Articoli di riviste sul tema "1882-1941 Criticism and interpretation"

As one of the disciples of Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917) together with Constantin Radulescu–Motru (1868–1957) and Petre Paul Negulescu (1872–1951), they are regarded as the most prolific thinkers in Romanian modern thought and founders of the Romanian modern culture. History changes which they could not foresee have left the marks upon the perception, reception and interpretation of their work and Ion Petrovici is no exception to that. In order to understand and interpret his work reflected in his writings on philosophy, logic, philosophical monographs, travel diaries, speeches and notes, biographical method, along with text analysis, hermeneutical approach and criticism have been adopted. Bridging his prolific philosophical endowment with his epoch realities remains a wish and an ideal to which this paper aims with the respect that it would offer us a much clear image of the past and would increase our wisdom as how to act upon the future. Keywords: Education, philosophy, Romanian culture.

This article discusses four Hamlet adaptations produced in twentieth-century Japan: Naoya Shiga’s ‘Claudius’s Diary’ (1912), Hideo Kobayashi’s ‘Ophelia’s Testament’ (1931), Osamu Dazai’s New Hamlet (1941) and Shohei Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary (1955). Though differently motivated, and written in different styles, they collectively make something of a tradition, each revealing a unique, unexpected interpretation of the famous tragedy. Read as a group, they thoroughly disprove the stereotypical view that Japan has generally taken a highly respectful, imitative attitude to Western culture and Shakespeare. Hamlet has certainly been revered in Japan as the epitome of Western literary culture, but these adaptations reveal complicated, ambivalent attitudes towards Shakespeare’s play: not only love and respect, but anxiety, competitiveness, resistance and criticism, all expressed alongside an opportunistic urge to appropriate the rich ‘cultural capital’ of the canonical work.

Pavle Stefanovic (1901-1985) is one of the most prominent Serbian music critics and essayists. He created extensive musicographic work, largely scattered in periodicals. A philosopher by education, he had an excellent knowledge of music and its history. His style was marked by eloquence, associativity and plasticity of expression. Between 1938 and 1940 he published eighteen music reviews in The Music Herald, the longest-running Belgrade music magazine in the interwar period (1928-1941, with interruption from 1934 to 1938). Stefanovic wrote about concerts, opera and ballet performances in Belgrade, performances by local and eminent foreign artists. His reviews include Magda Tagliaferro, Nathan Milstein, Jacques Thibaud, Enrico Mainardi, Bronis?aw Huberman, Alexander Uninsky, Alexaner Borovsky, Ignaz Friedman, Nikita Magaloff and many other eminent musicians. Th is study is devoted to the analysis of the Stefanovic?s procedure. Pavle Stefanovic was an anti-fascist and left ist. He believed that the task of a music critic was not merely to analyze and evaluate musical works and musical interpretations. He argued that the critic should engage in important social issues that concerned music and music life. That is why he wrote articles on the occasion of German artists visiting Belgrade, about the persecution of musicians of Jewish descent and the cultural situation in the Third Reich. On the other hand, Stefanovic was an aesthetic hedonist who expressed a great sense of the beauty of musical works. Th at duality - a socially engaged intellectual and a subtle ?enjoyer? of the art - remained undisturbed. In these articles he did not go into a deterministic interpretation of the structure of musical composition and the history of music. And he did not accept the larpurlartistic views.

This study aims to explore the policies of the Dutch colonial government towards people with disabilities. Nowadays, the practice of medicalization of disability remains being carried out, and it causes many losses. This paper explores the historical roots of the problem: why did disability medicalization occur and how? Historiographical studies on disability during the colonial period were still minimal. For this reason, the researcher uses historical research methods (heuristics, source criticism, and interpretation) in this article. This study found that the medicalization of the disability started in 1619 in military hospitals. It was then continued with the establishment of the first mental hospital in 1882 in Bogor. The practice of medicalization of disability carried out by the colonial authorities served as a means of social control.[Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengeksplorasi kebijakan pemerintah kolonial Belanda terhadap difabel. Dewasa ini praktik medikalisasi disabilitas masih dilakukan dan banyak menyebabkan kerugian. Penelitian menelusuri akar historis masalah tersebut: mengapa medikalisasi disabilitas terjadi dan bagaimana? Studi historiografi tentang disabilitas pada masa kolonial masih sangat terbatas. Untuk itu, peneliti menggunakan metode penelitian sejarah (heuristik, kritik sumber, dan interpretasi) dalam artikel ini. Penelitian ini menemukan bahwa medikalisasi terhadap difabel telah dilakukan sejak tahun 1619 di rumah sakit militer. Kemudian dilanjutkan dengan didirikannya rumah sakit jiwa pertama pada 1882 di Bogor. Praktik medikalisasi disabilitas dilakukan oleh penguasa saat itu berfungsi sebagai alat kontrol sosial di masyarakat.]

Penelitian ini membuktikan bahwa kajian kesusastraan dengan menggunakan new historicism mampu mengungkap pelbagai kekuatan budaya, sosial, ekonomi, dan politik yang menyetubuh dan menyelinap dalam setiap sela teks sastra yang merupakan ranah estetik (aesthetic richness). Penelitian ini mengungkapkan bahwa karya sastra tidak dapat dipisahkan dengan pelbagai konteks zaman dan praksis budaya, sosial, ekonomi, serta politik yang melingkupinya. Penelitian ini tidak sependapat dengan konsep new criticism John Crowe Ransom (The New Criticism, 1941 dan Criticism as Pure Speculation, 1971) dan William K. Wimsatt dan Monroe Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy, 1946 dan The verbal Icon, 1954) yang mengatakan bahwa karya sastra merupakan autotelic artefact. Sehingga menjadi tidak tepat ketika pemahaman terhadap sastra dikaitkan dengan pengarang, pembaca, maupun konteks di luar karya sastra. Penelitian ini mendukung konsep new historicism Stephen Greenblatt (Practicing New Historicism, 2000) yang menyatakan bahwa dunia imajinatif-estetis tidak pernah terlepas dari relasi kekuasaan dunia realitas yang termanifestasi dalam karya sastra sebagai apresiasi estetis individu dan praksis budaya, sosial, ekonomi, dan politik. Berdasarkan interpretasi kritis new historicism Greenblatt terhadap novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un diperoleh hasil penelitian berupa pemahaman karya imajinatif yang penuh dengan simbol yang lebih lengkap dan dalam (deeper understanding of value) dengan melibatkan konteks ekstrinsikalitas karya sastra di dalamnya dan novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un hadir sebagai tanggapan reflektif-imajinatif Saddam Hussein sebagai pengarangnya.[This research proves that literary studies using new historicism can reveal the various cultural, social, economic, and political forces that intercourse and sneak in every literary text: aesthetic richness. This research reveals that literary works cannot be separated from the various contexts of the era and the cultural, social, economic, and political praxis that surround them. This study disagrees with the concept of new criticism John Crowe Ransom (The New Criticism, 1941 and Criticism as Pure Speculation, 1971) and William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy, 1946 and The verbal Icon, 1954) literature is an autotelic artifact. So it is not appropriate when the understanding of literature is associated with authors, readers, and contexts outside of literary works. This research supports Stephen Greenblatt's new historicism concept (Practicing New Historicism, 2000), which states that the imaginative-aesthetic world is never separated from the power relations of the world of reality which are manifested in literature as an individual aesthetic appreciation and cultural, social, economic, and political praxis. Based on the critical interpretation of Greenblatt's new historicism of the Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal'un novel, the research results are in the form of a deeper understanding of imaginative works of symbols (deeper understanding of value) involving the context of the extrinsicality of literary works in it and the novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal. 'un appears as the reflective-imaginative response of Saddam Hussein as the author.]

A disciple of Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917), Petre Paul Negulescu, along with Constantin Radulescu-Motru (1868–1957) and Ion Petrovici (1882–1972), is regarded as being among the most prolific thinkers in Romanian modern thought and one of the founders of the modern Romanian culture. Historical changes he could never envisage have left their mark upon the perception, reception and interpretation of his work. The paper reviews the key characteristics of Petre Paul Negulescu’s work as reflected in his studies on the origin of culture, the philosophy of Renaissance and two magnificent works, The History of Contemporary Philosophy and The Destiny of Humanity. The aim is to contextualise these works within the field of philosophy in terms of their sources, conceptual approach and hermeneutics. As well as furnishing the Romanian culture with a wealth of original thought, his pertinent analysis of social, economic, cultural and political changes, and his involvement in improving the educational system through his position as Minister of Instruction, have made him worthy of criticism and an outstanding reference point in times of revival. Keywords: Education, philosophy, culture.

