities this policy poses for Russia.

Season one of the acclaimed historical drama Downton Abbey was set in 1912, but a key element of the show’s storyline, known to all dedicated viewers, occurred years earlier, off screen, when a wealthy, young American heiress named Cora Levinson of Cincinnati married the British Robert Crawley, Viscount Downton, the future Earl of Grantham. As part of their marriage contract, Cora’s fortune would be tied to the Grantham family’s failing estate to prevent it from going bankrupt. In return, Cora would eventually earn the title of Countess of Grantham. While Downton Abbey’s Granthams are fictional, the idea of wealthy American heiresses marrying impoverished European noblemen is not. There were by some counts close to 500 of these marriages in the decades between the end of the Civil War and WWI, and several of the brides had ties to NJ. Who were these women? Can we know what motivated them? Did they find happiness? And how did their “loves lives” impact social norms, transatlantic relations, and the U.S. economy?

A Manifesto in Danish has to deal with the Mother tongue and attack the Fatherland: Some preliminary studies about art and language presented from the point of view of the history of literature:The study follows five lines of reasoning: The first deals with the impossibility of formulating a manifesto in general; the impossibility of advocating the use of violence and on the other hand the impossibility of using dialogue. So the system of prescriptions and promises normally used in a manifesto no longer have sense.The next line of reasoning concerns the impossibility of presenting fictional preoccupations in the mass media and explaining why literature in Danish has to deal with its contents and form outside the current commentary and celebration hosted by the mass media. In this second line the Vico legacy is introduced to explain a conflict in Danish literature concerning its lack of an epic centre of historical and aesthetical understanding. Benjamin’s defence of the epicity in the work of Brecht is similarly discussed in this second part of the study. The third line of reasoning is presenting some older investigations on Danish prose into this question of what an epic dimension in the residual Danish culture might have been about in the last century. But all the investigations presented failed to get to the point. The point of dissidence was too weak and the point of national-socialism too clever to be manifest: It could easily hide behind the general cover up of theological aesthetics dominating Lutheran Denmark.So the fourth line of reasoning deals with political theology as a sort of interiorised state of mind in Denmark.The fifth line of reasoning presents two examples of something radically different and rather excluded in the political culture of Denmark: The Danish Council of Freedom (Danmarks Frihedsråd) during WWII which failed when it came to attacking the collaboration between Danish democracy and the Third Reich; and the Danish School of Writing (Forfatterskolen) which has been attacked by the local establishment since it was born 25 years ago.

The Holocaust theme was concealed and falsified for a long time because of non-literary reasons. Therefore, only when our country got its independence, a lot of aspects became clarified – especially the increasing of geographical markers of the Shoah, the aspect of memory and traumas of its victims and witnesses, the aspects of a woman history of the Holocaust etc. One of actual problems of nowadays is the problem of personalization of the Holocaust history with including the names of victims, saved and saviors for extending the space of memory about the tragedy of European Jews in the times of WWII. Literature, as well as historical science and commemorative practices, actively participates in this. The object of our attention in the following article is modern Ukrainian prose – novels “Sonya” (2013) by K. Babkina, “Me, You, And Our Drawn And Undrawn God” (2016) by T. Pakhomova, “A Story Worthy of a Whole Apple Orchard” (2017) by M. Dupeshko, “The Beech Land” (2019) by M. Matios. The aim of investigation is the characters of victims and saviors who have real prototypes: an icon of the Holocaust in Poland and Liublin, 9-years-old Henio (Henryk Zhytomirski), Righteous Among the Nations Maria and Stepan Vrublevski (Maria and Stepan Sichevliuk-Vrublevski), the Chernivtsi poet Selma Meerbaum- Eisinger, the mayor of Chernivtsi Traian Popovici, the diplomats Grzegorz Szymonowicz and Fritz Schellhorn. Implementation the life stories of real personalities into fictional form leads to expanding the memory about the Holocaust in Ukraine, and it’s also a way of creating a modern culture of memory, that is particularly important in a context of the international tendencies of finding the common understanding through awareness of a personal responsibility of others’ lives, and non-admission of repeating the tragic pages of the XX ct. history, one of those was the Holocaust. Since the long-term silence of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust victims didn’t create an intergenerational connection in the process of transmitting the memory of the Holocaust, modern literature, with its artistic construction of the past, becomes not only a tool for spreading knowledge about the Shoah, but also a way of creating the cultural memory about this tragedy. The prospect of further research of the following aspect is seen in a deep analysis of new examples of both Ukrainian and translated literature, including novels written by authors that are biographically related to Ukraine.

Surveying a large corpus of Modern Greek fiction from the interwar years to the decade of the financial crisis (2010-2020) we set out to delineate the national inflection of ‘working-class fiction’ along the axes of theme and style as well as answerability, i.e. the engagement with working-class interests in distinct periods (interwar years, WWII and postwar, Metapolitefsi and beyond). Characterized by quantitative and aesthetic variability, the Greek version of the genre is shown to engage actively with topical contextual issues as well as with changing imperatives of authorial commitment and the shifting composition of the working class.

IntroductionThis study investigates the cognitive processing and perception of counterfactual historical fiction and its effects on readers' receptivity to fascism, superstitious beliefs, and satisfaction with the present state of politics. Counterfactual historical fiction presents alternative realities where history diverges from the official historiography, such as in Robert Harris' novel Fatherland, which depicts a counterfactual world where Hitler won WWII. It was hypothesized that reading this genre incurs additional cognitive costs and is perceived with less realism and more aesthetic appreciation compared to historical fiction.MethodsSeventy-four subjects were divided into two groups and presented with two versions of paragraphs from Fatherland. An experimental group read the original version, describing a counterfactual reality where Hitler is still alive in 1964 (counterfactual historical fiction). A control group read a manipulated version, where events are made plausible by being backdated to 1941 (historical fiction). The study employed a triangulation of methods, utilizing online eye tracking and self-report questionnaires with 7-point Likert scale measurements.ResultsThe results indicate that counterfactual historical fiction is associated with increased cognitive demands at the first point of divergence, i.e., the first linguistic cue indicating counterfactuality. This genre also induced less perceived realism of history (factuality) and more surprise. Both versions of the text impacted readers by decreasing agreement with fascism, reducing superstitious beliefs, and enhancing their positive evaluation of the current political situation.DiscussionThe study reveals the cognitive processing of counterfactual historical fiction, highlighting the need for revising current theoretical assumptions. Additionally, the positive impact on readers' attitudes and beliefs may underscore literature's potential role in fostering critical thinking, pro-social behavior, and satisfaction. Further research is suggested for subsequent empirical validation.

Following the transnational turn in modernist studies, and building on Stuart Hall’s and Nadia Ellis’s concepts of diaspora as key to understanding Caribbean modernism, this essay examines Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) as the first wave of West Indian fiction that traces a black, male consciousness shaped by modernity and migration, one whose lived experiences and feelings of belonging in post-WWII London resist binarized understandings of colonizer and colonized. Selvon’s and Salkey’s fiction represents complex and conflicting senses of black masculinity as mediated by colonialism, bourgeois respectability, and whiteness. Migrant or middle-class, normative or queer, the various modes of black masculinity captured in the novels counter reductive attempts to ascribe one fixed identity, ideological position, or reality to Windrush flaneurs who might prefer walking the streets of London incognito.

