Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Horror tales – appreciation »

Atran & Norenzyan (A&N) claim that an appreciation of the evolved inferential machinery underlying supernatural beliefs can greatly aid us in understanding regularities in culturally shared conceptions of religion. I explore how their model provides insight into why culturally shared tales of horror (e.g., horror movies) often combine religious and predatory content.

The present paper proposes to undertake a deep study of the Death of a Clerk. This beautiful short story has been written by Anton Chekhov, a prominent story teller of Russia. This story has been translated into English from Russian by Ivy Litvinov. This translation of Ivy Litvinov has been made the basis of the present study. The period of 1880-1885 is a very important period in the career of Anton Chekhov. During this period, he wrote hundreds of humorous tales. They show a keen sense of the social scene and of the incongruities of life. These tales reveal a deep feeling for human injustice and suffering. In these stories Anton Chekhov attempted to see things as they were and to deal with them as he saw them. According to him a reasoned life without a clear-cut point of view is not a life, but a burden and a horror. This was a strange idea for that day but it played a significant role in his works. Chekhov’s Death of a Clerk is one of them. It beautifully presents the picture of the life of a society based on tyranny and servility.

Strange Tales from Liaozhai is a representative work of the Zhiguai Chuanqi of Chinese classical literature, and the writing of horror stories is one of its most essential parts, which contains adequate meaning, showing its rich details and vivid writing characteristics, which also reflects a certain extent of the author, Pu Songling's unique aesthetic and value orientation. This paper analyzes the setting of the time and space environment of the original text, the use of the third-person limited angle of view in the narrative, and the selection of horror images, respectively, from the scene of the incident, the subject of experience and the object of experience in the horror story. This paper analyzes the original texts of Strange Tales from Liaozhai by summarizing writing techniques of horror stories in work to explore the process of creating the sense of horror in Strange Tales from Liaozhai and how the author uses the original source of human fear to create a horror story. It reveals the alienation and abnormality of time and space, the immersive sense of subjective, limited perspective, and the deadly threat behind horrific imagery. While appreciating the artistic beauty and realizing the diversity of stories types of this work, its implicit humanistic concern is not ignored.

Background and Objective: Suicide attempts are 10-20X more common than completed suicide and an important risk factor for death by suicide, yet most people who attempt suicide do not die by suicide. The process of recovering after a suicide attempt has not been well studied. The Reasons to go on Living (RTGOL) Project, a narrative web-based study, focuses on experiences of people who have attempted suicide and made the decision to go on living, a process not well studied. Narrative research is ideally suited to understanding personal experiences critical to recovery following a suicide attempt, including the transition to a state of hopefulness. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize this work. This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. Material and Methods: A website created for The RTGOL Project (www.thereasons.ca) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery, a process which enabled participation from a large and diverse group of participants. The only direction given was “if you have made a suicide attempt or seriously considered suicide and now want to go on living, we want to hear from you.” The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Over 5 years, data analysis occurred in several phases over the course of the study, resulting in the identification of data that were inputted into an Excel file. This analysis used stories where participants described positive involvement with the mental health system (50 stories). Results: Several participants reflected on experiences many years previous, providing the privilege of learning how their life unfolded, what made a difference. Over a five-year period, 50 of 226 stories identified positive experiences with mental health care with sufficient details to allow analysis, and are the focus of this paper. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories, from suicidal ideation only to medically severe suicide attempts. Most described one or more suicide attempts. Three themes identified included: 1) trust and relationship with a health care professional, 2) the role of friends and family and friends, and 3) a wide range of services. Conclusion: Stories open a window into the experiences of the period after a suicide attempt. This study allowed for an understanding of how mental health professionals might help individuals who have attempted suicide write a different story, a life-affirming story. The stories that participants shared offer some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers, including immediately after a suicide attempt. Results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a tremendous difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt. Key Words: web-based; suicide; suicide attempt; mental health system; narrative research Word Count: 478 Introduction My Third (or fourth) Suicide AttemptI laid in the back of the ambulance, the snow of too many doses of ativan dissolving on my tongue.They hadn't even cared enough about meto put someone in the back with me,and so, frustrated,I'd swallowed all the pills I had with me— not enough to do what I wanted it to right then,but more than enough to knock me out for a good 14 hours.I remember very little after that;benzodiazepines like ativan commonly cause pre- and post-amnesia, says Google helpfullyI wake up in a locked rooma woman manically drawing on the windows with crayonsthe colors of light through the glassdiffused into rainbows of joy scattered about the roomas if she were coloring on us all,all of the tattered remnants of humanity in a psych wardmade into a brittle mosaic, a quilt of many hues, a Technicolor dreamcoatand I thoughtI am so glad to be able to see this. (Story 187)The nurse opening that door will have a lasting impact on how this story unfolds and on this person’s life. Each year, almost one million people die from suicide, approximately one death every 40 seconds. Suicide attempts are much more frequent, with up to an estimated 20 attempts for every death by suicide.1 Suicide-related behaviours range from suicidal ideation and self-injury to death by suicide. We are unable to directly study those who die by suicide, but effective intervention after a suicide attempt could reduce the risk of subsequent death by suicide. Near-fatal suicide attempts have been used to explore the boundary with completed suicides. Findings indicated that violent suicide attempters and serious attempters (seriousness of the medical consequences to define near-fatal attempts) were more likely to make repeated, and higher lethality suicide attempts.2 In a case-control study, the medically severe suicide attempts group (78 participants), epidemiologically very similar to those who complete suicide, had significantly higher communication difficulties; the risk for death by suicide multiplied if accompanied by feelings of isolation and alienation.3 Most research in suicidology has been quantitative, focusing almost exclusively on identifying factors that may be predictive of suicidal behaviours, and on explanation rather than understanding.4 Qualitative research, focusing on the lived experiences of individuals who have attempted suicide, may provide a better understanding of how to respond in empathic and helpful ways to prevent future attempts and death by suicide.4,5 Fitzpatrick6 advocates for narrative research as a valuable qualitative method in suicide research, enabling people to construct and make sense of the experiences and their world, and imbue it with meaning. A review of qualitative studies examining the experiences of recovering from or living with suicidal ideation identified 5 interconnected themes: suffering, struggle, connection, turning points, and coping.7 Several additional qualitative studies about attempted suicide have been reported in the literature. Participants have included patients hospitalized for attempting suicide8, and/or suicidal ideation,9 out-patients following a suicide attempt and their caregivers,10 veterans with serious mental illness and at least one hospitalization for a suicide attempt or imminent suicide plan.11 Relationships were a consistent theme in these studies. Interpersonal relationships and an empathic environment were perceived as therapeutic and protective, enabling the expression of thoughts and self-understanding.8 Given the connection to relationship issues, the authors suggested it may be helpful to provide support for the relatives of patients who have attempted suicide. A sheltered, friendly environment and support systems, which included caring by family and friends, and treatment by mental health professionals, helped the suicidal healing process.10 Receiving empathic care led to positive changes and an increased level of insight; just one caring professional could make a tremendous difference.11 Kraft and colleagues9 concluded with the importance of hearing directly from those who are suicidal in order to help them, that only when we understand, “why suicide”, can we help with an alternative, “why life?” In a grounded theory study about help-seeking for self-injury, Long and colleagues12 identified that self-injury was not the problem for their participants, but a panacea, even if temporary, to painful life experiences. Participant narratives reflected a complex journey for those who self-injured: their wish when help-seeking was identified by the theme “to be treated like a person”. There has also been a focus on the role and potential impact of psychiatric/mental health nursing. Through interviews with experienced in-patient nurses, Carlen