Serbian music criticism became a subject of professional music critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, after being developed by music amateurs throughout the whole previous century. The Serbian Literary Magazine (1901- 1914, 1920-1941), the forum of the Serbian modernist writers in the early 1900s, had a crucial role in shaping the Serbian music criticism and essayistics of the modern era. The Serbian elite musicians wrote for the SLM and therefore it reflects the most important issues of the early twentieth century Serbian music. The SLM undertook the mission of educating its readers. The music culture of the Serbian public was only recently developed. The public needed an introduction into the most important features of the European music, as well as developing its own taste in music. This paper deals with two aspects of the music criticism in the SLM, in view of its educational role: the problem of virtuosity and the method used by music critics in this magazine. The aesthetic canon of the SLM was marked by decisively negative attitude towards the virtuosity. Mainly concerned by educating the Serbian music public in the spirit of the highest music achievements in Europe, the music writers of the SLM criticized both domestic and foreign performers who favoured virtuosity over the 'essence' of music. Therefore, Niccol? Paganini, Franz Liszt, and even Peter Tchaikowsky with his Violin concerto became the subject of the magazine's criticism. However their attitude towards the interpreters with both musicality and virtuoso technique was always positive. That was evident in the writings on Jan Kubel?k. This educational mission also had its effect on the structure of critique writings in the SLM. In their wish to inform the Serbian public on the European music (which they did very professionally), the critics gave much more information on biographies, bibliographies and style of the European composers, than they valued the interpretation itself. That was by far the weakest aspect of music criticism in the SLM. Although the music criticism in the SLM was professional and analytic one, it often used the literary style and sometimes even profane expressions in describing the artistic value and performance, more than it was necessary for the genre of music criticism. The music critics of the SLM set high aesthetic standards before the Serbian music public, and therefore the virtuosity was rejected by them. At the same time, these highly professional critics did not possess a certain level of introspection that would allow them to abstain from using sometimes empty and unconvincing phrases instead of exact formulations suitable for the professional music criticism. In that respect, music critics in the SLM did not match the standards they themselves set before both the performers and the public in Serbia.

Tulisan ini bermaksud menunjukkan pemikiran dan peranan Émma Poeradiredja dalam pergerakan politik perempuan Indonesia. Émma Poeradiredja merupakan perempuan Sunda yang terlibat dalam pergerakan perempuan Indonesia sejak tahun 1920-an. Dia dikenal sebagai salah satu pendiri dan ketua Pasundan Istri, serta merupakan perempuan Sunda pertama yang terpilih sebagai anggota gemeenteraad. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode sejarah. Metode sejarah mencakup tahapan menemukan dan mengumpulkan sumber serta data (heuristic), kritik sumber, interpretasi dan historiografi. Pendekatan sejarah politik digunakan untuk mengelaborasi pemikiran-pemikiran Émma Poeradiredja. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa menurut Émma Poeradiredja, dalam kehidupan masyarakat, perempuan dapat menjalankan empat peran, yakni sebagai ibu, sebagai pemimpin dalam urusan rumah tangga, sebagai isteri, dan sebagai warga negara. Dengan demikian, pemberdayaan perempuan dilakukan dalam tiga tahap. Pertama, dalam rumah tangga; kedua, dalam kehidupan sosial ekonomi yang mana perempuan berada dalam posisi berdampingan dengan laki-laki dalam menjalankan kewajiban dalam masyarakat; ketiga, dalam politik, perempuan harus turut serta menerima kerja-kerja politik. Pemberdayaan perempuan ini dilakukan pertama-tama melalui pendidikan dan selanjutnya melalui gerakan politik. Émma menekankan bahwa dalam bidang politik ini peran perempuan sebagai warga negara yang berpartisipasi dalam kehidupan pemerintah dapat dijalankan. This article intends to show the thoughts and roles of Émma Poeradiredja in the Indonesian women's political movement. Émma Poeradiredja is a Sundanese woman who has been involved in Indonesian women's movements since the 1920s. She was known as one of the founders and chairman of the Pasundan Women, and was the first Sundanese woman to be elected as a member of the gemeenteraad. In this study historical methods are used. Historical methods include the stages of finding and collecting sources and data (heuristics), source criticism, interpretation and historiography. The approach to political history was used to elaborate on the thoughts of Émma Poeradiredja. The results of this study indicate that according to Émma Poeradiredja, in people's lives, women can carry out four roles: as mothers, as leaders in household affairs, as wives, and as citizens. Thus, women's empowerment is carried out in three stages. First, in the household; second, in socio-economic life where women are in a position side by side with men in carrying out obligations in society; third, in politics, women must participate in accepting political work. Women's empowerment was carried out first through education and then through political movements. Émma emphasized that in this political field the role of women as citizens who participate in government life can be carried out.

The article deals with the pandemic as an episode of intellectual history and a situation of reflection against the background of the “death of an intellectual”. The author proposes to question the very conditions of the possibility for philosophy’s response to the challenge of this or that current crisis in principle and the coronavirus pandemic in particular. The question is closely related to the phenomenon of the Intellectual, the crisis of which was announced by French researchers about forty years ago. Today one can talk about the simulation of its role and place in modern “reactions”, about the objective historical impossibility of reviving this figure and its inherent form of expression. The issue is considered based on the material of French intellectual history and criticism of the “media intellectual”. The starting point of the analysis is the political crisis in France in 2019, which falsely revived the forgotten structure of “intellectuals and power”. The author of the article draws attention to the similarity of the intellectual “calm” (reflexive inertia) of 1941 and 2021, suggesting to recall those forms of reflection that were involved by A. Malraux, J.-P. Sartre, J. Paulhan, M. Merleau-Ponty. The “reactions” of certain French intellectuals caused by the coronavirus crisis – E. Moren, R. Debray, J.-L. Nancy, B. Latour – reproduced in the article in the light of the interpretation of the pandemic as a “reductive situation” (M. Mamardashvily) with its inherent moralizing and neo-mania (R. Barthes). The author finds it problematic to appeal to criticism in the face of the “terror of the event” (M. Merleau-Ponty). Intellectuals themselves are a rare extinct phenomenon, which is important to consider in anticipation of their “response” in the face of the threat of a pandemic

Abstract: The author addresses the issue of Nicholai Velimirovich’s attitude towards fascism, responding to the criticism of Bishop Nicholai as a sympathizer of Adolph Hitler’s policy and the interpretation of Velimirovich’s thoughts that enabled such constructions. In the present article, special attention is paid to the public addresses of Nicholai Velimirovich during the period of the rise of the Nazi state, i.e. from 1935 to 1941. The main topic of this article is to deconstruct the great myth of Bishop Nicholai’s critics, which reads: Saint Bishop Nicholai is a fascist because he received a decoration from Hitler in 1934, and in 1935 he gave a lecture at Kolarac called “Nationalism of Saint Sava” where he praised Hitler as few people did during the life of the Reich leader, comparing him with Saint Sava, “whereby Hitler turned out to be bigger than Saint Sava.” This accusation comes from the critics of Bishop Nicholai from Peščanik, whose pamphlets are adopted and passed on by a part of the Serbian intelligentsia in which there are historians, linguists, political scientists, and even theologians. However, such constructions are possible only if we ignore the legacy of Bishop Nicholai and his thought. For instance, it is interesting that in the same year, namely in 1926, Hitler and Velimirovich published two completely opposite works — Hitler the second part of his Mein Kampf in which he revealed his racial theory to the world, and Nicholai a short article entitled “The Problem of Races,” in which he explained that the problem of race can not solve anthropologists, nor historians and psychologists, but only Christianity, urging Serbian youth not to make a value difference between races, but to consider whether a black earthen pot with honey or a white porcelain pot with vinegar is better. In his later works, there are much more references to the issues of racism, nationalism, chauvinism, etc., where he clearly holds moderated and balanced Christian worldview.