Wars cause trauma and disruption of temporal sequencing, leading to fragmentation of memory in survivors. This fragmentation leads to negative changes in the victims' posttraumatic relationships and character traits. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is a novel about war trauma in which WWII is satirized with the use of a nonlinear narrative and post-war traumatic self. The novel presents to the reader how an innocent man survives in a drastic war atmosphere by chance and how his life changes after the war in both a playful and critical manner. Although Slaughterhouse-Five broadly delineates the theme of the destructiveness of war, specifically Vonnegut draws attention to the distorted memory of a traumatized young man with an ironic stance. Thereby, presenting the reader an opportunity to delve into a mind in which the compulsory conditions about temporality and liminality are abolished, Vonnegut turns his narrative into a play that reflects both joy and suffering owing to the collapse of sequence in time. Making extensive use of the means of metafiction, the author reveals his war experiences and the hidden sides of WWII. Therefore, this study aims to analyze Vonnegut’s ironic approach to war trauma, distorted perception of time, and their reflection on fiction in a postmodern sense.

Outside-in is an installation that utilises machine learning to reflect on systematic discrimination by focusing on the indefinite detention of Mexicans with Japanese heritage concentrated in Morelos during WWII. This algorithmic discrimination system tears apart four classic fiction films continuously within a projection room. The fragments are displaced and classified using machine learning algorithms. The system selects, separates and reassembles the fragments into new orders. It evokes the condition of being robbed of your right to be in the place to which you belong. The citizens detained during WWII were removed from their residence, their belongings were confiscated and they were placed in seclusion solely for having Japanese ancestry. Similarly, at present, data retrieving companies configure low resolution representations of ourselves from the snatched digital debris of our daily life. These pieces are reconfigured into archetypes and meaning is attached to them for massive decision making. We don’t have the right or means to know what these representations look like or what meaning has been attached to such shapes. It is a privilege reserved to the designers of algorithmic processes: they own this right and we the citizens own the consequences. The present article is a case study presenting the creation of Outside in: exile at home as an installation that utilises machine learning and reflects on this kind of systematic discrimination.

In this article, I discuss Knut Hamsun’s last book On Overgrown Paths [På gjengrodde Stier] (1949) from the perspective of a pathography, meaning an autobiography that focuses on a person’s illness and its consequences. Due to his actions during WWII, Hamsun was subjected to a psychiatric examination in 1947 and diagnosed as having permanently impaired mental faculties. Hamsun opposed this diagnosis, and the book both aims at demonstrating his mental ability and depicting his experience of being an unwilling patient. This article looks at how the autobiographical narrator reflects upon his experiences as a patient, and how the text contains a certain critique of the clinic and the patient-doctor relationship. It sheds light on how the motif of travel and quest is important for the narrator’s experience of being ill, and it concludes with a brief discussion of how medicine and literature are disciplines that may benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to studying both fiction and autobiographical literature.

Humans are progressing machines. Naturally, it is continuously changing and modifying not only itself but also everything around it, from a simple gadget to abstract concepts or questions asked from the very beginning of conscious ancestors’ times. Therefore, it is universally accepted that the human evolution process has never ceased and never will. In today’s world, Homo Sapiens are considered as human. However, if there is evolution, new, more intelligent, much healthier, and morally better individuals will emerge in time. The second half of the twentieth century paved the way for a thought on transcendent human with the popularized science fiction works. Aliens and robots, with their brain capacities and bodily functions, were depicted as beings to superior to humans. It was the superhero comics and books that reinforced the thought of a possibility of a superman seeded by the medical experiments conducted during WWII. Now, people are discussing immortality, or at least anti-aging. New drugs are tested to see whether deadly diseases can be cured. There are countless areas working to enhance and make better human conditions. Once the aimed goals are achieved, human will be called post-human. But, since we are in an epoch between the former and the latter, our first milestone to reach is being a transhuman. Nebula and Hugo-awarded author, Ted Chiang, is an American science fiction writer. His novellas are best known for their transhumanist features. As a computer science graduate, Chiang, in his short story called ‘Understand’, successfully fictionalizes the possible outcomes of a world in which a minority is privileged with abilities beyond human limitation. His portrayal of such a world makes one ponder whether humanity is “really” ready for such a move up on the genetic ladder or whether we are pushing fast ourselves to our own demise.

Walker, Niki. Why Do We Fight?: Conflict, War, and Peace. Toronto: Owlkids Books, 2013. Print.In this work, Niki Walker explores the general nature of conflict. She relates basic aspects of international politics - the existence of power elites, the formation of alliances, the rise of disputes - to the politics of school life. Along the way, she defines such terms as “negotiation,” “mediation,” “arbitration” and “sanctions.” She mentions examples of 20th century warfare: the post WWII Cold War, the Suez Crisis, and outlines the history of the current crisis in Afghanistan. The role of the United Nations is discussed. Most impressive is her insertion of pertinent quotes; for example, the chapter entitled “Cooperation or Combat?” begins with the words of Indira Gandhi: “You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.”Walker is an experienced writer of non-fiction for children and this work demonstrates her typical proficiency. The book is well organized with good transitions between successive chapters. The index is rather brief, but the terms therein are consistent with the text. There is an informative list of sources.In a departure from her usual literary style, Walker occasionally attempts to use trendy language. There is a risk here: the vernacular of today’s young reader may be rejected as dated by tomorrow’s. This quibble aside, the book is highly recommended for use with upper elementary students. In particular, it could be a useful resource for Remembrance Day activities. Reviewer: Leslie AitkenHighly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special and university collections. She is the former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.