and Bengtsson13 identified the need to see suicidal patients as subjective human beings with unique experiences. This mirrors research with patients, which concluded that the interaction with personnel who are devoted, hope-mediating and committed may be crucial to a patient’s desire to continue living.14 Interviews with individuals who received mental health care for a suicidal crisis following a serious attempt led to the development of a theory for psychiatric nurses with the central variable, reconnecting the person with humanity across 3 phases: reflecting an image of humanity, guiding the individual back to humanity, and learning to live.15 Other research has identified important roles for nurses working with patients who have attempted suicide by enabling the expression of thoughts and developing self-understanding8, helping to see things differently and reconnecting with others,10 assisting the person in finding meaning from their experience to turn their lives around, and maintain/and develop positive connections with others.16 However, one literature review identified that negative attitudes toward self-harm were common among nurses, with more positive attitudes among mental health nurses than general nurses. The authors concluded that education, both reflective and interactive, could have a positive impact.17 This paper is one part of a larger web-based narrative study, the Reasons to go on Living Project (RTGOL), that seeks to understand the transition from making a suicide attempt to choosing life. When invited to tell their stories anonymously online, what information would people share about their suicide attempts? This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. The focus on the positive impact reflects an appreciative inquiry approach which can promote better practice.18 Methods Design and Sample A website created for The RTGOL Project (www.thereasons.ca) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery. Participants were required to read and agree with a consent form before being able to submit their story through a text box or by uploading a file. No demographic information was requested. Text submissions were embedded into an email and sent to an account created for the Project without collecting information about the IP address or other identifying information. The content of the website was reviewed by legal counsel before posting, and the study was approved by the local Research Ethics Board. Stories were collected for 5 years (July 2008-June 2013). The RTGOL Project enabled participation by a large, diverse audience, at their own convenience of time and location, providing they had computer access. The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Of the 226 submissions to the website, 112 described involvement at some level with the mental health system, and 50 provided sufficient detail about positive experiences with mental health care to permit analysis. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories: 8 described suicidal ideation only; 9 met the criteria of medically severe suicide attempts3; 33 described one or more suicide attempts. For most participants, the last attempt had been some years in the past, even decades, prior to writing. Results Stories of positive experiences with mental health care described the idea of a door opening, a turning point, or helping the person to see their situation differently. Themes identified were: (1) relationship and trust with a Health Care Professional (HCP), (2) the role of family and friends (limited to in-hospital experiences), and (3) the opportunity to access a range of services. The many reflective submissions of experiences told many years after the suicide attempt(s) speaks to the lasting impact of the experience for that individual. Trust and Relationship with a Health Care Professional A trusting relationship with a health professional helped participants to see things in a different way, a more hopeful way and over time. “In that time of crisis, she never talked down to me, kept her promises, didn't panic, didn't give up, and she kept believing in me. I guess I essentially borrowed the hope that she had for me until I found hope for myself.” (Story# 35) My doctor has worked extensively with me. I now realize that this is what will keep me alive. To be able to feel in my heart that my doctor does care about me and truly wants to see me get better.” (Story 34). The writer in Story 150 was a nurse, an honours graduate. The 20 years following graduation included depression, hospitalizations and many suicide attempts. “One day after supper I took an entire bottle of prescription pills, then rode away on my bike. They found me late that night unconscious in a downtown park. My heart threatened to stop in the ICU.” Then later, “I finally found a person who was able to connect with me and help me climb out of the pit I was in. I asked her if anyone as sick as me could get better, and she said, “Yes”, she had seen it happen. Those were the words I had been waiting to hear! I quickly became very motivated to get better. I felt heard and like I had just found a big sister, a guide to help me figure out how to live in the world. This person was a nurse who worked as a trauma therapist.” At the time when the story was submitted, the writer was applying to a graduate program. Role of Family and Friends Several participants described being affected by their family’s response to their suicide attempt. Realizing the impact on their family and friends was, for some, a turning point. The writer in Story 20 told of experiences more than 30 years prior to the writing. She described her family of origin as “truly dysfunctional,” and she suffered from episodes of depression and hospitalization during her teen years. Following the birth of her second child, and many family difficulties, “It was at this point that I became suicidal.” She made a decision to kill herself by jumping off the balcony (6 stories). “At the very last second as I hung onto the railing of the balcony. I did not want to die but it was too late. I landed on the parking lot pavement.” She wrote that the pain was indescribable, due to many broken bones. “The physical pain can be unbearable. Then you get to see the pain and horror in the eyes of someone you love and who loves you. Many people suggested to my husband that he should leave me in the hospital, go on with life and forget about me. During the process of recovery in the hospital, my husband was with me every day…With the help of psychiatrists and a later hospitalization, I was actually diagnosed as bipolar…Since 1983, I have been taking lithium and have never had a recurrence of suicidal thoughts or for that matter any kind of depression.” The writer in Story 62 suffered childhood sexual abuse. When she came forward with it, she felt she was not heard. Self-harm on a regular basis was followed by “numerous overdoses trying to end my life.” Overdoses led to psychiatric hospitalizations that were unhelpful because she was unable to trust staff. “My way of thinking was that ending my life was the only answer. There had been numerous attempts, too many to count. My thoughts were that if I wasn’t alive I wouldn’t have to deal with my problems.” In her final attempt, she plunged over the side of a mountain, dropping 80 feet, resulting in several serious injuries. “I was so angry that I was still alive.” However, “During my hospitalization I began to realize that my family and friends were there by my side continuously, I began to realize that I wasn't only hurting myself. I was hurting all the important people in my life. It was then that I told myself I am going to do whatever it takes.” A turning point is not to say that the difficulties did not continue. The writer of Story 171 tells of a suicide attempt 7 years previous, and the ongoing anguish. She had been depressed for years and had thoughts of suicide on a daily basis. After a serious overdose, she woke up the next day in a hospital bed, her husband and 2 daughters at her bed. “Honestly, I was disappointed to wake up. But, then I saw how scared and hurt they were. Then I was sorry for what I had done to them. Since then I have thought of suicide but know that it is tragic for the family and is a hurt that can never be undone. Today I live with the thought that I am here for a reason and when it is God's time to take me then I will go. I do believe living is harder than dying. I do believe I was born for a purpose and when that is accomplished I will be released. …Until then I try to remind myself of how I am blessed and try to appreciate the wonders of the world and the people in it.” Range of Services The important role of mental health and recovery services was frequently mentioned, including dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT)/cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), recovery group, group therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, accurate diagnosis, and medications. The writer in Story 30 was 83 years old when she submitted her story, reflecting on a life with both good and bad times. She first attempted suicide at age 10 or 12. A serious post-partum depression followed the birth of her second child, and over the years, she experienced periods of suicidal intent: “Consequently, a few years passed and I got to feeling suicidal again. I had pills in one pocket and a clipping for “The Recovery Group” in the other pocket. As I rode on the bus trying to make up my mind, I decided to go to the Recovery Group first. I could always take the pills later. I found the Recovery Group and yoga helpful; going to meetings sometimes twice a day until I got thinking more clearly and learned how to deal with my problems.” Several participants described the value of CBT or DBT in learning to challenge perceptions. “I have tools now to differentiate myself from the illness. I learned I'm not a bad person but bad things did happen to me and I survived.”