The beginning of 2006 marked two decades since the death of Stana Djuric-Klajn, the first historian of Serbian musical literature. This is the exterior motive for presenting a summary of the state and results of up-to-date musicology research into Serbian musical criticism and essay writings during the XIXth and the first half of the XXth century, alongside the many works dedicated to this branch of national musical history, recently published. In this way the reader is given a detailed background of these studies ? mainly the authors' names, books, studies, articles, as well as the problems of this branch of Serbian musicology. The first research is associated with the early years of the XXth century, that is, to the work of bibliography. The pioneer of Serbian ethnomusicology, Vladimir R. Djordjevic composed An Essay of the Serbian Musical Bibliography until 1914, noting selected XIXth century examples of Serbian literature on music. Bibliographic research was continued by various institutions and experts during the second half of the XXth century: in Zagreb (today Republic of Croatia); the Yugoslav Institute for Lexicography, Novi Sad (Matica srpska); and Belgrade (Institute for Literature and Art, Slobodan Turlakov, Ljubica Djordjevic, Stanisa Vojinovic etc). In spite of the efforts of these institutions and individuals, a complete analytic bibliography of music in Serbian print of the last two centuries has unfortunately still not been made. The most important contributions to historical research, interpretation and validation of Serbian musical criticism and essay writings were given by Stana Djuric-Klajn, Dr Roksanda Pejovic and Dr Slobodan Turlakov. Professor Stana Djuric-Klajn was the first Serbian musicologist to work in this field of Serbian music history. She wrote a significant number of studies and articles dedicated to Serbian musical writers and published their selected readings. Prof. Klajn is the author and editor of the first and only anthology of Serbian musical essay writings. Her student Roksanda Pejovic published two books (along with numerous other factually abundant contributions), where she synthetically presented the history of Serbian criticism and essay writings from 1825 to 1941. Slobodan Turlakov, an expert in Serbian criticism between the World Wars, meritorious researcher and original interpreter, especially examined the reception of music of great European composers (W. A. Mozart, L. v. Beethoven, F. Chopin, G. Verdi, G. Puccini etc) by Serbian musical critics. Serbian musical criticism and essay writings were also the focus of attention of many other writers. The work quotes comments and additions of other musicologists, but also historians of theatre, literature and art philosophers, aestheticians, sociologists, all members of different generations, who worked or still work on the history of the Serbian musical criticism and essay writings. The closing section of the text suggests directions for future research. Firstly, it is necessary to begin integral bibliographical research of texts about music published in our press during the cited period. That is a project of capital significance for national science and culture; realization needs adequate funding, the involvement of many academic experts, and time. Work on bibliography will also enable the collection and publication of sources: books and articles by Serbian music writers who worked before 1945. A separate problem is education of scholars. To study musical literature, a musicologist needs to be knowledgeable about the history of Serbian literature, aesthetic theory, and theatre, national social, political and cultural history, and methodology of literary study. That is why facilities for postgraduate and doctorial studies in musicology are necessary at the Faculties of Philology and Philosophy.

This article considers an important source on the evolution of Russian historical science. These are four letters written in 1926–1928 by the leading historian I.M. Grevs (1860–1941) to his colleague S.I. Archangelsky (1882–1958), a future corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Unfortunately, the response letters of S.I. Arkhangelsky have been lost. The letters under study focus on two main problems. I.M. Grevs unsuccessfully helped S.I. Arkhangelsky to publish the historical source he had translated – “The Edict on Maximum Prices” of Emperor Diocletian. In this connection, the problems of scientific formation and ideas of S.I. Arkhangelsky, the difficulties faced by the USSR historians of the 1920s who wanted to publish their scientific works, and the scholarly activity of I.M. Grevs in the Soviet period are considered. S.I. Arkhangelsky and I.M. Grevs adhered to different directions in interpreting world economic history – Eduard Meyer and Karl Bücher, respectively. S.I. Arkhangelsky refused to criticize I.M. Grevs, the reasons for which are discussed here. Another chief point of interest in the letters is the problems of local history studies. Based on the analysis of the exchange of views, new interpretations of the facts of I.M. Grevs’s biography – his travels along the Volga River, meetings with the figures of the Nizhny Novgorod Scientific Society for the Study of Local History – are offered. These and other issues are presented in the biographical context of communication ties between both the historians. The article is accompanied by the full texts of the letters and commentaries

El estreno de Les Contes d’Hoffmann, ópera de Jacques Offenbach, fue central para la difusión de la obra literaria de Hoffmann en México. A partir de la interpretación de las notas, críticas y anuncios aparecidos en la prensa se ha reconstruido el proceso de recepción de esta obra; un ejemplo ilustrativo de la forma en la que esta clase de espectáculos llegó a formar parte del gusto del público y un fenómeno que permite entender cómo se leyó la obra del alemán y dar cuenta del proceso de asimilación de su obra en México.The premiere of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach’s opera, was central for the dissemination of Hoffmann’s literary work in Mexico. The reception of this work has been reconstructed from the interpretation of the notes, criticisms and announcements appeared in the press. This process is an illustrative example of the way in which this kind of shows became part of the public’s taste; also a phenomenon that allows us to understand how the work of the German was read and its assimilation in Mexico.

In this forum onNeighborsby Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to readingNeighborsthat links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate onNeighborsin Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility ofNeighborsis low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some ofthecauses Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross'sNeighborshas created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

In this forum onNeighborsby Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to readingNeighborsthat links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate onNeighborsin Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility ofNeighborsis low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some ofthecauses Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross'sNeighborshas created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

In this forum onNeighborsby Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to readingNeighborsthat links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate onNeighborsin Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility ofNeighborsis low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some ofthecauses Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross'sNeighborshas created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

»At tale med de døde ...« Om sækularisering og hermeneutik i Kaj Thanings forfatterskab. Bibliografi over Kaj Thanings forfatterskab[»Talking with the dead« - On secularisation and hermeneutics in the writings of Kaj Thaning]By Mikkel Crone NielsenKaj Thaning’s thesis that Gr.’s visits to England 1829-31 led to his »conversion to life« and emergence as advocate of ‘secularisation’ has proved both influential and controversial, as has his methodological approach to the interpretation of Gr.’s writings with its underpinning thesis that Gr.’s entire literary production is determined by the one basic problem: how the relationship between human life and Christianity is to be understood.Raised in a Grundtvigian and clerical family, Thaning overtly personalized the theological issues that involved him. From 1922 onwards he was an activist in the Danish student-Christian association (Danmarks kristelige Studenterforbund), which was to voice through the periodical Tidehvery a radical criticism of the inward-turned and exclusive character of contemporary Danish congregational life, which judgmentally isolated itself from those powerful secular movements going on within national life as a whole. He held that it was not the true nature of the gospel, and therefore not the proper business of the Church, to exercise a judgmental power over the secular world.Rather, the congregation instead of clinging to ‘churchliness’ should provide an open place among the people where the gospel, which is for all the people, was proclaimed. The Church must be willing to risk a weakening of Christianity’s spiritual influence in this desirable process of ‘secularisation’.Believing that such ‘secularisation’ was entirely within the spirit of Gr. himself, contrary to the received ‘myth’ of Gr., Thaning proposes (1941) to »work with Gr. in his workshop« - to follow Gr. through his successive writings, as he hammered out his beliefs. Thus he analyses Gr.’s confrontation with himself (opgør med sig selv) in the wake of the England-visits, the outcome of which was Gr.’s rejection of German idealism in favour of an antiidealistic, common-sense thinking which Thaning calls ‘realism’. In the introduction to his Nordic Mythology (1832), Gr. moves towards prioritizing the human experiencing of existence in this world, here and now, over the cultivation of an empowered Christian religion, and towards seeing Christianity as endorsing rather than opposing this existential engagement with the life given in creation and with the moment.Charged by his critics with applying modem existentialist theological concepts alien to Gr., Thaning defends the concept ‘secularisation’ which he has adopted from Friedrich Gogarten - though he can be shown to have trodden his own independent path, especially in that, where Gogarten derives his justification from the Christian faith itself, Thaning derives his from a recognition of the innate worth of created human life without necessary reference to the Christian religion. The Christian gospel disavows any apologetic intention or any imposition of authority over its adherents, and God’s word must wander the world homeless. Redemption is to be understood in terms of the freeing of created human life from its shackles - the very shackles which gnosticism would lay upon human beings, namely utter disavowal and rejection of the world and the human experiencing of it. The critique of religion informing Thaning’s writings is primarily directed against such gnosticism - which he calls ‘pilgrim-Christianity’ (pilgrimskristendom) - as it thrives in latter-day Lutherdom. Gr. is himself aware of his role as a father of such ‘secularisation’ and Thaning, following him, is prepared to find the starting-point for his own ‘secularisation-theology’ even in ‘heathen’, non-Christian human life, because this is what life demands.Central to Thaning’s interpretative method is the assumption that historical distance between an author and a commentator can be bridged when the issue is one of common human existential experiencing. With Rudolf Bultmann (and behind him, Heidegger), Thaning accepts that the neutrality of a systematic, objective analysis is thus relinquished in favour of an existential interest in the shared situation addressed. The exegete meets the text with his own premises in mind, expecting that the text will then cast new light upon them. Thus a dialogue is validated; but subjective arbitrariness in the exegete is constrained by adherence to »a formal anthropology and an existential analysis«.Thaning’s understanding of that life given to human beings in creation is greatly indebted to the religious-historical writings of Vilhelm Grønbech, who in particular rejects the distinctively European concept of human life as a pilgrimage through an imperfect world to the perfection of the heavenly homeland, along with its resultant dualistic perception of a true, spiritual self engaged in a struggle with the natural self. Herein, Thaning perceives not just a European but a universal and historical conflict between religion and human life, which stance furnishes him, in practice, with a theological hermeneutic.Thus Thaning engaged in a generational confrontation with a certain traditional Grundtvigian conceptualisation of the Christian congregation. Though he made little overt declaration of his hermeneutical method, he worked with discernible controlling concepts and brought to the task an enormous knowledge of Gr.’s writings. Accordingly he made an unparalleled impact upon Gr. studies and his work stands as an indispensable reference-point in Gr. research.