Teesid: Artikkel vaatleb kriitiliselt 21. sajandi eesti mängufilmides peegelduvaid katseid rakendada militaartemaatika heroilise rahvusnarratiivi kujundamise ja edasikandmise teenistusse. Vaatluse keskmes on suund, mis koosneb seni kolmest mängufilmist ning ühest telesarjast ja telemängufilmist: „Nimed marmortahvlil“ (2002), „Detsembrikuumus“ (2008), „1944“ (2015) ja „Tuulepealne maa“ (2008, 2013). Teosed moodustavad temaatikalt ja lähenemiselt küllaltki homogeense terviku ning ka retseptsioon on kaldunud neid käsitlema sama riiklikult toetatud propagandadiskursuse osadena. Artikkel tõstab problemaatilisena esile, et filmide tootmises on osalenud ajaloolase taustaga poliitikud.SU M M A R YThis article traces and critiques attempts to reclaim militarism for patriotic purposes, as evidenced in early 21st century Estonian war-centred fiction films and TV series. Military themes were scarce in Estonia’s cinematic output during the 1990s, not so much due to their lingering association with Soviet propaganda, but rather because of economic hardship, which severely limited film budgets. However, as the ideological focus of the re-established nation-state came to rely heavily on nostalgia towards the interwar independence era, with its glorification of the victorious War of Independence, the emergence of „our own“ war films, intended to establish and perpetuate a heroic national narrative complete with military glory, seems to have been inevitable.The works primarily discussed here include the domestic box office hits Names in Marble (dir. Elmo Nüganen, 2002), December Heat (Asko Kase, 2008) and 1944 (Elmo Nüganen, 2015) as well as the popular TV series Windswept Land (Ain Prosa, 2008, 2013). While these productions are similar in many other ways, they are united by their straightforward patriotic pathos. There is a clear genre preference for epic historical dramas presented in a populist key, complete with spectacular action sequences and romantic subplots. The preferred subject matter initially involved armed conflicts of the early 20th century – the War for Independence from 1918 to 1920, as well as the communist coup attempt in 1924, but more recent works have focused on WWII, a topic that remains divisive in contemporary Estonia. These productions have been relatively lavish for Estonia’s limited means, but their scripts have inclined towards the simplistic and conservative end of the dramatic spectrum, relying on clichés, and lacking in creativity and psychological depth. Despite attempts to encompass different social classes and some minority groups, the works perpetuate rigidly conservative values. Thus the message tends to ring hollow to many contemporary ears, and alienates parts of the audience, instead of uniting everyone in patriotic fervor.While these productions have clearly sought to meet an existing public demand and have proved popular domestically (not abroad, despite some hopes of marketing them internationally), they have also faced mounting, increasingly sharp criticism. This stems from both their artistic shortcomings and the fact that in addition to these productions being primarily state-funded (as is nearly all of Estonian cinema), they have all received outright backing from the right-wing conservative party, Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit, that has been either Estonia’s ruling party or part of the ruling coalition for most of the time since the country re-established its independence in 1991. Two of the key figures in this party, the former prime minister Mart Laar and long-term parliament member Lauri Vahtre (both are practising historians in addition to their political careers), served either as script authors or consultants during the production of all the works mentioned. Thus, these works can be regarded as attempts to harness the emotive power of war-related themes in cinema for official purposes once again, albeit this time for the benefit of the Estonian nation-state; perhaps more accurately, for the benefit of one political party’s conceptualization of this state.The films have also been closely tied to the state through official events, either by premiering on Independence Day or being promoted as part of the public celebrations of the state’s 90th and 95th anniversaries. This can be interpreted as an attempt to place these productions above criticism due to their patriotic content. Vahtre has even publicly challenged film critics who complain about the films being far too blatantlypropagandistic. However, it remains questionable whether such films could ever be very effective as vehicles for patriotic propaganda, as their excessive propagandistic pathos turns out to be off-putting even for domestic audiences.

The article analyzes War Stories (Voennye rasskazy, 1915) by Mikhail Kuzmin and offers a new interpretation of the book’s pragmatics. Most students of War Stories have not treated this collection in much detail, mainly seeing it as Kuzmin’s unsuccessful attempt to become a part of the mainstream patriotic movement during WWI. Contrary to her predecessors, Alexandra Pakhomova argues this particular book has a definite and consciously motivated authorial strategy. What Kuzmin did in War Stories was an attempt to establish his new literary reputation, and also to create an entirely new genre of short fiction in Russian literature. KEYWORDS: 20th-Century Russian Literature, Mikhail Kuzmin (1972—1936), Voennye rasskazy (1915), Literary Reputation, History of Literature.

Artikkel uurib mäletamismustrit, mis joonistub välja kahes lapsepõlvekogemust vahendavas teoses, mille autorite lapsepõlv jäi Teise maailmasõja aastatesse: Tiina Kurnimi autobiograafias „Sõrve rahva elukeerdkäigud“ (2014) ja Ülo Tuuliku dokumentaalromaanis „Sõja jalus“ (1974; kärpimata versioon 2010). Nii Kurnim kui ka Tuulik vaatavad tagasi oma lapsepõlvele Saaremaal Sõrve säärel, kust sakslased evakueerisid 1944. aasta sügisel sunniviisiliselt suurema osa kohalikust elanikkonnast, nende hulgas Kurnimi ja Tuuliku ning nende perekonnad. Mõlemas teoses ilmneb selle sündmuse psühholoogiliselt traumeeriv mõju nii autoritele kui kogu Sõrve kogukonnale, mis võimaldab käsitleda neid teoseid tunnistusena. --- The article poses the question what type of remembering patterns emerge in two works communicating childhood experiences whose authors’ childhood coincided with the years of WWII. Tiina Kurnim in her 2014 autobiography Ups and Downs in the Life of the People of Sõrve recalls her childhood on the Sõrve Peninsula on the island of Saaremaa, and the author Ülo Tuulik does the same in the novel In the Way of War, first published in 1974 (the unpurged version referred to in the article came out in 2010). Childhood is of a central importance in the development of all people, for early experiences affect a child’s ability to relate to others and the external world and to express their feelings, as well as their general development. The childhood experiences of Estonians born before WWII were fashioned to a signicifant degree by the war that undermined their sense of security, as did deportations, desctruction of homes, and economic difficulties that many families had to face after the war. The events of WWII, life changes caused by the war and experiences related to death and violence that have been conveyed as explicitly traumatic, also dominate in the first third of Kurnim’s autobiography in which the author takes a retrospective look at her childhood. Tuulik’s novel does not contain many personal childhood memories of the author, but uses memories of his parents and other people from Sõrve, diary excerpts and other documentary materials. Kurnim’s autobiography and Tuulik’s documentary novel belong to the tradition of the literature of witnessing that emerged after WWII and was initiated in Estonian literature by Tuulik’s novel. Kurnim’s autobiography fills in the gaps in the events described in Tuulik’s novel of which Tuulik, who was four at the time, has only a few fragments of memory or that he cannot recall at all. The historical context of both works is the forced evacuation of the people of Sõrve by the Germans in the autumn of 1944 that they had to participate in as children. The people of Sõrve who went through the evacuation as children in retrospect interpret the event as a tragedy, consider themselves victims of Nazism and emphasise that no one would explain to the people what was expecting them. For many of the people of Sõrve the evacuation turned out to be a traumatic experience first and foremost because it hit them unexpectedly and caused fear, suffering and death. It is a paradoxical that speaking of individual traumas related to WWII has been shunned in both European and Estonian memory cultures. Peter Leese has claimed that acknowledging the suffering of the victims of WII has been so complicated due to social and political stigmatisation that it has led to them being silenced and rendered invisible. Sophie Delaporte has suggested that war veterans have been silent about their suffering either because of their self-effacing stance and their inabiliy to voice their experiences, or lack of people who would have listened to them. The same can certainly also be claimed about other people who suffered in the war. In addition to the above, in Eastern European countries speaking of war-related traumatic experiences has also been hindered by the political circumstances: even if those victimised by the war had empathetic listeners whom they could tell of their suffering, fear of the power in office in the country made them prefer silence. Both Kurnim’s autobiography and Tuulik’s novel sketch a similar pattern of recollections that is characteristic of traumatic victim memory; however, while the part of Kurnim’s autobiography that mediates childhood experiences is dominated by traumatic evidence of suffering, Tuulik’s novel is marked by a tone of accusation and reproach. In Kurnim’s autobiography the author recalls the most traumatic experiences of her childhood, bringing to the reader also the experiences of other children from Sõrve during WWII. She creates a detailed picture of the conditions in which hundreds of children deprived of parental care due to the war would find themselves, as well as of the trials that the war inflicted upon their family members and to the community as a whole. Kurnim’s autobiography as witnessing is characterised by the overlapping subject positions of witnessing and confession: the confessing self that speaks of the suffering that befell her as a child simultaneously fulfills the role of the witnessing self who is giving witness of the tragic events that befell their loved ones and their community. Tuulik’s novel is a literary witness statement in which the autobiographical, documentary and fictional elements intermingle. The devastation of a year of his childhood seems to have had a deeply traumatic effect on the author, as does the scarcity of personal memories of the time. The moral dimension of Tuulik’s novel openes up in an attempt to construct memory and, on the level of poetics, through the confessions, reasonings and deliberations of the writer as a character in the novel, as well as in three episodes depicting premature deaths. The thematisation of the novel’s writing process demonstrates how Tuulik, while drawing on his own traumatic childhood experiences, explores the aesthetic and ethical limits of representing the sufferings of the people of Sõrve who found themselves in the way of war. He is engaged in such studies also on his memory trips to the island of Saaremaa and outside Estonia, in time and space, while attempting to maintain and protect the truth of the events that occurred on the Sõrve Peninsula during WWII. Tuulik’s novel as a piece of moral witnessing has been written with the aim to counter pain and fear, and first and foremost to fight forgetfulness; häving discussed the nature of war and its effects on the civilian population, at the end of the novel Tuulik reaches the conclusion that war crimes do not expire.