(Story 3) “The fact is that we have thoughts that are helpful and thoughts that are destructive….. I knew it was up to me if I was to get better once and for all.” (Story 32): “In the hospital I was introduced to DBT. I saw a nurse (Tanya) every day and attended a group session twice a week, learning the techniques. I worked with the people who wanted to work with me this time. Tanya said the same thing my counselor did “there is no study that can prove whether or not suicide solves problems” and I felt as though I understood it then. If I am dead, then all the people that I kept pushing away and refusing their help would be devastated. If I killed myself with my own hand, my family would be so upset. DBT taught me how to ‘ride my emotional wave’. ……….. DBT has changed my life…….. My life is getting back in order now, thanks to DBT, and I have lots of reasons to go on living.”(Story 19) The writer of Story 67 described the importance of group therapy. “Group therapy was the most helpful for me. It gave me something besides myself to focus on. Empathy is such a powerful emotion and a pathway to love. And it was a huge relief to hear others felt the same and had developed tools of their own that I could try for myself! I think I needed to learn to communicate and recognize when I was piling everything up to build my despair. I don’t think I have found the best ways yet, but I am lifetimes away from that teenage girl.” (Story 67) The author of story 212 reflected on suicidal ideation beginning over 20 years earlier, at age 13. Her first attempt was at 28. “I thought everyone would be better off without me, especially my children, I felt like the worst mum ever, I felt like a burden to my family and I felt like I was a failure at life in general.” She had more suicide attempts, experienced the death of her father by suicide, and then finally found her doctor. “Now I’m on meds for a mood disorder and depression, my family watch me closely, and I see my doctor regularly. For the first time in 20 years, I love being a mum, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a cousin etc.” Discussion The 50 stories that describe positive experiences in the health care system constitute a larger group than most other similar studies, and most participants had made one or more suicide attempts. Several writers reflected back many years, telling stories of long ago, as with the 83-year old participant (Story 30) whose story provided the privilege of learning how the author’s life unfolded. In clinical practice, we often do not know – how did the story turn out? The stories that describe receiving health care speak to the impact of the experience, and the importance of the issues identified in the mental health system. We identified 3 themes, but it was often the combination that participants described in their stories that was powerful, as demonstrated in Story 20, the young new mother who had fallen from a balcony 30 years earlier. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize our clinical work. Results are consistent with, and add to, the previous work on the importance of therapeutic relationships.8,10,11,14–16 It is from the stories in this study that we come to understand the powerful experience of seeing a family members’ reaction following a participant’s suicide attempt, and how that can be a potent turning point as identified by Lakeman and Fitzgerald.7 Ghio and colleagues8 and Lakeman16 identified the important role for staff/nurses in supporting families due to the connection to relationship issues. This research also calls for support for families to recognize the important role they have in helping the person understand how much they mean to them, and to promote the potential impact of a turning point. The importance of the range of services reflect Lakeman and Fitzgerald’s7 theme of coping, associating positive change by increasing the repertoire of coping strategies. These findings have implications for practice, research and education. Working with individuals who are suicidal can help them develop and tell a different story, help them move from a death-oriented to life-oriented position,15 from “why suicide” to “why life.”9 Hospitalization provides a person with the opportunity to reflect, to take time away from “the real world” to consider oneself, the suicide attempt, connections with family and friends and life goals, and to recover physically and emotionally. Hospitalization is also an opening to involve the family in the recovery process. The intensity of the immediate period following a suicide attempt provides a unique opportunity for nurses to support and coach families, to help both patients and family begin to see things differently and begin to create that different story. In this way, family and friends can be both a support to the person who has attempted suicide, and receive help in their own struggles with this experience. It is also important to recognize that this short period of opportunity is not specific to the nurses in psychiatric units, as the nurses caring for a person after a medically severe suicide attempt will frequently be the nurses in the ICU or Emergency departments. Education, both reflective and interactive, could have a positive impact.17 Helping staff develop the attitudes, skills and approach necessary to be helpful to a person post-suicide attempt is beginning to be reported in the literature.21 Further implications relate to nursing curriculum. Given the extent of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and deaths by suicide, this merits an important focus. This could include specific scenarios, readings by people affected by suicide, both patients themselves and their families or survivors, and discussions with individuals who have made an attempt(s) and made a decision to go on living. All of this is, of course, not specific to nursing. All members of the interprofessional health care team can support the transition to recovery of a person after a suicide attempt using the strategies suggested in this paper, in addition to other evidence-based interventions and treatments. Findings from this study need to be considered in light of some specific limitations. First, the focus was on those who have made a decision to go on living, and we have only the information the participants included in their stories. No follow-up questions were possible. The nature of the research design meant that participants required access to a computer with Internet and the ability to communicate in English. This study does not provide a comprehensive view of in-patient care. However, it offers important inputs to enhance other aspects of care, such as assessing safety as a critical foundation to care. We consider these limitations were more than balanced by the richness of the many stories that a totally anonymous process allowed. Conclusion Stories open a window into the experiences of a person during the period after a suicide attempt. The RTGOL Project allowed for an understanding of how we might help suicidal individuals change the script, write a different story. The stories that participants shared give us some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers immediately after a suicide attempt. While we cannot know the experiences of those who did not survive a suicide attempt, results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a crucial difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt. We end with where we began. Who will open the door? References 1. World Health Organization. Suicide prevention and special programmes. http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/index.html Geneva: Author; 2013.2. Giner L, Jaussent I, Olie E, et al. Violent and serious suicide attempters: One step closer to suicide? J Clin Psychiatry 2014:73(3):3191–197.3. Levi-Belz Y, Gvion Y, Horesh N, et al. Mental pain, communication difficulties, and medically serious suicide attempts: A case-control study. Arch Suicide Res 2014:18:74–87.4. Hjelmeland H and Knizek BL. Why we need qualitative research in suicidology? Suicide Life Threat Behav 2010:40(1):74–80.5. Gunnell D. A population health perspective on suicide research and prevention: What we know, what we need to know, and policy priorities. Crisis 2015:36(3):155–60.6. Fitzpatrick S. Looking beyond the qualitative and quantitative divide: Narrative, ethics and representation in suicidology. Suicidol Online 2011:2:29–37.7. Lakeman R and FitzGerald M. How people live with or get over being suicidal: A review of qualitative studies. J Adv Nurs 2008:64(2):114–26.8. Ghio L, Zanelli E, Gotelli S, et al. Involving patients who attempt suicide in suicide prevention: A focus group study. J Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs 2011:18:510–18.9. Kraft TL, Jobes DA, Lineberry TW., Conrad, A., & Kung, S. Brief report: Why suicide? Perceptions of suicidal inpatients and reflections of clinical researchers. Arch Suicide Res 2010:14(4):375-382.10. Sun F, Long A, Tsao L, et al. The healing process following a suicide attempt: Context and intervening conditions. Arch Psychiatr Nurs 2014:28:66–61.11. Montross Thomas L, Palinkas L, et al. Yearning to be heard: What veterans teach us about suicide risk and effective interventions. Crisis 2014:35(3):161–67.12. Long M, Manktelow R, and Tracey A. The healing journey: Help seeking for self-injury among a community population. Qual Health Res 2015:25(7):932–44.13. Carlen P and Bengtsson A. Suicidal patients as experienced by psychiatric nurses in inpatient care. Int J Ment Health Nurs 2007:16:257–65.14. Samuelsson M, Wiklander M, Asberg M, et al. Psychiatric care as seen by the attempted suicide patient. J Adv Nurs 2000:32(3):635–43.15. Cutcliffe JR, Stevenson C, Jackson S, et al. A modified grounded theory study of how psychiatric nurses work with suicidal people. Int J Nurs Studies 2006:43(7):791–802.16. Lakeman, R. What can qualitative research tell us about helping a person who is suicidal? Nurs Times 2010:106(33):23–26.17. Karman P, Kool N, Poslawsky I, et al. Nurses’ attitudes toward self-harm: a literature review. J Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs 2015:22:65–75.18. Carter B. ‘One expertise among many’ – working appreciatively to make miracles instead of finding problems: Using appreciative inquiry as a way of reframing research. J Res Nurs 2006:11(1): 48–63.19. Lieblich A, Tuval-Mashiach R, Zilber T. Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation. Sage Publications; 1998.20. Braun V and Clarke V. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 2006:3(2):77–101.21. Kishi Y, Otsuka K, Akiyama K, et al. Effects of a training workshop on suicide prevention among emergency room nurses. Crisis 2014:35(5):357–61.