During most of the 19th century, an important body of literary works appeared outside of Cuba criticizing the institution of slavery on the island, the system’s inherent violence, its sexual practices, and its repercussions on the white population. Among the most famous works published at the time were Sab (1841), by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Cecilia Valdés ([1839] 1882), by Cirilo Villaverde. In this essay, I would like to explore a lesser known novel that was published by a Cuban writer of the following generation—El negro Francisco (1875), by Antonio Zambrana y Vazquez—in order to understand the principal role of the legal and anthropological archives in the novel, as well as the author’s use of newspaper reports and advertisements. How are these texts and styles intertwined in the novel to criticize institutional slavery on the Island? How does the authorial voice appear in the novel when we consider a tradition present since the beginning of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas—which reached the 20th century with novels such as Los pasos perdidos (1958) by Alejo Carpentier? I would base my arguments on Roberto González Echevarría’s interpretation of Latin American novel in Mito y Archivo, una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana, in which he employs basic concepts of US critical anthropology in order to re-interpret various aspects of 19th century Latin American history.

This study sheds new light on the role of city whether real or fictional in modern novel as one of the signs of man’s cultural fate. For the same reason, city is not a mere physical place, but a spatial concept. Not only has city become inseparable from man’s personal and national destiny but also one’s life continues to unfold on city’s streets. James Joyce’s (1882-1941) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (A Portrait, 2000) deals with Joyce’s home, Dublin. Joyce aims to universalize and simultaneously eternalize his home through his art. Accordingly, the reader of his text is to decipher the cultural signs of Dublin to get into it. As Michael Ryan (1946-) refers to culture as the total way of life that it has multiple meanings; to understand the culture of a city, to read its meaning, one has to decipher it. Semiology, based on Roland Barthes (1915-1980), is the science of signs whose emphasis is on the interpretation of codes, signs and symbols in a particular culture. Thus, the culture of Dubliners portrayed in A Portrait can be decoded through semiology by the readers. Stephen Dedalus is one who deciphers the cultural signs such as paralysis, religion, prostitution and confession through his walking in Dublin. He considers them as nets of Dublin that he tries to escape from them.

This article is going to study the ecocritical conception in Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) novel, To the Lighthouse (TL) (1927). This is an ecocritical reading which uses Lawrence Buell (1939- ) and Derek Wall’s (1965- ) ideas of ecocriticism. Lawrence Buell defined eco-criticism as the study of the relationships between literature and environment in an environmentalist praxis or as a critical insurgency mainly focused on the issue rather than methodology like what cultural studies of identity and body have done. Writers create their works under the influence of environment and nature and a literary work is not created void of nature. Literary works beyond of concepts and contents which are addressed by writers indicate the interaction of human and nature. Wall believes that ecology in particular and the environmental sciences in general have demonstrated how closely one’s species is connected to all other in a web or net of life connections. To the Lighthouse (TL) takes place in a summerhouse near the sea and its main goal is traveling to the Lighthouse amid the sea. There are many natural parts and nature’s elements which are studied in detail to reveal the relation of ecocriticism and literature. This article studies the close relation of man and nature and notes that there is an intimate relation between them. There is a bilateral relation between nature and man; they affect each other in several ways. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a good context to portray ecocriticism and green cultural studies. Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life from the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse.

Fantastic Realism, rising from the surrealism movement, began with the Vienna Fantastic Realism school, founded in 1945 by Rudolf Hausner, Ernst Fuchs, Wolfgang Hutter, Anton Lehmden and Arik Brauer after World War II. Famous critic Prof. Johann Muschik named this core group "Fantastic Realists" due to the religious, mysterious subjects and symbolist approaches, that they dealt with in their works. In this research, the works of Ernst Fuchs (1930-2015), one of the world's leading representative of the fantastic realist art movement, "The Cross (1950)" and the "Human, Horse, Eagle Trio (1991)" by Erol Deneç (1941-…) are analyzed by using E. B. Feldmann’s "investigative art criticism" method, which is included in the discipline-based art education. E. B. Feldmann's method of "investigative art criticism"; consists of description, analysis, interpretation and judgment sub-titles. After examining the works independently, they were compared in terms of their similarities and differences. Despite the subject and technical richness of fantastic realism, a comparative study of the works of two artists from different lives and cultures produced with similar characteristics emphasizes the importance of the study, in this aspect it is thought that it will contribute to art education and shed light on researchers interested in the field. Keywords: Fantastic Realism, Ernst Fuchs, Erol Deneç, investigative art criticism

The article is devoted to the analysis of the creative activity of Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), the “literary source” of the time of the “spiritual turning point” (N. Berdyaev). It is pointed out that Merezhkovsky, being one of the initiators and theorists of Russian symbolism and a well-known representative of the Russian religious renaissance, did not want to limit himself to either “symbolist” or national frameworks, as he always “claimed more: leadership, literary and artistic, religious and philosophical, social and political” (M. Vish­nyak). This kind of attitude to creative work initially assumed an intercultural approach, which obviously implied a polylogue of religion, culture and philosophy. Beginning with the justification of a “new direction” in art – symbolism, or “subjective-artistic criticism” regarded as a genuine method of philosophizing and searching for the religious meaning of culture, Me­rezh­kovsky widely developed in his works the themes of the conjunction of culture and revolution, the contradictions of culture and civilization, “religious community”, the need for re­li­gious, moral and cultural revival of society by forming the Universal Church. These and other themes were immediately included by him in a wide cultural and historical-philo­so­phical contexts, which enabled Merezhkovsky to make a deeper analysis and provide a more interesting interpretation. It is suggested that intercultural philosophical position of Merezhkovsky was formed as a result of his recognition of uniqueness and importance of each philosophical system and tradition. A conclusion is made that this helped the Russian thinker to reach an essentially new level of philosophical dialogism, which can be regarded as an example of intercultural polylogue.

A análise literária, crítica ou os estudos literários é um campo altamente valorizado, com revistas dedicadas e pesquisas, na maioria das vezes, dentro do escopo das humanidades. A analítica textual é um processo auxilado por computador de extração de conhecimento a partir de dados textuais. Neste artigo, descrevemos um modelo simples e genérico de análise literária assistida pela analítica textual. O método utiliza medidas estatísticas de: 1) símbolo e tamanho das frases; e 2) padronização de rede de palavras. Através da análise das componentes principais (PCA), os textos, de escolha do crítico, são observados em relação aos de Shakespeare e aos da Bíblia, tidos como referências máximas da língua inglesa. O modelo é exemplificadocom a análise dos trabalhos de James Joyce (1882-1941), um dos mais importantes escritores do século XX. Nós discutimos a consistência dessa abordagem, as razões pelas quaisevitamos outras técnicas (por exemplo, etiquetação morfossintática), potenciais adaptações e melhoras do modelo proposto, e até algumas questões levantadas sobre a obra de James Joyce, a serem investigadas como contribuições para a crítica, história e estética literária.