In recent years a number of dramas focussing on Indigenous Australians and Australian history have appeared on the ABC, one of Australia's two public television channels. These dramas have different foci but all represent some aspects of Australian Indigenous history and how it interacts with 'mainstream' representations of Australian history. The four programs I will look at are Cleverman (Goalpost Pictures, 2016-ongoing), Glitch (Matchbox Films, 2015-ongoing), The Secret River (Ruby Entertainment, 2015) and Redfern Now (Blackfella Films, 2012), each of which engages with the past in a unique way.Clearly, different creators, working with different plots and in different genres will have different ways of representing the past. Redfern Now and Cleverman are both produced by Indigenous creators whereas the creators of The Secret River and Glitch are white Australians. Redfern Now and The Secret River are in a realist mode, whereas Glitch and Cleverman are speculative fiction. My argument proceeds on two axes: first, speculative genres allow for more creative ways of representing the past. They give more freedom for the creators to present affective representations of the historical past. Speculative genres also allow for more interesting intellectual examinations of what we consider to be history and its uncertainties. My second axis argues, because it is hard to avoid when looking at this group of texts, that Indigenous creators represent the past in different ways than non-Indigenous creators. Indigenous creators present a more elliptical vision. Non-Indigenous creators tend to address historical stories in more overt ways. It is apparent that even when dealing with the same histories and the same facts, the understanding of the past held by different groups is presented differently because it has different affective meanings.These television programs were all made in the 2010s but the roots of their interpretations go much further back, not only to the history they represent but also to the arguments about history that have raged in Australian intellectual and popular culture. Throughout most of the twentieth century, indigenous history was not discussed in Australia, until this was disturbed by WEH Stanner's reference in the Boyer lectures of 1968 to "our great Australian silence" (Clark 73). There was, through the 1970s and 80s, increased discussion of Indigenous history, and then in the 1990s there was a period of social and cultural argument known locally as the 'History Wars'. This long-running public disagreement took place in both academic and public arenas, and involved historians, other academics, politicians, journalists and social commentators on each side. One side argued that the arrival of white people in Australia led to frontier wars, massacre, attempted genocide and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous people (Reynolds). The other posited that when white people arrived they killed a few Aborigines but mostly Aboriginal people were killed by disease or failure to 'defend' their culture (Windschuttle). The first viewpoint was revisionist from the 1960s onwards and the second represented an attempt at counter-revision – to move the understanding of history back to what it was prior to the revision. The argument took place not only among historians, but was taken up by politicians with Paul Keating, prime minister 1993-1996, holding the first view and John Howard, prime minister 1996-2007, aggressively pursuing the second. The revisionist viewpoint was championed by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan and academics and Aboriginal activists such as Tony Birch and Aileen Moreton Robinson; whereas the counter-revisionists had Keith Windschuttle and Geoffrey Blainey. By and large the revisionist viewpoint has become dominant and the historical work of the counter-revisionists is highly disputed and not accepted.This argument was prominent in Australian cultural discourse throughout the 1990s and has never entirely disappeared. The TV shows I am examining were not made in the 1990s, nor were they made in the 2000s - it took nearly twenty years for responses to the argument to make the jump from politicians' speeches and opinion pieces to television drama. John Ellis argues that the role of television in popular discourse is "working through," meaning contentious issues are first raised in news reports, then they move to current affairs, then talk shows and documentaries, then sketch comedy, then drama (Ellis). Australian Indigenous history was extensively discussed in the news, current affairs and talk shows in the 1990s, documentaries appeared somewhat later, notably First Australians in 2008, but sketch comedy and drama did not happen until in 2014, when Black Comedy's programme first aired, offering sketches engaging often and fiercely with indigenous history.The existence of this public discourse in the political and academic realms was reflected in film before television. Felicity Collins argues that the "Blak Wave" of Indigenous film came to exist in the context of, and as a response to, the history wars (Collins 232). This wave of film making by Indigenous film makers included the works of Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen – whose films chronicled the lives of Indigenous Australians. There was also what Collins calls "back-tracking films" such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and The Tracker (2010) made by white creators that presented arguments from the history wars for general audiences. Collins argues that both the "blak wave" and the "back track" created an alternative cultural sphere where past injustices are acknowledged. She says: "the films of the Blak Wave… cut across the history wars by turning an Indigenous gaze on the colonial past and its afterlife in the present" (Collins 232). This group of films sees Indigenous gazes relate the past and present whereas the white gaze represents specific history. In this article I examine a similar group of representations in television programs.History is not an innocent discourse. In western culture 'history' describes a certain way of looking at the past that was codified in the 19th century (Lloyd 375). It is however not the only way to look at the past, theorist Mark Day has described it as a type of relation with the past and argues that other understandings of the past such as popular memory and mythology are also available (Day). The codification of history in the 19th century involved an increased reliance on documentary evidence, a claim to objectivity, a focus on causation and, often though not always, a focus on national, political history. This sort of history became the academic understanding of history – which claims to be, if not objective, at least capable of disinterest; which bases its arguments on facts and which can establish its facts through reference to documentary records (Froeyman 219). Aileen Moreton-Robinson would call this "white patriarchal knowledge" that seeks to place the indigenous within its own type of knowledge production ("The White Man's Burden" 414). The western version of history tends to focus on causation and to present the past as a coherent narrative leading to the current point in time. This is not an undisputed conception of history in the western academy but it is common and often dominant.Post-colonialist analyses of history argue that western writing about non-western subjects is biased and forces non-westerners into categories used to oppress them (Anderson 44). These categories exist ahistorically and deny non-westerners the ability to act because if history cannot be perceived then it is difficult to see the future. That is to say, because non-western subjects in the past are not seen as historical actors, as people whose actions effected the future, then, in the present, they are unable to access to powerful arguments from history. Historians' usual methodology casts Indigenous people as the 'subjects' of history which is about them, not by them or for them (Tuhiwai Smith 7, 30-32, 144-5). Aboriginal people are characterised as prehistoric, ancient, timeless and dying (Birch 150). This way of thinking about Indigenous Australia removes all agency from Aboriginal actors and restoring agency has been a goal of Aboriginal activists and historians. Aileen Moreton Robinson discusses how Aboriginal resistance is embodied through "oral history (and) social memory," engaging with how Aboriginal actors represent themselves and are represented in relation to the past and historical