AbstractGenres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x is the genre of that work). A work can be good all things considered, but genre membership provides us with an additional set of evaluative criteria over and above those of the medium, which colors how we interpret and appreciate the work. Given this importance, it is not surprising that philosophers of art have been interested in providing an account of what, exactly, a genre is. Despite this interest, there is not widespread agreement about what it takes for something to be a genre, nor what kinds of considerations are relevant in determining whether a work is a member of that genre. Beyond this, we might also want to know to what degree we ought to consider genre in evaluating a work of art and why it should matter at all. Here, I explore the variety of recent theories that philosophers have taken up on the topic of genre and why we should ultimately think of genres as artistic practices rather than the alternatives.

Violent crime, and the impulse to temper it, fuel cycles of utopian and dystopian discourse in North American literature. Dystopian fiction operates as a social document that highlight the anxieties of the time in which authoring takes place, and in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, America's violent history/(his)story is legalized and gendered. The principal narrator, Offred, manages her perspective—the only thing she can claim personal ownership over—under the pressure of a strict monotheocracy. This paper examines Atwood's novel with a historical-critical lens and posits that groundwork for Gilead was seeded during a spike of lurid serial murders in the 1970s/1980s—a discourse established, perhaps hyperbolically, by the pre-digital press combined with the resurgence of conservative values during the Reagan administration; these conditions fertilized the neo-patriarchal legislation of the fictional Gilead—text born of context. Both historical and feminist criticism discover examples of gendered assault, contemporary to the time of the novel's authoring, bleeding into the nebulously timed present-day Gilead—for time, the narrator notes, has not been of enumerable value since the mid-1980s. The Handmaid's Tale repurposes the history of sexual violence and femicide; here, horror is systematically present within the Puritan womb which seeks to shield an infantilized population—women from the monsters in dark alleys to the proliferation of Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper doppelgangers in mass media.

IntroductionRecut trailers typically mix footage from one or more films to create a preview for a feature that will never exist. Challenging the trailer’s assumed function as existing merely to gain an audience for a main attraction, the recut trailer suggests that the trailer can exist separately from a film. This paper will ask if recut trailers are evidence of fan enthusiasm and question precisely where this enthusiasm is directed. Do recut trailers demonstrate there are fans for the feature film that is recut, or does this enthusiasm extend beyond an appreciation and anticipation for a feature film? It will be ascertained if the recut trailer – as a site for homage, parody and fandom – transcends the advertising imperatives of box office success. This paper will demonstrate how fan-made trailers are symptomatic of the need for a new critical approach to trailers, one that does not situate the trailer as the low advertisement to the high cultural text of the film. It will be proposed that trailers form a network, of which the feature films and other trailers that are invoked form only a part.Recut trailers, while challenging the norms of what is considered an advertisement, function within a strict frame of reference: in their length, use of credits, text, voiceover in direct address to the audience, and editing techniques. Consequently, the recut trailer parodies and challenges the tools of promotion by utilising the very methods that sell to a prospective audience, to create an advertisement that is stripped of its traditional function by promoting a film that cannot exist and cannot be consumed. The promotion seems to end at the site of the advertisement, while still calling upon a complex series of interconnected references and collective knowledge in order for the parody to be effective. This paper will examine the network of Brokeback Mountain parodies, which were created before, during and after the feature film’s release, suggesting that the temporal imperative usually present in trailers is irrelevant for their appreciation. A playlist of the trailers discussed is available here.The Shift from Public to PrivateThe limited scholarship available situates the trailer as a promotional tool and a “brief film text” (Kernan 1), which is a “limited sample of the product” of the feature film (Kerr and Flynn 103), one that directly markets to demographics in order to draw an audience to see the feature. The traditional distribution methods for the trailer – as pre-packaged coming attractions in a cinema, and as television advertisements – work by building a desire to see a film in the future. For the trailer to be commercially successful within this framework, there is an imperative to differentiate itself from other trailers through creating an appeal to stars, genre or narrative (Kernan 14), or to be recognised as a trailer in amongst the stream of other advertisements on television. As new media forms have emerged, the trailer’s spatial and temporal bounds have shifted: the trailer is now included as a special feature on DVD packages, is sent to mobile devices on demand, and is viewed on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. In this move from the communal, collective and directed consumption of the trailer in the public sphere to the individualised, domesticated and on-demand consumption in the private sphere – the trailer has shown itself to be a successful “cross-media text” (Johnston 145). While choosing to watch a trailer – potentially long after the theatrical release of the film it promotes – suggests a growing “interactive relationship between film studio and audience” (Johnston 145), it also marks the beginning of increasing interactivity between the trailer and the audience, a relationship that has altered the function and purpose of the trailer beyond the studio’s control. Yet, the form of the trailer as it was traditionally distributed has been retained for recut trailers in order to parody and strip the trailer of its original meaning and purpose, and removes any commercial capital attached to it. Rather than simply being released at the control of a studio, the trailer is now actively shared, appropriated and altered. Demand for the trailer has not diminished since the introduction of new media, suggesting that there is an enthusiasm not only for coming feature films, but also for the act of watching, producing and altering trailers that may not translate into box office takings. This calls into question the role of the trailer in new media sites, in which the recut trailers form a significant part by embodying the larger changes to the consumption and distribution of trailers.TrailerTubeThis study analyses recut trailers released on YouTube only. This is, arguably, the most common way that these trailers are watched and newly created trailers are shared and interacted with, with some clips reaching several million views. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the network that is created surrounding the recut trailer through addressing its specific qualities. YouTube is the only site consulted in this study for the release for fan-made trailers as YouTube forms a formidable part of the network of recut trailers and studio released trailers, and currently, serves as a common way for Internet users to search for videos.YouTube was launched in December 2005, and in the following 1-2 years, the majority of popular recut trailers emerged. The correlation between these two dates is not arbitrary; the technology and culture promoted and fostered by the unique specificities of YouTube has in turn developed the recut trailer as “one of the most popular forms of fan subversion in the age of digital video” (Hilderband 52). It is also the role of audiences and producers that has ensured that the trailer has moved beyond its original spatial and temporal bounds – to be consumed in the home or on mobile devices, and at any stage past any promotional urgency. The Brokeback Mountain parodies, to be later discussed, surfaced mainly in 2006, demonstrative of an early acceptance of the possibilities that YouTube and mass broadcasting presented, and the possibilities that the trailer could offer to YouTube’s “clip” culture (Hilderbrand 49).The specificities of YouTube as a channel for dissemination have allowed for fan-made trailers to exist alongside trailers released by studios. Rather than the trailer being consumed and then becoming irretrievable, perpetually tied to the feature film it promotes, the online distribution and storing of trailers allows a constant revisiting of the advertisement – this act alone demonstrating an enthusiasm for the form of the trailer. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube “offers[s] new and remediating relationships to texts that indicate changes and acceleration of spectatorial consumption” (49). Specifically, Hilderbrand proposes that YouTube functions as a collection of memories, which in turn present a “portal of cultural memory” (54) – amplified by the ability to create playlists and channels. The tagging of trailers to the films from which they drive, the official trailers released for a film referenced, or other recut trailers ensures that there is a physical trace of the network the trailer creates. Recut trailers demand for knowledge and capital to be shared amongst viewers, the technical attributes of YouTube allow for much of this knowledge to be available on demand, and to be hyperlinked or suggested to the viewer. In order for the parody present in recut trailers to function at the level intended, the films that are drawn upon would presumably need to be identified and some basic elements of the plot understood in order for the capital imbued in the trailer to be completely realised. If the user is unaware of the film, however, clips of the film or the original trailer can be reached either through the “related videos” menu which populates according to the didactic information for the clip watched, or by searching. As the majority of recut trailers seek to displace the original genre of the film parodied – such as, for example, Ten Things I Hate about Commandments which presents the story of The Ten Commandments as a teen film in which Moses will both part the sea and get the girl – the original genre of the film must be known by the viewer in order to acknowledge the site for parody in the fan-made trailer. Further to this, the network deployed suggests that there must be some knowledge of the conventions of the genre that is being applied to the original film’s promotional qualities. The parody functions by effectively sharing the knowledge between two genres, in conjunction with an awareness of the role and capital of the trailer. Tagging, playlists and channels facilitate the sharing of knowledge and dispersing of capital. As the recut trailer tends to derive from more than one source, the network alters the viewer’s relationship to the original feature film and cultivates a series of clips and