Should ethical standards be enforced on performers or their critics? Asking such a question may stimulate memories of personal or professional censorship and fearful imaginings of oppressive, fascist regimes. Indeed, many of us might immediately respond by arguing that personal expression should never be inhibited since a person's right to free expression is an essential tenet of a democratic society. Yet this question raises issues that are not easily dismissed and it may remind us that it is equally important to remember that a number of responsibilities and repercussions can accompany the public expression of personal experiences and opinions. A short time ago, I was told that this journal had to grapple with similar considerations when a performer decided to pursue legal action after reading a critical account of his/her performance in M/C Reviews. When I was first asked to comment on this situation, I initially found myself considering familiar arguments that defend the right to free speech. However, upon reflection, I think there is more to be said about the long term causes and effects of such an action and I wish to explore how this incident illustrates the friction that can be generated when traditional and emergent value systems are adopted indiscriminately. To me, the dispute between the performer and M/C illustrates what seems to be a growing confusion surrounding interpretations of what is right (what is legal or permissible?), what is true (whose opinion?), and what is good (the performance or an audience's response?). Although definitions of what is right, true, and good have always had to negotiate shifting boundaries, the increasingly blurry usages of these terms are reflecting a waxing disregard for how these distinctions impact upon our judgements. Jon McKenzie has offered some explanation of this new social attitude in his recently published text Perform or Else. Throughout this text, he argues that 'performance' is now widely recognised in commercial industries as a conceptual tool for assessing human and technological standards and that this concept is fast becoming the dominant social model of evaluation. According to McKenzie, traditional philosophical distinctions are becoming less influential, while performance 'effectiveness' and 'efficiency' are increasingly being viewed as the new measurements of what is right, true, and good (178-79). McKenzie's assessment of the social demand to perform echoes the comments of other twentieth-century theorists who have warned us of the growing objectification and alienation of human labour. However, his message is timely and provocative and it offers some explanation of the confusion surrounding critical appraisals of performances and performer's experiences. There is certainly evidence of a growing demand for efficient and effective appraisal of all human performance as individuals, companies, and governments produce reports, conduct market research, and continue to try and predict what results will be produced before any investment of personal or financial energy is committed. Yet as our society continues to develop a dependency on critical opinion, it unfortunately seems to be distancing audiences and performers, devaluing personal interpretations, and encouraging fewer exchanges between groups with varying values. Such distinctive separations can, in turn, isolate social groups and identities and invite exclusivity and intolerance for other evaluations. This kind of alienation seems to have governed the dispute between the performer and the critic from M/C. Although these trends may have made it socially 'permissible' to pursue legal action against critics, performers, or anyone else who expresses negative or unpalatable opinions, I think it is essential that we continue to ask whether is it right, or good to do so. Is it right or good to penalise someone for expressing a personal opinion? Is it right or good to object to an evaluation when someone offers a performance for appraisal? These are, of course, ethical questions that can only be hinted at here. However, I believe it is important to remember that live performing art forms can physically bring together varying social demographics and that they are therefore in a unique position to provide conceptual bridges between social groups with differing opinions. I wish to emphasise this fact and to ask readers to consider whether they wish opinions to become more and more polarised, or whether they wish to finds ways to enable us to appreciate and evaluate the diverse interpretations of performances more harmoniously. It is true that the 'objective' certainties associated with the basic principles of aesthetic appreciation are sagging under the weight of arguments from critical theory and postmodernism. It may also be true that the only certainty that will soon enjoy popular appeal may be one that suggests that pragmatic considerations should govern what we view as right, true, and good. All of these developments introduce challenges that need to be addressed. However, I do not believe they exclude the possibility that a shared theoretical perspective can be developed that can allow us to build bridges of understanding between varying opinions and social demands. Philosophers and social theorists such as Michael Stocker, Alessandro Ferrara, and Linda Zagzebski all agree that the development of such a perspective is possible. They have also suggested that finding this shared view may require us to embrace a more malleable and less certain way of knowing what is good about our opinions. Instead, they encourage individuals to reinvestigate ancient views of 'wisdom' and 'understanding' and to review personal emotional responses to what we believe is true and good. I believe such advice is valuable and that arguments like these offer theoretical tools for those involved in the criticism and practice of the performing arts still wanting to find bridges between disparate views. While 'critical' reviews can often alienate performers from those who are evaluating their performance, if we are to initiate understanding and tolerance, and celebrate and value difference, the beliefs and emotional responses that accompany and drive each of our opinions do require further reflection, articulation, and discussion. Some theatre critics already appear to recognise how important emotional responses are to the expression and reworking of personal and traditional beliefs. For example, some have suggested that a theatre performance can "make you stop breathing" (Christofis) or be "breathtaking" (McCallum) or "poignant and powerful" (Lambert). Other critics have suggested that performances contain "images of emotional power" (Kelly) with which an "audience can empathise, [and] sympathise" because the subject is close to their hearts" (Hinde). As these kinds of responses clearly embellish and entwine the experiences of performers and critics, perhaps we can eventually discover how powerful, passionate, and, sometimes, visceral experiences contribute benefits that can be objectively defined and defended. Alternatively, perhaps the inclusion of negative emotional responses in performances and critical reviews can provide some impetus for personal and professional development. Many might dismiss emotional responses as theoretical tools because individuals' emotional experiences reveal different qualities and/or intensities and seem to contain no shared causal indicator that can be objectively defined and graded. Yet if these kinds of experiences are really so subjective, so capricious and diverse, why do some theatre reviewers continue to describe and record them? If such reactions are peculiar to each individual and there is no guarantee that they can be replicated in other individuals, personal views of emotional and physical responses would only be viewed as useless, superfluous information. However, it seems that critics sharing their experiences are suggesting that something in the performance is powerful enough to evoke similar emotions in others. Furthermore, they seem to be indicating that these experiences are important and worth pursuing. So, instead of viewing powerful emotional responses as completely subjective, perhaps it is more accurate and fruitful to recognise how they signal the presence of beliefs and values that are formed inter-subjectively. A purely subjective appraisal of a performance would require a subject that is capable of receiving, processing and evaluating impressions in social isolation. A number of influential theorists like Bourdieu, Foucault, and Eagleton have argued that such a view is misleading since 'individuals' are developed from class and power relations and subjects cannot extricate themselves from social discourses of some kind. As a result of adopting perspectives like these, it is plausible to suggest that audiences may value or dismiss the ideas and experiences of the person recommending the performance as well as ideas about the performance itself. Furthermore, a person's experiences or ideas may seem to relate to our own, or be regarded as more valuable or significant than our own, and this may affect the way we assess any descriptions provided by others. Since emotional responses experienced by others can sometimes influence our own affective states, it seems theatres, critics, and performers that establish public social identities do need to become aware of how these experiences are stimulated. Some theatre scholars have suggested that analyses of the emotive element of audience reception must record and defend emotional responses according to an objective set of logical criteria that can be judged relevant by experts (Martin and Sauter 34; de Toro 120). However, the logical criteria that many performance scholars suggest should determine such evaluations are often purely empirical and I would suggest that the study of emotions and feelings must also incorporate the often forgotten epistemic values of personal understanding and wisdom. If these approaches are explored and integrated, I believe critics and performers may be reconciled through the recognition that personal opinions can change and that our responses should be discussed and defended rather than feared, attacked, or penalised. References Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Christofis, Lee. "Colour Amid Darkest Drama." Rev. of The Funniest Man in the World, by Daniel Keene. Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, Grant Street Theatre, Melbourne. The Australian. May 2000: F18 de Toro, Fernando. Theatre Semiotics: Text and Staging in Modern Theatre. Trans. John Lewis. Ed. Carole Hubbard. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Ferrara, Alessandro. Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1998. Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Aesthetics: The Big Questions. Ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 270-87. Hinde, Suellen. "Play Oh So True." Rev. of Choking in the Comfort Zone, by Stephen Carleton. Darwin Theatre Company, Brown's Mart, Darwin. Northern Territory News 15 Sep. 2000: W26. Kelly, Veronica. "Pretty, But as Deep as a Shallow Puddle." Rev. of The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder. Queensland Theatre Company, Optus Playhouse, Brisbane. The Australian 21 Feb. 2000: F18. Lambert, Catherine. "Revival of a Classic." Rev. of Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, Melbourne Theatre Company, Fairfax Theatre, Melbourne. Sunday Herald Sun, 23 July 2000: LH87. Martin, Jacqueline, and Willmar Sauter. Understanding Theatre. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1995. McCallum, John. "Don't Keep it Quiet." Rev. of Hollow Ground, by Nick Parsons. The NIDA Company, Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney. The Australian 27 Mar. 2000: F15. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001. Stocker, Michael. Valuing Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kehoul, Gillian. "Performing Feeling Without Fear" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/perform.php>. Chicago Style Kehoul, Gillian, "Performing Feeling Without Fear" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/perform.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Kehoul, Gillian. (2002) Performing Feeling Without Fear. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/perform.php> ([your date of access]).