settings is an important act ("Introduction" 127).Redfern Now and Cleverman were produced through the ABC's Indigenous Department and made by Indigenous filmmakers, whereas Glitch and The Secret River are from the ABC drama department and were made by white Australians. The different programs also have different generic backgrounds. Redfern Now and The Secret River are different forms of realist texts; social realism and historical realism. Cleverman and Glitch, however, are speculative fiction texts that can be argued to be in the mode of magical realism, they "denaturalise the real and naturalise the marvellous" they are also closely tied ideas of retelling colonial stories and "resignify(ing) colonial territories and pasts" (Siskind 834-5).Redfern Now was produced by Blackfella Films for the ABC. It was, with much fanfare, released as the first drama made for television, by Aboriginal people and about Aboriginal people (Blundell). The central concerns of the program are issues in the present, its plots and settings are entirely contemporary. In this way it circumvents the idea and standard representation of Indigenous Australians as ancient and timeless. It places the characters in the program very much in the present.However, one episode "Stand Up" does obliquely engage with historical concerns. In this episode a young boy, Joel Shields, gets a scholarship to an expensive private school. When he attends his first school assembly he does not sing the national anthem with the other students. This leads to a dispute with the school that forms the episode's plot. As punishment for not singing Joel is set an assignment to research the anthem, which he does and he finds the song off-putting – with the words 'boundless plains to share' particularly disconcerting. His father supports him saying "it's not our song" and compares Joel singing it to a "whitefella doing a corrobboree". The national anthem stands metaphorically for the white hegemony in Australia.The school itself is also a metaphor for hegemony. The camerawork lingers on the architecture which is intended to imply historical strength and imperviousness to challenge or change. The school stands for all the force of history white Australia can bring to bear, but in Australia, all architecture of this type is a lie, or at least an exaggeration – the school cannot be more than 200 years old and is probably much more recent.Many of the things the program says about history are conveyed in half sentences or single glances. Arguably this is because of its aesthetic mode – social realism – that prides itself on its mimicry of everyday life and in everyday life people are unlikely to set out arguments in organised dot-point form. At one point the English teacher quotes Orwell, "those who control the past control the future", which seems overt but it is stated off-screen as Joel walks into the room. This seeming aside is a statement about history and directly recalls central arguments of the history wars, which make strong political arguments about the effects of the past, and perceptions of the past, on the present and future. Despite its subtlety, this story takes place within the context of the history wars: it is about who controls the past. The subtlety of the discussion of history allows the film makers the freedom to comment on the content and effects of history and the history wars without appearing didactic. They discuss the how history has effected the present history without having to make explicit historical causes.The other recent television drama in the realist tradition is The Secret River. This was an adaptation of a novel by Kate Grenville. It deals with Aboriginal history from the perspective of white people, in this way it differs from Redfern Now which discusses the issues from the perspective of Aboriginal people. The plot concerns a man transported to Australia as a convict in the early 19th century. The man is later freed and, with his family, attempts to move to the Hawksbury river region. The land they try to settle is, of course, already in use by Aboriginal people. The show sets up the definitional conflict between the idea of settler and invader and suggests the difference between the two is a matter of perspective. Of the shows I am examining, it is the most direct in its representation of historical massacre and brutality. It represents what Felicity Collins described as a back-tracking text recapitulating the colonial past in the light of recovered knowledge. However, from an Indigenous perspective it is another settler tale implying Aboriginal people were wiped out at the time of colonisation (Godwin).The Secret River is told entirely from the perspective of the invaders. Even as it portrays their actions as wrong, it also suggests they were unavoidable or inevitable. Therefore it does what many western histories of Indigenous people do – it classifies and categorises. It sets limits on interpretation. It is also limited by its genre, as a straightforward historical drama and an adaptation, it can only tell its story in a certain way. The television series, like the book before it, prides itself on its 'accurate' rendition of an historical story. However, because it comes from such a very narrow perspective it falls into the trap of categorising histories that might have usefully been allowed to develop further.The program is based on a novel that attracted controversy of its own. It became part of ongoing historiographical debate about the relationship between fiction and history. The book's author Kate Grenville claimed to have written a kind of affectively accurate history that actual history can never convey because the emotions of the past are hidden from the present. The book was critiqued by historians including Inge Clendinnen, who argued that many of the claims made about its historical accuracy were largely overblown (Clendinnen). The book is not the same as the TV program, but the same limitations identified by Clendinnen are present in the television text. However, I would not agree with Clendinnen that formal history is any better. I argue that the limitation of both these mimetic genres can be escaped in speculative fiction.In Glitch, Yurana, a small town in rural Victoria becomes, for no apparent reason, the site of seven people rising from the dead. Each person is from a different historical period. None are Indigenous. They are not zombies but simply people who used to be dead. One of the first characters to appear in the series is an Aboriginal teenager, Beau, we see from his point of view the characters crawling from their graves. He becomes friendly with one of the risen characters, Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been the town's first mayor. At first Fitzgerald's story seems to be one of working class man made good in colonial Australia - a standard story of Australian myth and historiography. However, it emerges that Fitzgerald was in love with an Aboriginal woman called Kalinda and Beau is his descendant. Fitzgerald, once he becomes aware of how he has been remembered by history, decides to revise the history of the town – he wants to reclaim his property from his white descendants and give it to his Indigenous descendants. Over the course of the six episodes Fitzgerald moves from being represented as a violent, racist boor who had inexplicably become the town's mayor, to being a romantic whose racism was mostly a matter of vocabulary. Beau is important to the plot and he is a sympathetic character but he is not central and he is a child. Indigenous people in the past have no voice in this story – when flashbacks are shown they are silent, and in the present their voices are present but not privileged or central to the plot.The program demonstrates a profoundly metaphorical relationship with the past – the past has literally come to life bringing with it surprising buried histories. The program represents some dominant themes in Australian historiography – other formerly dead characters include a convict-turned-bush-ranger, a soldier who was at Gallipoli, two Italian migrants and a girl who died as a result of sexual violence – but it does not engage directly with Indigenous history. Indigenous people's stories are told only in relation to the stories of white people. The text's magical realism allows a less prescriptive relationship with the past than in The Secret River but it is still restricted in its point of view and allows only limited agency to Aboriginal actors.The text's magical realism allows for a thought-provoking representation of relationships