knowledge. However, this also indicates that intimate fan knowledge can be bypassed – which places this particular relationship to the trailer and the invoked films as existing outside the realms of the archetypal cult fan. This challenges prior conceptions of fan culture by resisting a prolonged engagement normally attributed to cultivating fan status (Hills), as typically only one trailer will be made, rather than exhibiting a concentrated adulation of one text. The recut trailer is placed as the nexus in a series of links, in which the studio system is subverted while also being directly engaged with and utilised. The tools that have traditionally been used to sell to an audience through pre-packaged coming attractions are now used to promote a film that cannot be consumed that holds no commercial significance for film studios. These tools also work to reinforce the aesthetic and cinematic norms in the trailer, which provide a contract of audience expectations – such as the use of the approval by the American Motion Picture Association screen and classification at the beginning of the majority of recut trailers. The recut trailer assimilates to the nature of video sharing on YouTube in which the trailer is part of a network of narratives all of which are accessible on demand, can be fast-forwarded, replayed, and embedded on numerous social networking sites for further dissemination and accompanying editorial comment. The trailer thus becomes a social text that involves a community and is wide-reaching in its aims and consumption, despite being physically consumed in the private sphere. The feature which enables the user to “favourite” a video, add it to their playlist and embed it in another site, demonstrates that the trailer is considered as its own cohesive form, subject to scrutiny and favoured or dismissed. Constant statistics reflecting its popularity reinforce the success of a recut trailer, and popularity will generally lead to the trailer becoming more accessible. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube has nutured a “new temporality of immediate gratification for audiences” which has in turn contributed to the “culture of the clip” (49), which the trailer seems to exemplify – and in the absence of feature films being legally readily accessible on sites such as YouTube, the trailer seeks to fill the void for immediate gratification.Brokeback MountainsWhile fan-made trailers can generate enthusiasm about the release of an upcoming film they may be linked to – as was recently the case with fan-made trailers for teen vampire film, Twilight – there is also a general enthusiasm to play with the form of the trailer and all that it signifies, while in the process, stripping the trailer of its traditional function. Following the release of the trailer for feature film Brokeback Mountain, numerous recut trailers emerged on YouTube which took the romantic and sexual relationship of the two male leads in the film, and applied this narrative to films depicting two male leads in a non-romantic friendship. In effect, new films were created that used the basis of Brokeback Mountain to shift plots in existing films, creating a new narrative in the process. The many Brokeback… parodies vary in popularity, and have been uploaded to YouTube continuously since 2006. The titles include Brokeback to the Future, Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style, Brokeback of the Ring, The Brokeback Redemption, Broke Trek, Harry Potter and Brokeback Goblet and Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. The trailers use footage from a variety of film and television sources that show a friendship between two men and introduce it to the “style” of Brokeback Mountain. There are several techniques which are used uniformly across all of the trailers in order to convey this new plot: the original score used in the Brokeback Mountain trailer begins each recut trailer; the use of typically white text on a black screen based on the original trailer’s text, or a slight variant of it which is specific to the film which is being recut; and the pace of shots altered to focus on lingering looks, or to splice scenes together in order to imply sexual contact. Consequently, there is a consciousness of the effects used in the original trailer to sell a particular narrative to the audience as something that an audience would want to view. The narrative is constructed as being universal, as any story with two men as the leads and their friendship can be altered to show an underlying homoerotic story, and the form of the trailer allows these storylines to be promoted and shared. The insider knowledge of the fan that has noticed these interactions is able to make their knowledge communal. Hills argues that “fans participate in communal activities” (ix), which here takes the form of creating a network of collective stories which form Brokeback – it is a story extended to several sites, and a story which is promoted and sold. Through the use of tagging, playlists and suggested videos, once one recut trailer is viewed, several others are made instantly available. The availability of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer then serves to reinforce the authenticity and professionalism of the clips, by providing a template in which existing footage from other films is moulded to fit within.The instant identifier of a Brokeback… trailer is the music that was used in the original trailer. This signals that the trailer for Brokeback Mountain was itself so iconic that the use of its soundtrack would be instantly recognisable, and the re-use of music and text suggests that the recut trailers reinforce this iconography and its capital by visually reinforcing what signifies Brokeback Mountain. The network these trailers create includes the film Brokeback Mountain itself, but the recut trailer begins to open a new trajectory for the narrative to mould and shift, identifiable by techniques present in the trailer but not the feature film itself. The fan appreciation is evident in several ways: namely, there is an enthusiasm to conflate a feature film into Brokeback Mountain’s general narrative; that there has been enough of an engagement with a feature in order to retrieve clips to be edited into a new montage, and consequently, a condensed narrative with a direct mode of address; and also the eagerness to see a feature film in trailer form, employing trailer-specific cinematic techniques to enhance parody and displacement. Recut trailers are also subject to commenting, which generally reflect on either the insider fan knowledge of the text that is being initiated to the world of Brokeback Mountain, or take the place of comments that reflect on the success of the editing. In this respect, critique is a part of the communal fan interaction with the creator and uploader in the recut trailer’s network. As such, there is a focus on quality for the creator of the fan video, and rating occurs in order to rank the recut trailers. This focus on quality and professionalism elevates the creator of the recut trailer to the status of a director, despite not having filmed the scenes themselves. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for the role of the trailer, the internal promotion on YouTube of the most successful trailers – designated as such by the YouTube community – signals an active engagement with the role of the trailer, and its social properties, even though it is consumed individually.ConclusionWhile the recut trailer extends the fan gaze toward one object or more, it is typically presented as a parody, and consequently, could also be seen as rejecting elements of a genre or feature film. However, the parody typically occurs at the site of displacement: such as the relationship between the two male leads in Brokeback to the Future having a romantic relationship whilst coming to terms with time-travel; the burning bush in Ten Things I Hate about Commandments being played by Samuel L. Jackson as “Principal Firebush”, complete with audio from Pulp Fiction; or recutting romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle to become a horror film. The parody relies on knowledge that can be found easily, aided by YouTube’s features, while requiring the creator to intimately engage with a feature film. The role of the trailer in this network is to provide the tools and the boundaries for the new narrative to exist within, and create a system of referents for the fan to identify, through parodies of star appeal, genre, or narrative, as Kernan proposes are the three ways in which a trailer often relies upon to sell itself to an audience (14).As this paper has argued toward, the recut trailer can also be released from the feature films it invokes by being considered as its own coherent form, which draws upon numerous sites of knowledge and capital in order to form a network. While traditionally trailers have worked to gain an audience for an impending feature release, the recut trailer only seeks to create an audience for itself. Through the use of cult texts or a particularly successful form of parody, as demonstrated in Scary Mary Poppins, the recut trailer is widely consumed and shared across multiple avenues. The recut trailer then seeks to promote only itself through providing a condensed narrative, speaking directly to audiences, and cleverly engaging with the use of editing to leave traces of authorship. Fan culture may be seen as the adoration of one creator to the film they recut, but the network that the recut trailer creates demonstrates that there is an enthusiasm in both creators and viewers for the form of the trailer itself, to exist beyond the feature film and advertising imperatives.ReferencesBrokeback of the Ring. 27 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgt-BiFiBek›.Brokeback to the Future. 1 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY›.Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2005. The Brokeback Redemption Trailer. 28 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtRi42DEdTE›.Broke Trek – A Star Trek Brokeback Mountain Parody. 27 May 2007. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSOuLky3n0›.Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet. 8 March 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9D0veHTxh0›. Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61 (2007): 48-57. Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Johnston, Keith M. "'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World': Trailers in the Digital Age." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (2008): 145-60. Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Kerr, Aphra, and Roddy Flynn. "Rethinking Globalisation through the Movie and Games Industries." Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 9 (2003): 91-113. The Original Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer. 8 Oct. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic›.Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style. 4 April 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHLr5AYl5f4›.Sleepless in Seattle. Dir. Nora Ephron. Film. Tristar Pictures, 1993. Sleepless in Seattle: Recut as a Horror Movie. 30 Jan. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08›.Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. 14 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omB18oRsBYg›.The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Ten Things I Hate about Commandments. 14 May 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs›.