Film adaptation is an ambiguous term, both semantically and conceptually. Among its multiple connotations, the word “adaptation” may signify an artistic composition that has been recast in a new form, an alteration in the structure or function of an organism to make it better fitted for survival, or a modification in individual or social activity in adjustment to social surroundings. What all these definitions have in common is a tacitly implied hierarchy and valorisation: they presume the existence of an origin to which the recast work of art is indebted, or of biological or societal constraints to which the individual should conform in order to survive. The bias implied in the very connotations of the word has affected the theory and study of film adaptation. This bias is most noticeably reflected in the criterion of fidelity, which has been the major standard for evaluating film adaptations ever since George Bluestone’s 1957 pivotal Novels into Films. “Fidelity criticism,” observes McFarlane, “depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film-maker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (7). But such an approach, Leitch argues, is rooted in several unacknowledged but entrenched misconceptions. It privileges literature over film, casts a false aura of originality on the precursor text, and ignores the fact that all texts, whether literary or cinematic, are essentially intertexts. As Kristeva, along with other poststructuralist theorists, has taught us, any text is an amalgam of others, a part of a larger fabric of cultural discourse (64-91). “A text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, writes Barthes in 1977 (146), and 15 years later film theoretician Robert Stam elaborates: “The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through evershifting grids of interpretation” (57). The poststructuralists’ view of texts draws on the structuralists’ view of language, which is conceived as a system that pre-exists the individual speaker and determines subjectivity. These assumptions counter the Romantic ideology of individualism, with its associated concepts of authorial originality and a text’s single, unified meaning, based on the author’s intention. “It is language which speaks, not the author,” declares Barthes, “to write is to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not me” (143). In consequence, the fidelity criterion of film adaptation may be regarded as an outdated vestige of the Romantic world-view. If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid. Film adaptation should rather be perceived as an intertextual practice, contributing to a dynamic interpretive exchange between the literary and cinematic texts, an exchange in which each text can be enriched, modified or subverted. The relationship between Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2001) is a case in point. Here there was no source text, as the writing of the story did not precede the making of the film. The two processes were concurrent, and were triggered by the same basic idea, which Jonathan discussed with his brother during a road trip from Chicago to LA. Christopher developed the idea into a film and Jonathan turned it into a short story; he also collaborated in the film script. Moreover, Jonathan designed otnemem> (memento in reverse), the official Website, which contextualises the film’s fictional world, while increasing its ambiguity. What was adapted here was an idea, and each text explores in different ways the narrative, ontological and epistemological implications of that idea. The story, the film and the Website produce a multi-layered intertextual fabric, in which each thread potentially unravels the narrative possibilities suggested by the other threads. Intertextuality functions to increase ambiguity, and is therefore thematically relevant, for “Memento Mori”, Memento and otnemem> are three fragmented texts in search of a coherent narrative. The concept of narrative may arguably be one of the most overused and under-defined terms in academic discourse. In the context of the present paper, the most productive approach is that of Wilkens, Hughes, Wildemuth and Marchionini, who define narrative as a chain of events related by cause and effect, occurring in time and space, and involving agency and intention. In fiction or in film, intention is usually associated with human agents, who can be either the characters or the narrator. It is these agents who move along the chain of causes and effects, so that cause-effect and agency work together to make the narrative. This narrative paradigm underpins mainstream Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960. In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell writes: The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. … The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem, and a clear achievement, or non achievement, of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character … . In classical fabula construction, causality is the prime unifying principle. (157) The large body of films flourishing in America between the years 1941 and 1958 collectively dubbed film noir subvert this narrative formula, but only partially. As accurately observed by Telotte, the devices of flashback and voice-over associated with the genre implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth and foregrounds the rift between reality and perception (3, 20). Yet in spite of the narrative experimentation that characterises the genre, the viewer of a classical film noir film can still figure out what happened in the fictional world and why, and can still reconstruct the story line according to sequential and causal schemata. This does not hold true for the intertextual composite consisting of Memento, “Memento Mori” and otnemem>. The basic idea that generated the project was that of a self-appointed detective who obsessively investigates and seeks to revenge his wife’s rape and murder, while suffering from a total loss of short term memory. The loss of memory precludes learning and the acquisition of knowledge, so the protagonist uses scribbled notes, Polaroid photos and information tattooed onto his skin, in an effort to reconstruct his fragmented reality into a coherent and meaningful narrative. Narrativity is visually foregrounded: the protagonist reads his body to make sense of his predicament. To recap, the narrative paradigm relies on a triad of terms: connectedness (a chain of events), causality, and intentionality. The basic situation in Memento and “Memento Mori”, which involves a rupture in the protagonist’s/narrator’s psychological time, entails a breakdown of all three pre-requisites of narrativity. Since the protagonists of both story and film are condemned, by their memory deficiency, to living in an eternal present, they are unable to experience the continuity of time and the connectedness of events. The disruption of temporality inevitably entails the breakdown of causality: the central character’s inability to determine the proper sequence of events prevents him from being able to distinguish between cause and effect. Finally, the notion of agency is also problematised, because agency implies the existence of a stable, identifiable subject, and identity is contingent on the subject’s uninterrupted continuity across time and change. The subversive potential of the basic narrative situation is heightened by the fact that both Memento and “Memento Mori” are focalised through the consciousness and perception of the main character. This means that the story, as well as the film, is conveyed from the point of view of a narrator who is constitutionally unable to experience his life as a narrative. This conundrum is addressed differently in the story and in the film, both thematically and formally. “Memento Mori” presents, in a way, the backdrop to Memento. It focuses on the figure of Earl, a brain damaged protagonist suffering from anterograde amnesia, who is staying in a blank, anonymous room, that we assume to be a part of a mental institution. We also assume that Earl’s brain damage results from a blow to the head that he received while witnessing the rape and murder of his wife. Earl is bent on avenging his wife’s death. To remind himself to do so, he writes messages to himself, which he affixes on the walls of his room. Leonard Shelby is Memento’s cinematic version of Earl. By Leonard’s own account, he has an inability to form memories. This, he claims, is the result of neurological damage sustained during an attack on him and his wife, an attack in which his wife was raped and killed. To be able to pursue his wife’s killers, he has recourse to various complex and bizarre devices—Polaroid photos, a quasi-police file, a wall chart, and inscriptions tattooed onto his skin—in order to replace his memory. Hampered by his affliction, Leonard trawls the motels and bars of Southern California in an effort to gather evidence against the killer he believes to be named “John G.” Leonard’s faulty memory is deviously manipulated by various people he encounters, of whom the most crucial are a bartender called Natalie and an undercover cop named Teddy, both involved in a lucrative drug deal. So far for a straightforward account of the short story and the film. But there is nothing straightforward about either Memento or “Memento Mori”. The basic narrative premise, consisting of a protagonist/narrator suffering from a severe memory deficit, is a condition entailing far-reaching psychological and philosophical implications. In the following discussion, I would like to focus on these two implications and to tie them in to the notions of narrativity, intertextuality, and eventually, adaptation. The first implication of memory loss is the dissolution of identity. Our sense of identity is contingent on our ability to construct an uninterrupted personal narrative, a narrative in which the present self is continuous with the past self. In Oneself as Another, his philosophical treatise on the concept of selfhood, Paul Ricoeur queries: “do we not consider human lives to be more readable when they have been interpreted in terms of the stories that people tell about them?” He concludes by observing that “interpretation of the self … finds in narrative, among others signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation” (ft. 114). Ricoeur further suggests that the sense of selfhood is contingent on four attributes: numerical identity, qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across time and change, and finally, permanence in time that defines sameness. The loss of memory subverts the last two attributes of personal identity, the sense of continuity and permanence over time, and thereby also ruptures the first two. In “Memento Mori” and Memento, the disintegration of identity is formally rendered through the fragmentation of the literary and cinematic narratives, respectively. In Jonathan Nolan’s short story, traditional linear narrative is disrupted by shifts in point of view and by graphic differences in the shape of the print on the page. “Memento Mori” is alternately narrated in the first and in the third person. The first person segments, which constitute the present of the story, are written by Earl to himself. As his memory span is ten-minute long, his existence consists of “just the same ten minutes, over and over again” (Nolan, 187). Fully aware of the impending fading away of memory, Earl’s present-version self leaves notes to his future-version self, in an effort to situate him in time and space and to motivate him to the final action of revenge. The literary device of alternating points of view formally subverts the notion of identity as a stable unity. Paradoxically, rather than setting him apart from the rest of us, Earl’s brain damage foregrounds his