with the past. The town of Yurana is represented as a place deeply committed to the representation and glorification of its past. Its main street contains statues of its white founders and war memorials, one of its main social institutions is the RSL, its library preserves relics of the past and its publican is a war history buff. All these indicate that the past is central to the town's identity. The risen dead however dispute and revise almost every aspect of this past. Even the history that is unmentioned in the town's apparent official discourse, such as the WWII internment camp and the history of crimes, is disputed by the different stories of the past that the risen dead have to tell. This indicates the uncertainty of the past, even when it seems literally set in stone it can still be revised. Nonetheless the history of Indigenous people is only revised in ways that re-engage with white history.Cleverman is a magical realist text profoundly based in allegory. The story concerns the emergence into a near future society of a group of people known as the "Hairies." It is never made clear where they came from or why but it seems they appeared recently and are unable to return. They are an allegory for refugees. Hairypeople are part of many Indigenous Australian stories, the show's creator, Ryan Griffen, stated that "there are different hairy stories throughout Australia and they differ in each country. You have some who are a tall, some are short, some are aggressive, some are friendly. We got to sort of pick which ones will fit for us and create the Hairies for our show" (Bizzaca).The Hairies are forced to live in an area called the Zone, which, prior to the arrival of the Hairy people, was a place where Aboriginal people lived. This place might be seen as a metaphor for Redfern but it is also an allegory for Australia's history of displacing Aboriginal people and moving and restricting them to missions and reserves. The Zone is becoming increasingly securitised and is also operating as a metaphor for Australia's immigration detention centres. The prison the Hairy characters, Djukura and Bunduu, are confined to is yet another metaphor, this time for both the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison and the securitisation of immigration detention. These multiple allegorical movements place Australia's present refugee policies and historical treatment of Aboriginal people within the same lens. They also place the present, the past and the future within the same narrative space.Most of the cast is Aboriginal and much of the character interaction is between Aboriginal people and Hairies, with both groups played by Indigenous actors. The disadvantages suffered by Indigenous people are part of the story and clearly presented as affecting the behaviour of characters but within the story Aboriginal people are more advantaged than Hairies, as they have systems, relationships and structures that Hairy people lack. The fact that so much of the interaction in the story is between Indigenous people and Hairies is important: it can be seen to be an interaction between Aboriginal people and Aboriginal mythology or between Indigenous past and present. It demonstrates Aboriginal identities being created in relation to other Aboriginal identities and not in relation to white people, where in this narrative, Aboriginal people have an identity other than that allowed for in colonialist terms.Cleverman does not really engage with the history of white invasion. The character who speaks most about this part of Aboriginal history and whose stated understanding of himself is based on that identity is Waruu. But Waruu is also a villain whose self-identity is also presented as jealous and dishonest. However, despite only passing mentions of westernised history the show is deeply concerned with a relationship with the past. The program engages with Aboriginal traditions about the past that have nothing to do with white history. It presents a much longer view of history than that of white Australia. It engages with the Aboriginal tradition of the Cleverman - demonstrated in the character of Uncle Jimmy who passes a nulla nulla (knob-headed hardwood club), as a symbol of the past, to his nephew Koen and tells him he is the new Cleverman. Cleverman demonstrates a discussion of Australian history with the potential to ignore white people. It doesn't ignore them, it doesn't ignore the invasion but it presents the possibility that it could be ignored.There is a danger in this sort of representation of the past that Aboriginal people could be relegated to the type of ahistorical, metahistorical myths that comprise colonialist history's representation of Indigenous people (Birch). But Cleverman's magical realist, near future setting tends to undermine this. It grounds representation in history through text and metaphor and then expands the definition.The four programs have different relationships with the past but all of them engage with it. The programs are both restrained and freed by the genres they operate in. It is much easier to escape the bounds of formal history in the genre of magical realism and both Glitch and Cleverman do this but have significantly different ways of dealing with history. "Stand up" and The Secret River both operate within more formally realist structures. The Secret River gives us an emotional reading of the past and a very affective one. However, it cuts off avenues of interpretation by presenting a seemingly inevitable tragedy. Through use of metaphor and silence "Stand up" presents a much more productive relationship with the past – seeing it as an ongoing argument rather than a settled one. Glitch engages with the past as a topic that is not settled and that can therefore be changed whereas Cleverman expands our definition of past and understanding of the past through allegory.It is possible to draw further connections. Those stories created by Indigenous people do not engage with the specifics of traditional dominant Australian historiography. However, they work with the assumption that everyone already knows this historiography. They do not re-present the pain of the past, instead they deal with it in oblique terms with allegory. Whereas the programs made by non-Indigenous Australians are much more overt in their representation of the sins of the past, they overtly engage with the History Wars in specific historical arenas in which those wars were fought. The non-Indigenous shows align themselves with the revisionist view of history but they do so in a very different way than the Indigenous shows.ReferencesAnderson, Ian. "Introduction: The Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Birch, Tony. "'Nothing Has Changed': The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Bizzaca, Chris. "The World of Cleverman." Screen Australia 2016.Blundell, Graeme. "Redfern Now Delves into the Lives of Ordinary People." The Australian 26 Oct. 2013: News Review.Clark, Anna. History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom. Sydney: New South, 2008.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” The Quarterly Essay. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.Collins, Felicity. "After Dispossession: Blackfella Films and the Politics of Radical Hope." The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. Eds. Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy. New York: Routledge, 2016.Day, Mark. "Our Relations with the Past." Philosophia 36.4 (2008): 417-27.Ellis, John. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.Froeyman, Anton. "The Ideal of Objectivity and the Public Role of the Historian: Some Lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars." Rethinking History 20.2 (2016): 217-34.Godwin, Carisssa Lee. "Shedding the 'Victim Narrative' for Tales of Magic, Myth and Superhero Pride." The Conversation 2016.Lloyd, Christopher. "Historiographic Schools." A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Ed. Tucker, Aviezer. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. "Introduction: Resistance, Recovery and Revitalisation." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.———. "The White Man's Burden." Australian Feminist Studies 26.70 (2011): 413-31.Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. 2nd ed. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1995.Siskind, Mariano. "Magical Realism." The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 833-68.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012.Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002.