So then: That all phenomena in our intermediate state, or quasi-state, represent this one attempt to organise, stabilise, harmonise, individualise -- or to positivise, or to become real: That only to have seeming is to express failure or intermediateness to final failure and final success; That every attempt -- that is observable -- is defeated by Continuity, or by outside forces -- or by the excluded that are continuous with the included: That our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be absolute, or by the local to be the universal. -- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (1919) I inspire this essay with outlandish reference from the "Godfather of the paranormal" primarily because upon revision of his seminal, often "disjointed" tome The Book of the Damned, I am immediately struck by the deeply ironic reciprocity his renegade theory of Continuity shares with expansive sociocultural change effected by global communication technologies, specifically, a growing awareness of interconnections -- or links -- between all things. I am swiftly presented, upon making this observation, with Sony's latest TV ad which, rather than attempting to persuade me to buy a Sony product per se, seems considerably more interested in luring me to buy into the digital world the advertisement illustrates, blending it ambiguously into "reality", repetitively informing me that in such an environment, "we are all connected". Following suit, I make the link. But from a strictly Fortean perspective, the link was already there, acknowledged or not, since Fort's ontology of Continuity precludes locality in much the same way as, say, the graphic art of M.C. Escher. Much of what Fort catalogued as "paranormal" phenomena can be seen as signs (in the semiotic sense) of the universe's non-localised nature. Although he did not frame his own perspective in these terms, Fort's writings subtly imply an explanation of "existence" as an assemblage of continuous signs seeking affirmation via exclusion (I am because I am not what I am not), an assemblage read, interpreted and ordered by the exclusive human mind. Mysterious coincidences, apparitions, vanishings, appearances, ESP, telekinesis -- these types of apparently instantaneous phenomena were seen as manifestations of phenomenological connections or mergings where none was believed or known to exist. The role of the Fortean, therefore, has traditionally been both to acknowledge that such phenomena do occur and to elucidate their significance, to explore connections between apparently unconnected phenomena, to make new, illuminating links in an infinitely interlinked universe. Such a role is hardly incompatible, of course, with that of today's average Web surfer. In the virtual environment communication technologies seek to construct, nothing is really local because everything is continuous with, or linked to, everything else. Significantly, these links are of our own making, but were already there, and it is in this sense that the Web is the essence of Forteana electronically virtualised, accounting for cyberspace's prolific production of UFO and conspiracy lore, for example, both traditionally fields of high interest to Forteans. Jodie Dean notes that: With the Internet, conspiracy information has been turned into entertainment ... this is because of the way that the networked society turns all of its citizens into conspiracy theorists: we are all told to search for information and make links. What is interesting about the expansion of conspiracy into mass media is the way that conspiracy thinking comes to define the Zeitgeist, to be synonymous with critical thinking in the networked society. (Pilkington 25) Fortean Continuity has woven itself through much of Western popular culture since Fort's time, obviously underpinning The X-Files and its ilk but surfacing more subtly in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, for example, where it in fact formed the crux of that film's "confusing" closure: a narratively "unconnected" frog fall, a well-documented but poorly understood phenomenon to which Fort attached considerable significance. Seemingly "unconnected" events like this happen quite often, Fort discovered, and through his study of their social reception (which historically ranges from ignorance to mythic inspiration) reasoned that all phenomena and events are unexplained and unexpected -- are apparently unconnected -- until we are able to establish a context in which they might plausibly "make sense", or be possible, or real. When such a (culturally specific) context is established, often elaborately so in a culture intolerant of randomness, the phenomenon "explained" becomes awash in significance, enriching the entire environment in which it is deemed to occur, reminding us of Continuity and the creative power of explanation. Unless, of course, that explanation is primarily concerned with maintaining a dominant social power structure or paradigmatic worldview which, Fort observed, in the West tends to be interested in downplaying Continuity and promoting fragmentation, or "localisation of the universal". Further, by "excluding" the anomaly altogether (and that includes accepting its presence but maintaining its "otherness"), we only limit the scope of our own observation, leaving the most alluring links unexplored. While all this sounds rather antiquated and mystical (it was Fort's way), I still can't help but think he might have been onto something: upon review Magnolia actually contains numerous clear Fortean references (Coleman 49). Granted a context, the frogs actually make sense. "The message" is that, even if the links seem at first so obscure as to be nonexistent, we are, in a virtual environment, encouraged to make them. In such an environment, the once staunch division between "subjective construction" and "objective observation" becomes largely redundant. The Body as Media Sign This redundancy describes a culture in which the medium has become the message. We are now encouraged to make links by transcending locality via the "technological simulation of consciousness", which McLuhan saw as symptomatic of the "electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us..." (4), an age in which media technology essentially elaborates the nonsynthetic interconnective model of biological nature, a model completely inhospitable to notions of "disconnection". When our bodies and their perceptual functions become continuous with the form and information relay of technology, "we" become undeniably continuous, disembodied via the body. Fort's ontology of Continuity (which lead him to conceive the term "teleportation", probably a significant influence on the cosmology of Lovecraft) has become increasingly intrinsic to much horror and science fiction, and especially central to the filmography of Canadian auteur and master of paranoid horror, David Cronenberg. Notably prominent in his first investigation of postmodernity's mediated ontology, Videodrome (1982), the theme of Continuity permeates this often "disjointed" film, which suggests the power of mass media operates not through the message, but through an obscure function of the medium which ultimately renders the "message" redundant as the medium becomes the message. Videodrome, a snuff TV show that seduces Toronto cable station chief Max Renn (James Woods), is encoded with a subliminal signal, which induces a brain tumour that eventually transforms the viewer's reality into video hallucination (and/or vice versa). The nature of the message does not ultimately matter since this subliminal signal can function through any program, even a test pattern. Steven Shaviro notices the psychedelic, McLuhanesque joke: the boundary between "inner bodily excitation and outer objective representation" collapses as the "new regime of the image abolishes the distance required either for disinterested aesthetic contemplation or for stupefied absorption in spectacle" (141). In the addictive cybernetic feedback loop of Videodrome, the distance between the medium and the body eventually collapses -- the body becomes the medium itself, the "New Flesh", and consequently the message: a sign within the hyperreality of an information system in which there are only signs. In such an all-encompassing system of interconnected signs, in which signification becomes incontrovertibly arbitrary, borders don't so much collapse as blend into one another, forming what Cronenberg presents as eXistenZ (1999), an unresolvable "quasi-state" of virtual embodiment. In many ways an elaboration of Videodrome, eXistenZ presents a "different present" style future in which technology, biology, the synthetic, the natural, and the real are completely virtualised with the advent of synthesised, organic virtual reality technology. Consisting of "metaflesh", the game pods/consoles are living tissue requiring a human body as a power source. Connecting directly with the central nervous system via a port at the base of the spine, they become a working part of the biological body, transforming the individual's reality into a narrative game called eXistenZ, so "real" it is ultimately indistinguishable from reality itself, hence its overwhelming appeal. The content of the game is an ambiguous combination of pre-programmed information and the player's own expectations, the objective of the game being to learn why one is playing the game. Progress within the game depends upon saying the right thing to the right person/character, or doing the right thing at the right time, to receive the right information to proceed in the right direction. When progress begins to lag, the player feels an overwhelming urge to do or say something they don't "want" to as their game character temporarily takes over to ensure continuation of the game. Initially felt as artificially induced bodily impulses, these urges eventually become acceptable and naturalised as the player "becomes" their game character, adopting the prescribed attitude and behaviour required for proficiency within the game, allowing them to "do the right thing" more easily, to both "make the links" and reconfigure themselves as links. In this sense eXistenZ is a fitting parable for an increasingly interconnected media culture that equates media transgressions of the body/mind with eventual transcendence from the body/mind into a quasi-corporeal "virtual reality" of cybernetics in which the individual, like everything else that is deemed to exist, is defined as a sign of its own connection to everything else. Existence as game describes existence within a playful culture of desire in which the pursuit of happiness is equated with the pursuit of pleasurable symbols that speak for our selves, and for which a virtual reality becomes a most logical, desirable future, if not a present. Within such an environment we are all characters in the same game, a game called "existence". Our bodies are the game pods which make interaction within existence possible, the vehicular flesh that binds "us" to the gaming environment, their provision of "reality" becoming ever more indistinguishable from the contexts established by increasingly pervasive electronic media. Literality begins to fade schizophrenically in the wake of hypersignificance. As a sign of and within a media age, the body becomes both a medium for a self-reflexive message and a message for a self-reflexive medium. In other words, as eXistenZ suggests, the body is already so incorporated as both media (information system) and media image that there is nothing non-virtual about its reality, or reality in general, for that matter, hence the analogy of existence as interactive simulation, a game. The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ, I'd suggest, describes the increasingly anarchic power, ebb and flow of signs within a postmodern, virtual environment. Interestingly, Fort ultimately saw existence itself as reliant upon the processional denial of Continuity in the pursuit of the "real", or the Truth, or some kind of localisation of the universal, something that owes no debt to or shares no phenomenological relationship with anything other than itself, something that could only ever be ... self-referential. He argued that, despite our attempts to construct such phenomena, and to define our own lived experience (and our bodies) in these terms, no such phenomena exist in any objective sense because, ultimately, the observer is the observed. Everything is a part of itself, so every attempt to become "real" is doomed to fail, since "real" for Western culture involves some degree of conceptual disconnection, if only of the "real" from the "unreal". Fort didn't miss the irony of Intermediateness, the Truth that could never be, deeply appreciating The amazing paradox of it all: That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding other things. That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all expressions, in all fields of phenomena, of that which we think of as one inter-continuous nexus. (Book of the Damned 9) If then, upon the technological realisation of Continuity, there emerges in Western popular culture a deep obsession with the growing elusiveness of Truth (or "reality") accompanied by a certain degree of "paranoia" -- a veritable Fortean revival -- might this be attributable, at least in part, to the growing inefficacy of Truth and "reality" within the virtual environment of an inherently Fortean media form? References Coleman, Loren. "When Frogs Fall..." Fortean Times 133 (2000): 49. eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. 1999. Fort, Charles. The Complete Books of Charles Fort. New York: Dover, 1974. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 1964. Pilkington, Mark. "Watching the Watchers." Fortean Times 134 (2000): 24-5. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. 1982. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Adam Dodd. "The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ within a Virtual Environment." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/continuity.php>. Chicago style: Adam Dodd, "The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ within a Virtual Environment," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/continuity.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Adam Dodd. (2000) The Fortean continuity of eXistenZ within a virtual environment. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/continuity.php> ([your date of access]).

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Doubt has been my closest companion for several years as I struggle to make sense of certain hidden events from within my family’s history. The actual nature of such events, although now lost to us, can nevertheless be explored through the distorting lens of memory and academic research. I base such explorations in part on my intuition and sensitivity to emotional experience, which are inevitably riddled with doubt. I write from the position of a psychoanalytic psychologist who is also a creative writer and my doubts increase further when I use the autobiographical impulse as a driving force. I am not alone with such uncertainties. Ross Gibson, an historian and filmmaker, uses his doubts to explore empty spaces in the Australian landscape. He looks to see “what’s gone missing” as he endeavours with a team of colleagues to build up some “systematic comprehension in response to fragments” (Gibson, “Places” 1). How can anyone be certain as to what has transpired with no “facts” to go on? he asks. What can we do with our doubts? To this end, Gibson has collected a series of crime scene photographs, taken in post war Sydney, and created a display – a photographic slide show with a minimalist musical score, mostly of drumming and percussion, coupled with a few tight, poetic words, in the form of haiku, splattered across the screen. The notes accompanying the photographic negatives were lost. The only details “known” include the place, the date and the image. Of some two thousand photos, Gibson selected only fifty for display, by hunch, by nuance, or by whatever it was that stirred in him when he first glimpsed them. He describes each photo as “the imprint of a scream”, a gut reaction riddled with doubt (Gibson and Richards, Wartime). In this type of research, creative imaginative flair is essential, Gibson argues. “We need to propose ‘what if’ scenarios that help us account for what has happened…so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past” (Gibson, “Places” 2). To do this we need imagination, which involves “a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens”, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt (Gibson, “Places” 2). The sociologist, Avery Gordon, also argues in favour of the imaginative impulse. “Fiction is getting pretty close to sociology,” she suggests as she begins her research into the business of ghosts and haunting (Gordon 38). As we entertain our doubts we tune in with our uncertain imaginations. “The places where our discourse is unauthorised by virtue of its unruliness…take us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalised questions, toward the materiality of institutionalised storytelling, with all its uncanny repetitions” (Gordon 39). If we are to dig deeper, to understand more about the emotional truth of our “fictional” pasts we must look to “the living traces, the memories of the lost and disappeared” (Gordon ix). According to Janice Radway, Gordon seeks a new way of knowing…a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions and portents … ghostly matters … . To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects. (x) And to be tied to such effects is to live constantly in the shadow of doubt. A photograph of my dead baby sister haunts me still. As a child I took this photo to school one day. I had peeled it from its corners in the family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind. “She’s dead,” I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My fingers had smeared the photo’s surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one had seen a dead body before, and not one had been able to imagine the stillness, a photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground one spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old. I have the photo still—my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep. I do not emphasise grief at the loss of my mother’s first-born daughter. My mother felt it briefly, she told me later. But things like that happened all the time during the war. Babies were born and died regularly. Now, all these years later, these same unmourned babies hover restlessly in the nurseries of generations of survivors. There is no way we can be absolute in our interpretations, Gibson argues, but in the first instance there is some basic knowledge to be generated from viewing the crime scene photographs, as in viewing my death photo (Gibson, "Address"). For example, we can reflect on the décor and how people in those days organised their spaces. We can reflect on the way people stood and walked, got on and off vehicles, as well as examine something of the lives of the investigative police, including those whose job it was to take these photographs. Gibson interviewed some of the now elderly men from the Sydney police force who had photographed the crime scenes he displays. He asked questions to deal with his doubts. He now has a very different appreciation of the life of a “copper”, he says. His detective work probing into these empty spaces, digging into his doubts, has reduced his preconceptions and prejudices (Gibson, "Address"). Preconception and prejudice cannot tolerate doubt. In order to bear witness, Gibson says we need to be speculative, to be loose, but not glib, “narrativising” but not inventive, with an eye to the real world (Gibson, "Address"). Gibson’s interest in an interpretation of life after wartime in Sydney is to gather a sense of the world that led to these pictures. His interpretations derive from his hunches, but hunches, he argues, also need to be tested for plausibility (Gibson, Address). Like Gibson, I hope that the didactic trend from the past—to shut up and listen—has been replaced by one that involves “discovery based learning”, learning that is guided by someone who knows “just a little more”, in a common sense, forensic, investigative mode (Gibson, “Address”). Doubt is central to this heuristic trend. Likewise, my doubts give me permission to explore my family’s past without the paralysis of intentionality and certainty. “What method have you adopted for your research?” Gordon asks, as she considers Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the same question. It is “a delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Gordon 38). So what is my methodology? I use storytelling meshed with theory and the