IntroductionI stumble to my feet breathing heavily and, over the roar of a tank, a nearby soldier yells right into my face: “We’re surrounded! We have to hold this line!” I follow him, moving past burning debris and wounded men being helped walk back in the opposite direction. Shells explode around me, a whistle sounds, and then the Hun attack; shadowy figures that I fire upon as they approach through the battlefield fog and smoke. I shoot some. I take cover behind walls as others fire back. I reload the weapon. I am hit by incoming fire, and a red damage indicator appears onscreen, so I move to a better cover position. As I am hit again and again, the image becomes blurry and appears as if in slow-motion, the sound also becoming muffled. As an enemy wielding a flame-thrower appears and blasts me with thick fire, my avatar gasps and collapses. The screen fades to black.So far, so very normal in the World War One themed first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts 2016). But then the game does something unanticipated. I expect to reappear—or respawn—in the same scenario to play better, to stay in the fight longer. Instead, the camera view switches to an external position, craning upwards cinematically from my character’s dying body. Text superimposed over the view indicates the minimalist epitaph: “Harvey Nottoway 1889-1918.” The camera view then races backwards, high over the battlefield and finally settles into position behind a mounted machine-gun further back from the frontline as the enemy advances closer. Immediately I commence shooting, mowing down German troops as they enter our trenches. Soon I am hit and knocked away from the machine-gun. Picking up a shotgun I start shooting the enemy at close-quarters, until I am once again overrun and my character collapses. Now the onscreen text states I was playing as “Dean Stevenson 1899-1918.”I have attempted this prologue to the Battlefield 1 campaign a number of times. No matter how skilfully I play, or how effectively I simply run away and hide from the combat, this pattern continues: the structure of the game forces the player’s avatar to be repeatedly killed in order for the narrative to progress. Over a series of player deaths, respawning as an entirely new character each time, the combat grows in ferocity and the music also becomes increasingly frenetic. The fighting turns to hand-to-hand combat, or shovel-to-head combat to be more precise, and eventually an artillery barrage wipes everybody out (Figure 1). At this point, the prologue is complete and the gamer may continue in a variety of single-player episodes in different theatres of WW1, each of which is structured according to the normal rules of combat games: when your avatar is killed, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint for a follow-up attempt.What are we to make of this alternative narrative structure deployed by the opening episode of Battlefield 1? In contrast to the normal video-game affordances of re-playability until completion, this narrative necessitation of death is in some ways motivated by the onscreen text that introduces the prologue: “What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.” Certainly it is true that the rest of the game (either single-player or in its online multiplayer deathmatch mode) follows the predictable pattern of dying, replaying, completing. And also we would not expect Battlefield 1 to be motivated primarily by a kind of historical fidelity given that an earlier instalment in the series, Battlefield 1942 (2002) was described by one reviewer as:a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game. (Osborne)However what is happening in this will-to-die structure of the game’s prologue represents an alternative and affectively unsettling game experience both in its ludological structure as well as its affective impact. Defamiliarization and Humanization Drawing upon a phenomenology of game-play, whereby the scholar examines the game “as played” (see Atkins and Kryzwinska; Keogh; Wilson) to consider how the text reveals itself to the player, I argue that the introductory single-player episode of Battlefield 1 functions to create a defamiliarizing effect on the player. Defamiliarization, the Russian Formalist term for the effect created by art when some unusual aspect of a text challenges accepted perceptions and/or representations (Schklovski; Thompson), is a remarkably common effect created by the techniques used in combat cinema and video-games. This is unsurprising. After all, warfare is one of the very examples Schklovski uses as something that audiences have developed habituated responses to and which artworks must defamiliarize. The effect may be created by many techniques in a text, and in certain cases a work may defamiliarize even its own form. For instance, recent work on the violence in Saving Private Ryan shows that during the lengthy Omaha Beach sequence, the most vivid instances of violence—including the famous shot of a soldier picking up his dismembered arm—occur well after the audience has potentially become inured to the onslaught of the earlier frequent, but less graphic, carnage (Bender Film Style and WW2). To make these moments stand out with equivalent horrific impact against the background of the Normandy beach bloodbath Spielberg also treats them with a stuttered frame effect and accompanying audio distortion, motivated (to use a related Formalist term) by the character’s apparent concussion and temporary disorientation. Effectively a sequence of point of view shots then, this moment in Private Ryan has become a model for many other war texts, and indeed the player’s death in the opening sequence of Battlefield 1 is portrayed using a very similar (though not identical) audio-visual treatment (Figure 2).Although the Formalists never played videogames, recent scholarship has approached the medium from a similar perspective. For example, Brendan Keogh has focused on the challenges to traditional videogame pleasure generated by the 2012 dystopian shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Keogh notes that the game developers intended to create displeasure and “[forcing] the player to consider what is obscured in the pixilation of war” by, for instance, having them kill fellow American troops in order for the game narrative to continue (Keogh 9). In addition, the game openly taunts the player’s expectations of entertainment based, uncritical run-and-gun gameplay with onscreen text during level loading periods such as “Do you feel like a hero yet?” (8).These kinds of challenges to the expectations of entertainment in combat shooters are found also in one sequence from the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player—as an undercover operative—is forced to participate in a terrorist attack in which civilians are killed (Figure 3). While playing that level, titled “No Russian,” Timothy Welsh argues: “The player may shoot the unarmed civilians or not; the level still creeps slowly forward regardless” (Welsh 409). In Welsh’s analysis, this level emerges as an unusual attempt by a popular video game to “humanize” the non-playing characters that are ordinarily gunned down without any critical and self-reflective thought by the player in most shooter games. The player is forced into a scenario in which they must make a highly difficult ethical choice, but the game will show civilians being killed either way.In contrast to the usual criticisms of violent video games—eg., that they may be held responsible for school shootings, increased adolescent aggression and so on —the “No Russian” sequence drew dramatic complaints of being a “terrorist simulator” (Welsh 389). But for Welsh this ethical choice facing the player, to shoot or not to shoot civilians, raises the game to a textual experience offering self-inspection. As in the fictional theme park of Westworld (HBO 2016), it does not really matter to the digital victim if a player kills them, but it should—and does—matter to the player. There are no external consequences to killing a computer game character composed only of pixels, or killing/raping a robot in the Westworld theme park, however there are internal consequences: it makes you a killer, or a rapist (see Harris and Bloom).Thus, from the perspective of defamiliarization, the game can be regarded as creating the effect that Matthew Payne has labelled “critical displeasure.” Writing about the way this is created by Spec Ops, Payne argues that:the result is a game that wields its affective distance as a critique of the necessary illusion that all military shooters trade in, but one that so few acknowledge. In particular, the game’s brutal mise-en-scène, its intertextual references to other war media, and its real and imagined opportunities for player choice, create a discordant feeling that lays bare the ease with which most video war games indulge in their power fantasies. (Payne 270)There is then, a minor tradition of alternative military-themed video game works that attempt to invite or enable the player to conduct a kind of ethical self-examination around their engagement with interactive representations of war via particular incursions of realism. The critical displeasure invoked by texts such as Spec Ops and the “No Russian” level of Call of Duty is particularly interesting in light of another military game that was ultimately cancelled by the publisher after it received public criticism. Titled Six Days in Fallujah, the game was developed with the participation of Marines who had fought in that real life battle and aimed to depict the events as they unfolded in 2004 during the campaign in Iraq. As Justin Rashid argues:the controversy that arose around Six Days in Fallujah was, of course, a result of the view that commercial video games can only ever be pure entertainment; games do not have the authority or credibility to be part of a serious debate. (Rashid 17)On this basis, perhaps a criterial attribute of an acceptable alternative military game is that there is enough familiarity to evoke some critical distance, but not too much familiarity that the player must think about legitimately real-life consequences and impact. After all, Call of Duty was a successful