autobiographical. But what do you think you’re doing? my critics ask. You call this research? I must therefore look to literary theorists on biography and autobiography for support. Nancy Miller writes about the denigration of the autobiographical, particularly in academic circles, where the tendency has been to see the genre as “self indulgent” in its apparent failure to maintain standards of objectivity, of scrutiny and theoretical distance (Miller 421). However, the autobiographical, Miller argues, rather than separating and dividing us through self-interests can “narrow the degree of separation” by operating as an aid to remembering (425). We recognise ourselves in another’s memoir, however fleetingly, and the recognition makes our “own experience feel more meaningful: not ‘merely’ personal but part of the bigger picture of cultural memory” (Miller 426). I speak with some hesitation about my family of origin yet it frames my story and hence my methodology. For many years I have had a horror of what writers and academics call “structure”. I considered myself lacking any ability to create a structure within my writing. I write intuitively. I have some idea of what I wish to explore and then I wait for ideas to enter my mind. They rise to the surface much like air bubbles from a fish. I wait till the fish joggles my bait. Often I write as I wait for a fish to bite. This writing, which is closely informed by my reading, occurs in an intuitive way, as if by instinct. I follow the associations that erupt in my mind, even as I explore another’s theory, and if it is at all possible, if I can get hold of these associations, what I, too, call hunches, then I follow them, much as Gibson and Gordon advocate. Like Gordon, I take my “distractions” seriously (Gordon, 31-60). Gordon follows ghosts. She looks for the things behind the things, the things that haunt her. I, too, look for what lies beneath, what is unconscious, unclear. This writing does not come easily and it takes many drafts before a pattern can emerge, before I, who have always imagined I could not develop a structure, begin to see one—an outline in bold where the central ideas accrue and onto which other thoughts can attach. This structure is not static. It begins with the spark of desire, the intercourse of opposing feelings, for me the desire to untangle family secrets from the past, to unpack one form, namely the history as presented within my family and then to re-assemble it through a written re-construction that attempts to make sense of the empty spaces left out of the family narrative, where no record, verbal or written, has been provided. This operates against pressure from certain members of my family to leave the family past unexplored. My methodology is subjective. Any objectivity I glean in exploring the work and theories of others comes through my own perspective. I read the works of academics in the literary field, and academics from psychoanalysis interested in infant development and personality theory. They consider these issues in different ways from the way in which I, as a psychotherapist, a doubt-filled researcher, and writer, read and experience them. To my clinician self, these ideas evolve in practice. I do not see them as mere abstractions. To me they are living ideas, they pulse and flow, and yet there are some who would seek to tie them down or throw them out. Recently I asked my mother about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter) of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about. My curiosity had been flamed by Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography, which includes several photos of dead people. The book I found by chance in a second-hand books store. I could not leave these photographs behind. Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world, that we no longer take photographs of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we take such photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish (Ruby 161). I follow in Gordon’s footsteps. She describes how one day, on her way to a conference to present a paper, she had found herself distracted from her conference topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered was “missing” from a photo taken in Berlin in 1901. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein, should have been present in this photo, but was not. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct, an unconscious drive towards death and oblivion (Gordon 40). Gordon’s “search” for this missing woman overtook her initial research. My mother could not remember who took her dead baby’s photograph, but suspected it was a neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had stayed. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, and always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that my mother could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on. “It is harder,” my mother said, to lose an older child. “When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes less time to get over it.” Ruby concludes that after World War Two, postmortem photographs were less likely to be kept in the family album, as they would have been in earlier times. “Those who possess death-related family pictures regard them as very private pictures to be shown only to selected people” (Ruby 161). When I look at the images in Ruby’s book, particularly those of the young, the children and babies, I am struck again at the unspoken. The idea of the dead person, seemingly alive in the photograph, propped up in a chair, on a mother’s lap, or resting on a bed, lifeless. To my contemporary sensibility it seems wrong. To look upon these dead people, their identities often unknown, and to imagine the grief for others in that loss—for grief there must have been such that the people remaining felt it necessary to preserve the memory—becomes almost unbearable. It is tempting to judge the past by present standards. In 1999, while writing her historical novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks came across a letter Henry James had written ninety eight years earlier to a young Sarah Orne Jewett who had previously sent him a manuscript of her historical novel for comment. In his letter, James condemns the notion of the historical novel as an impossibility: “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense of horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world,” are all impossible, he insisted (Brooks 3). Despite Brooks’s initial disquiet at James’s words, she realised later that she had heard similar ideas uttered in different contexts before. Brooks had worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa: “They don’t think like us,” white Africans would say of their black neighbours, or Israelis of Arabs or upper class Palestinians about their desperately poor refugee-camp brethren … . “They don’t value life as we do. They don’t care if their kids get killed—they have so many of them”. (Brookes 3) But Brooks argues, “a woman keening for a dead child sounds exactly as raw in an earth-floored hovel as it does in a silk-carpeted drawing room” (3). Brooks is concerned to get beyond the certainties of our pre-conceived ideas: “It is human nature to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy”(3). And empathy again requires the capacity to tolerate doubt. Later I asked my mother yet again about what it was like for her when her baby died, and why she had chosen to have her dead baby photographed. She did not ask for the photograph to be taken, she told me. But she was glad to have it now; otherwise nothing would remain of this baby, buried in an unfamiliar cemetery on the other side of the world. Why am I haunted by this image of my dead baby sister and how does it connect with my family’s secrets? The links are still in doubt. Gibson’s creative flair, Gordon’s ideas on ghostly matters and haunting, the things behind the things, my preoccupation with my mother’s dead baby and a sense that this sister might mean less to me did I not have the image of her photograph planted in my memory from childhood, all come together through parataxis if we can bear our doubts. Certainty is the enemy of introspection of imagination and of creativity. Yet too much doubt can paralyse. Here I write about tolerable levels of doubt tempered with an inquisitive mind that can land on hunches and an imagination that allows the researcher to follow such hunches and then seek evidence that corroborates or disproves them. As Gibson writes elsewhere, I tried to use all these scrappy details to help people think about the absences and silences between all the pinpointed examples that made up the scenarios that I presented in prose that was designed to spur rigorous speculation rather than lock down singular conclusions. (“Extractive” 2) Ours is a positive doubt, one that expects to find something, however “unexpected”, rather than a negative doubt that expects nothing. For doubt in large doses can paralyse a person into inaction. Furthermore, a balanced state of doubt fosters connectivity. As John Patrick Shanley’s character, the parish priest, Father Flynn, in the film Doubt, observes, “there are these times in our life when we feel lost. It happens and it’s a bond” (Shanley). References Brooks, Geraldine. "Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller." New York Times, 2001. 14 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/02/arts/writers-on-writing-timeless-tact-helps-sustain-a-literary-time-traveler.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm›. Doubt. Shanley, Dir. J. P. Shanley. Miramax Films, 2008. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. “Life after Wartime.” N.d. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/›. Gibson, Ross. “The Art of the Real Conference.” Keynote address. U Newcastle, 2008. Gibson, Ross. “Places past Disappearance.” Transformations 13-1 (2006). 22 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml›. ———. “Extractive Realism.” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). 25 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/gibson.html›. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008. Miller, Nancy K. “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 421-536. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. 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Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.