release, even amid the controversy of “No Russian.” This makes sense as the level does not really challenge the overall enjoyment of the game. The novelty of the level, on the one hand, is that it is merely one part of the general narrative and cannot be regarded as representative of the whole game experience. On the other hand, because none of the events and scenarios have a clear indexical relationship to real-world terrorist attacks (at least prior to the Brussels attack in 2016) it is easy to play the ethical choice of shooting or not shooting civilians as a mental exercise rather than a reflection on something that really happened. This is the same lesson learned by the developers of the 2010 game Medal of Honor who ultimately changed the name of the enemy soldiers from “The Taliban” to “OPFOR” (standing in for a generic “Opposing Forces”) after facing pressure from the US and UK Military who claimed that the multiplayer capacities of the game enabled players to play as the Taliban (see Rashid). Conclusion: Affective Friction in Battlefield 1In important ways then, these game experiences are precursors to Battlefield 1’s single player prologue. However, the latter does not attempt a wholesale deconstruction of the genre—as does Spec Ops—or represent an attempt to humanise (or perhaps re-humanise) the non-playable victim characters as Welsh suggests “No Russian” attempts to do. Battlefield 1’s opening structure of death-and-respawn-as-different-character can be read as humanizing the player’s avatar. But most importantly, I take Battlefield’s initially unusual gameplay as an aesthetic attempt to set a particular tone to the game. Motivated by the general cultural attitude of deferential respect for the Great War, Battlefield 1 takes an almost austere stance toward the violence depicted, paradoxically even as this impact is muted in the later gameplay structured according to normal multiplayer deathmatch rules of run-and-gun killing. The futility implied by the player’s constant dying is clearly motivated by an attempt at realism as one of the cultural memories of World War One is the sheer likelihood of being killed, whether as a frontline soldier or a citizen of a country engaged in combat (see Kramer). For Battlefield 1, the repeated dying is really part of the text’s aesthetic engagement. For this reason I prefer the term affective friction rather than critical displeasure. The austere tone of the game is indicated early, just prior to the prologue gameplay with onscreen text that reads:Battlefield 1 is based on events that unfolded over 100 years agoMore than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”It ended nothing.Yet it changed the world forever. At a simple level, the player’s experience of being killed in order for the next part of the narrative to progress evokes this sense of futility. There have been real responses indicating this, for instance one reviewer argues that the structure is “a powerful treatment” (Howley). But there is potential for increased engagement with the game itself as the structure breaks the replay-cycle of usual games. For instance, another reviewer responds to the overall single-player campaign by suggesting “It is not something you can sit down and play through and not experience on a higher level than just clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard” (Simpson). This affective friction amplifies, and draws attention to, the other advances in violent stylistics presented in the game. For instance, although the standard onscreen visual distortions are used to show character damage and the direction from which the attack came, the game does use slow-motion to draw out the character’s death. In addition, the game features incidental battlefield details of shell-shock, such as soldiers simply holding the head in their hands, frozen as the battle rages around them (Figure 4). The presence of flame-thrower troops, and subsequently the depictions of characters running as they burn to death are also significant developments in violent aesthetics from earlier games. These elements of violence are constitutive of the affective friction. We may marvel at the technical achievement of such real-time rendering of dynamic fire and the artistic care given to animate deaths and shell-shock depictions. But simultaneously, these “violent delights”—to borrow from Westworld’s citation of Shakespeare—are innovations upon the depictions of earlier games, even contemporary, combat games. Indeed, one critic has almost ashamedly noted: “For a game about one of the most horrific wars in human history, it sure is pretty” (Kain).These violent depictions show a continuation in the tradition of increased detail which has been linked to a model of “reported realism” as a means of understanding audience’s claims of realism in combat films and modern videogames as a result primarily of their hypersaturated audio-visual texture (Bender "Blood Splats"). Here, saturation refers not to the specific technical quality of colour saturation but to the densely layered audio-visual structure often found in contemporary films and videogames. For example, thick mixing of soundtracks, details of gore, and nuanced movements (particularly of dying characters) all contribute to a hypersaturated aesthetic which tends to prompt audiences to make claims of realism for a combat text regardless of whether or not these viewers/players have any real world referent for comparison. Of course, there are likely to be players who will simply blast through any shooter game, giving no regard to the critical displeasure offered by Spec Ops narrative choices or the ethical dilemma of “No Russian.” There are also likely to be players who bypass the single-player campaign altogether and only bother with the multiplayer deathmatch experience, which functions in the same way as it does in other shooter games, including the previous Battlefield games. But perhaps the value of this game’s attempt at alternative storytelling, with its emphasis on tone and affect, is that even the “kill-em-all” player may experience a momentary impact from the violence depicted. This is particularly important given that, to borrow from Stephanie Fisher’s argument in regard to WW2 games, many young people encounter the history of warfare through such popular videogames (Fisher). In the centenary period of World War One, especially in Australia amid the present Anzac commemorative moment, the opportunity for young audiences to engage with the significance of the events. As a side-note, the later part of the single-player campaign even has a Gallipoli sequence, though the narrative of this component is designed as an action-hero adventure. Indeed, this is one example of how the alternative dying-to-continue structure of the prologue creates an affective friction against the normal gameplay and narratives that feature in the rest of the text. The ambivalent ways in which this unsettling opening scenario impacts on the remainder of the game-play, including for instance its depiction of PTSD, is illustrated by some industry reviewers. As one reviewer argues, the game does generate the feeling that “war isn’t fun — except when it is” (Plante). From this view, the cognitive challenge created by the will to die in the prologue creates an affective friction with the normalised entertainment inherent in the game’s multiplayer run-and-gun components that dominate the rest of Battlefield 1’s experience. Therefore, although Battlefield 1 ultimately proves to be an entertainment-oriented combat shooter, it is significant that the developers of this major commercial production decided to include an experimental structure to the prologue as a way of generating tone and affect in a fresh way. ReferencesAtkins, Barry, and Tanya Kryzwinska. "Introduction: Videogame, Player, Text." Videogame, Player, Text. Eds. Atkins, Barry and Tanya Kryzwinska. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Bender, Stuart Marshall. "Blood Splats and Bodily Collapse: Reported Realism and the Perception of Violence in Combat Films and Videogames." Projections 8.2 (2014): 1-25.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Film Style and the World War II Combat Film. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Fisher, Stephanie. "The Best Possible Story? Learning about WWII from FPS Video Games." Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh Call and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 299-318.Harris, Sam, and Paul Bloom. "Waking Up with Sam Harris #56 – Abusing Dolores." Sam Harris 12 Dec. 2016. Howley, Daniel. "Review: Beautiful Battlefield 1 Gives the War to End All Wars Its Due Respect." Yahoo! 2016. Kain, Erik. "'Battlefield 1' Is Stunningly Beautiful on PC." Forbes 2016.Keogh, Brendan. Spec Ops: The Line's Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter. Paper presented at DiGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies.Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Osborne, Scott. "Battlefield 1942 Review." Gamesport 2002. Payne, Matthew Thomas. "War Bytes: The Critique of Militainment in Spec Ops: The Line." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31.4 (2014): 265-82. Plante, Chris. "Battlefield 1 Is Excellent Because the Series Has Stopped Trying to Be Call of Duty." The Verge 2016. Rashid, Justin. Terrorism in Video Games and the Storytelling War against Extremism. Paper presented at Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, 9-12 Jan. 2011.Schklovski, Viktor. "Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary." Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 25-60.Simpson, Campbell. "Battlefield 1 Isn't a Game: It's a History Lesson." Kotaku 2016. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. Welsh, Timothy. "Face to Face: Humanizing the Digital Display in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2." Guns, Grenade, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh. Call, and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 389-414. Wilson, Jason Anthony. "Gameplay and the Aesthetics of Intimacy." PhD diss. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.

I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html