similarity. “Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions,” observes Earl, comforting his future self by affirming his basic humanity, “Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing” (Nolan, 189). His observation echoes Beckett’s description of the individual as “the seat of a constant process of decantation … to the vessel containing the fluid of past time” (Beckett, 4-5). Identity, suggests Jonathan Nolan, following Beckett, among other things, is a theoretical construct. Human beings are works in progress, existing in a state of constant flux. We are all fragmented beings—the ten-minute man is only more so. A second strategy employed by Jonathan to convey the discontinuity of the self is the creation of visual graphic disunity. As noted by Yellowlees Douglas, among others, the static, fixed nature of the printed page and its austere linearity make it ideal for the representation of our mental construct of narrative. The text of “Memento Mori” appears on the page in three different font types: the first person segments, Earl’s admonitions to himself, appear in italics; the third person segments are written in regular type; and the notes and signs are capitalised. Christopher Nolan obviously has recourse to different strategies to reach the same ends. His principal technique, and the film’s most striking aspect, is its reversed time sequence. The film begins with a crude Polaroid flash photograph of a man’s body lying on a decaying wooden floor. The image in the photo gradually fades, until the camera sucks the picture up. The photograph presents the last chronological event; the film then skips backwards in ten-minute increments, mirroring the protagonist’s memory span. But the film’s time sequence is not simply a reversed linear structure. It is a triple-decker narrative, mirroring the three-part organisation of the story. In the opening scene, one comes to realise that the film-spool is running backwards. After several minutes the film suddenly reverses and runs forward for a few seconds. Then there is a sudden cut to a different scene, in black and white, where the protagonist (who we have just learned is called Leonard) begins to talk, out of the blue, about his confusion. Soon the film switches to a color scene, again unconnected, in which the “action” of the film begins. In the black and white scenes, which from then on are interspersed with the main action, Leonard attempts to understand what is happening to him and to explain (to an unseen listener) the nature of his condition. The “main action” of the film follows a double temporal structure: while each scene, as a unit of action, runs normally forward, each scene is triggered by the following, rather than by the preceding scene, so that we are witnessing a story whose main action goes back in time as the film progresses (Hutchinson and Read, 79). A third narrative thread, interspersed with the other two, is a story that functions as a foil to the film’s main action. It is the story of Sammy Jankis: one of the cases that Leonard worked on in his past career as an insurance investigator. Sammy was apparently suffering from anterograde amnesia, the same condition that Leonard is suffering from now. Sammy’s wife filed an insurance claim on his behalf, a claim that Leonard rejected on the grounds that Sammy’s condition was merely psychosomatic. Hoping to confirm Leonard’s diagnosis, Sammy’s diabetic wife puts her husband to the test. He fails the test as he tenderly administers multiple insulin injections to her, thereby causing her death. As Leonard’s beloved wife also suffered from diabetes, and as Teddy (the undercover cop) eventually tells Leonard that Sammy never had a wife, the Sammy Jankis parable functions as a mise en abyme, which can either corroborate or subvert the narrative that Leonard is attempting to construct of his own life. Sammy may be seen as Leonard’s symbolic double in that his form of amnesia foreshadows the condition with which Leonard will eventually be afflicted. This interpretation corroborates Leonard’s personal narrative of his memory loss, while tainting him with the blame for the death of Sammy’s wife. But the camera also suggests a more unsettling possibility—Leonard may ultimately be responsible for the death of his own wife. The scene in which Sammy, condemned by his amnesia, administers to his wife a repeated and fatal shot of insulin, is briefly followed by a scene of Leonard pinching his own wife’s thigh before her insulin shot, a scene recurring in the film like a leitmotif. The juxtaposition of the two scenes suggests that it is Leonard who, mistakenly or deliberately, has killed his wife, and that ever since he has been projecting his guilt onto others: the innocent victims of his trail of revenge. In this ironic interpretive twist, it is Leonard, rather than Sammy, who has been faking his amnesia. The parable of Sammy Jankis highlights another central concern of Memento and “Memento Mori”: the precarious nature of truth. This is the second psychological and philosophical implication of what Leonard persistently calls his “condition”, namely his loss of memory. The question explicitly raised in the film is whether memory records or creates, if it retains the lived life or reshapes it into a narrative that will confer on it unity and meaning. The answer is metaphorically suggested by the recurring shots of a mirror, which Leonard must use to read his body inscriptions. The mirror, as Lacan describes it, offers the infant his first recognition as a coherent, unique self. But this recognition is a mis-recognition, for the reflection has a coherence and unity that the subject both lacks and desires. The body inscriptions that Leonard can read only in the mirror do not necessarily testify to the truth. But they do enable him to create a narrative that makes his life worth living. A Lacanian reading of the mirror image has two profoundly unsettling implications. It establishes Leonard as a morally deficient, rather than neurologically deficient, human being, and it suggests that we are not fundamentally different from him. Leonard’s intricate system of notes and body inscriptions builds up an inventory of set representations to which he can refer in all his future experiences. Thus when he wakes up naked in bed with a woman lying beside him, he looks among his Polaroid photographs for a picture which he can match with her, which will tell him what the woman’s name is and what he can expect from her on the basis of past experience. But this, suggest Hutchinson and Read, is an external representation of operations that all of us perform mentally (89). We all respond to sensory input by constructing internal representations that form the foundations of our psyche. This view underpins current theories of language and of the mind. Semioticians tell us that the word, the signifier, refers to a mental representation of an object rather than to the object itself. Cognitivists assume that cognition consists in the operation of mental items which are symbols for real entities. Leonard’s apparently bizarre method of apprehending reality is thus essentially an externalisation of memory. But if, cognitively and epistemologically speaking, Lennie is less different from us than we would like to think, this implication may also extend to our moral nature. Our complicity with Leonard is mainly established through the film’s complex temporal structure, which makes us viscerally share the protagonist’s/narrator’s confusion and disorientation. We become as unable as he is to construct a single, coherent and meaningful narrative: the film’s obscurity is built in. Memento’s ambiguity is enhanced by the film’s Website, which presents a newspaper clipping about the attack on Leonard and his wife, torn pages from police and psychiatric reports, and a number of notes from Leonard to himself. While blurring the boundaries between story and film by suggesting that Leonard, like Earl, may have escaped from a mental institution, otnemem> also provides evidence that can either confirm or confound our interpretive efforts, such as a doctor’s report suggesting that “John G.” may be a figment of Leonard’s imagination. The precarious nature of truth is foregrounded by the fact that the narrative Leonard is trying to construct, as well as the narrative in which Christopher Nolan has embedded him, is a detective story. The traditional detective story proceeds from a two-fold assumption: truth exists, and it can be known. But Memento and “Memento Mori” undermine this epistemological confidence. They suggest that truth, like identity, is a fictional construct, derived from the tales we tell ourselves and recount to others. These tales do not coincide with objective reality; they are the prisms we create in order to understand reality, to make our lives bearable and worth living. Narratives are cognitive patterns that we construct to make sense of the world. They convey our yearning for coherence, closure, and a single unified meaning. The overlapping and conflicting threads interweaving Memento, “Memento Mori” and the Website otnemem> simultaneously expose and resist our nostalgia for unity, by evoking a multiplicity of meanings and creating an intertextual web that is the essence of all adaptation. References Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1957. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Hutchinson, Phil, and Rupert Read. “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation.” Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005. 72-93. Kristeva, Julia. “World, Dialogue and Novel.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Rudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ēcrits: A Selection. New York: Norton 1977. 1-7. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149-71. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Nolan, Jonathan. “Memento Mori.” The Making of Memento. Ed. James Mottram. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 183-95. Nolan, Jonathan. otnemem. 24 April 2007 http://otnemem.com>. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 54-76. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989. Wilkens, T., A. Hughes, B.M. Wildemuth, and G. Marchionini. “The Role of Narrative in Understanding Digital Video.” 24 April 2007 http://www.open-video.org/papers/Wilkens_Asist_2003.pdf>. Yellowlees Douglass, J. “Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don’t) Do.” 24 April 2007 http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (May 2007) "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. London: Harvill Secker, 2014.Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselsberger. Rochester New York: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26: (Spring 1989): 7–24.Polster, Heike. The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Handke. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002.Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Reality TV has emerged as a visible site for contemporary debates over modern fame. In fact, while issues of ‘taste’ and cultural value have long since shaped conceptions of celebrity (Turner, Bonner, Marshall 178), the issue of fame has played a central role in the negative cultural criticisms of Reality TV. Reality programming is often invoked as short-hand to illustrate the moral ills of contemporary fame – as if it has somehow swept away the certainties of ‘the past’ where discourses of public recognition, visibility and reward are concerned. In exploring Reality TV as a site of contemporary fame, I examine here some of these claims to ‘transformation’, not so much to defend the form’s participation in celebrity culture, as to indicate that there is more going on here than these (increasingly familiar) critiques appear to suggest. We can note, for example, their tendency to simplify the history of fame (which of course then makes it far easier to situate Reality TV as a conclusive break with the past). Equally, these criticisms seem of limited use when it comes to considering what is clearly a broader cultural fascination with fame in Reality TV. Furthermore, such critiques tend to operate at a very general level, often paying little attention to how fame is actually articulated in Reality TV, and the possibilities of differences between formats. The period 2000-1 saw a number of global reality game shows emerge in the UK and elsewhere and in general terms, critics often foregrounded fame as part of a broader negative response to the use of factual programming as primarily entertainment. The pervasive screen examples of ‘would-be presenters’ or ‘wannabe models’ were invoked as antithetical to perceptions of factual programming’s traditionally more ‘worthy’ (and implicitly public service) agenda (Holmes, “All”). But in the context of fame, it is more appropriate to suggest that a number of critical positions on Reality TV have emerged. For example, in what is probably the most prevalent perspective in circulation, contestants have persistently been constructed as exemplifying, and in many ways accelerating, a shift toward a fame culture in which an emphasis on ‘famous for being famous’ has regrettably triumphed over the concepts of ‘talent’ and ‘hard work’ (Holmes, “All”) (even though this perspective is clearly far from new) (see Marshall 9-11). Second, and related to the emphasis on ‘undeserved’ fame above, has been a position which foregrounds the prominence of falsity and manufacture. Here, Reality TV contestants are seen as falling victim to the manipulative powers of a ruthless fame-making machine. Often yoked to an emphasis on the ephemeral nature of their celebrity, here we encounter cautionary tales about the price of public visibility and the lure of immediate wealth, a penalty when, as one programme put it, ‘instant television fame is over in a dream’ (Tonight with Trevor McDonald, ITV1, 13 Feb. 2004). In contrast, the centrality of the ‘ordinary’ person turned celebrity has been read in terms of democratisation, both in relation to access to the televisual airwaves (a position championed by broadcasters and producers, for example) (Bazalgette) and to the dynamics of public/ media visibility itself (see Biressi and Nunn). These positions clearly intersect, their distinctions largely inflected by the perspective of the observer. For example, what is the producer’s claim to ‘democratisation’ is the critic’s class-based distaste for all these ‘awful ordinary’ people on television (see Bazalgette). While each of these positions is limited and simplistic, collectively they do speak to changing cultural conceptions of fame. Joshua’s Gamson’s (Claims, “Assembly”) work in particular has usefully suggested a picture in which certain positions on, or ‘explanations of fame’, have had a historical significance in vying for cultural visibility (although the contours of these narratives must be swiftly drawn here). With the growth of the arts and technologies and the establishment of celebrity as a mass phenomenon (see Gamson, “Assembly” 261), public visibility became increasingly detached from aristocratic standing, with discourses of democracy – as epitomised by the American context – increasingly coming to the fore. With the Hollywood studio system representing celebrity’s later period of industrialisation, and with a controlled production system producing celebrities for a mass audience, the earlier theme of ‘greatness’ became muted into questions of ‘star quality’ and ‘talent’ (Gamson, “Assembly” 264). While the focus may now have been predominantly on the culture of the ‘personality’, Gamson argues that the primary narrative was still one of ‘natural’ rise (“Assembly” 264). However, what is crucial here is that the increasing visibility of the publicity machine itself gradually began to pose a threat to this myth. Shaped by industrial and cultural shifts such as the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the emergence of television, as well as the increasing growth of celebrity journalism, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the increasing prevalence of the ‘manufacture’ discourse, where it henceforth becomes what Gamson describes as a ‘serious contender’ in explaining celebrity (Claims 44). This is not to suggest that the older ideological myths of fame are entirely obscured but rather that, perhaps as never before, the two positions precariously jostle for visibility in the same space. Indeed, Gamson suggests that by the late 20th century, it was possible to discern strategies intended to ‘cope’ with the increasing potential for disjuncture here. In particular, he points toward the twin devices of the ‘exposure’ of the process and the construction of an ironic and mocking perspective on celebrity culture, both of which can be seen to offer the audience a flattering position of power (Claims 276). In many ways, Reality TV would appear to be paradigmatic of these discursive shifts in fame. While I emphasise the specificity of particular formats below, Reality TV in the form of Big Brother, Pop Idol or celebrity-reality shows (such as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!), have made a particular claim to ‘reveal’ or ‘expose’ the process of fame construction – whether in terms of following ‘ordinary’ hopefuls from the audition stages to their entrance into the media world, or by claiming to offer us an unprecedented ‘access’ to existing celebrities (‘stripping’ away the celebrity façade). (While of course what Richard Dyer termed ‘the negotiation of authenticity’, or the bid to think in terms of ‘really’, has long since structured the textual mediation of celebrity, it can conceivably be seen to have witnessed an accelerated shift in these contexts.) Equally, in terms of the decline of older myths of fame, these shows exhibit a self-conscious acknowledgement of the process of image production and construction, and the use of celebrity for commercial purposes. Lastly, in mediating the threat of the manufacture discourse, they evidently speak quite explicitly to an emphasis on the ‘power’ of the audience given that, through the now familiar use of interactivity (see Holmes, “But”), they construct the audience as operating as the ultimate creator of the celebrity. This already begins to indicate how, responding to and participating in particular discursive shifts in fame, Reality TV negotiates contemporary discourses on celebrity in complex and contradictory ways. Yet this would also need to acknowledge the differences and specificities of particular formats. For example, Big Brother may well be invoked as the ultimate example of the decline of older myths of fame. The programme does not suggest that a special ‘talent’, or ‘hard work’, are necessary for fame. Indeed, time in the house is clearly organised around an excess of leisured time in which, as the primary antidotes to boredom, eating, sleeping and sunbathing are repetitiously played out before the camera’s gaze. Contestants talk self-consciously about being ‘produced’ as celebrities while in the house (in terms of the programme and wider press coverage), with the understanding that each other’s behaviour and self-presentation is clearly directed to this end. The highly opportunistic and potentially calculating conception of fame is thus self-consciously displayed in the programme itself. In comparison, drawing on the older genre of the TV talent show, the Reality pop programmes such as Popstars (2001, UK), Pop Idol (2001-2, 2003, UK), Fame Academy (2002, 2003, UK) and most recently, The X-Factor (2004, UK) are more explicitly configured around the ‘search’ for a star. In this respect, they are specifically concerned with dramatising a power relationship between music industry and audience, a dialogue which is mapped onto the narrative of the star-making process. Certainly, on one level, they are self-consciously a product of the manufacture era of fame, produced for the scrutiny of a media-aware audience entirely conversant with the concept of ‘image’ construction. In tracking the contestants through auditions, training and re-styling, we witness the open production of the famous self – often trying on different ‘images’ week by week – and the ideological constraints (such as those pertaining to body image or physical appearance) under which this process must take place. The judges equally claim to be representative articulations of the ‘reality’ of the business by foregrounding the importance of image ‘packaging’ and the selling of the self. (As the notoriously ‘nasty’ judge Simon Cowell explains in one edition of Pop Idol, ‘Ten year old girls in Hull have to want to be you… They have to buy into the “image”. Do you see?’) (12 Sep. 2003). In short, they often boldly foreground the capitalistic nature of celebrity production. But at the same time, these programmes clearly draw upon, and arguably engage the audience by, much articulating older myths of fame. Given that, in Gamson’s terms, the pervasive nature of the manufacture discourse ultimately represents a threat to the commercial enterprise of celebrity, these shows provide exemplary evidence of the ways in which the two claims-to-fame stories continue to jostle for cultural legitimacy. Celebrating a mythic emphasis on a unique, authentic and gifted self, there is a persistent bid to lay claim to an indefinable sense of ‘specialness’. Indeed, the phrases ‘you’ve got “star quality” or the “X factor” have become an increasingly self-conscious convention in the shows themselves – as suggested by the naming of the most recent UK format, The X-Factor. In their emphasis on ‘ordinariness’, ‘lucky breaks’, ‘specialness’ and ‘hard work’, they are paradigmatic of the meritocratic ideology of the ‘access myth’ (Dyer, Stars). As Fame Academy’s singing coach Carrie Grant gravely tells the contestants: ‘The only place where “success” comes before work is in the dictionary’ (14 Dec. 2002). In this respect, without the irony or humour that has become such a pervasive aspect of contemporary celebrity coverage (see Gamson, Claims, “Assembly”), the programmes clearly also re-peddle traditional explanations of fame for contemporary cultural consumption (Holmes, “Reality”). Dismissals of these programmes in terms of their promotion of ‘manufactured pop’ ignore the fact that ‘authenticity’ is not really configured around the music itself. Pop music (and particularly TV pop) has historically been configured as ‘the most inauthentic music’ (Moore 220), whether in terms of industrial production, form/ sound, or artist expression and identity. But in many ways the programmes openly acknowledge the derivative and packaged nature of ‘pop’. The aspirant pop stars often sing cover versions on the shows (although they are valued and praised for inserting their ‘individual’ style), and in Pop Idol we witness each of the three finalists record the winning song in the studio prior to the result of the (live) television vote. In this respect, evoking Adorno’s famous critique of popular music’s standardised form, their voice is a cog in a wider machine – a component part which can be substituted and exchanged. But Reality TV’s serial form, aesthetic style and pursuit of ‘the real’, asks us to buy into the authenticity of the self, that the participants are – despite the image packaging – somehow the same person that auditioned at the start. There is often equally the suggestion that Reality TV may bring out the ‘real’, ‘special’ self that was partly inside all along: As one contestant in Fame Academy is chastised after a live performance: ‘We’ve had you showing that you can be Westlife or Bryan Adams, but have we had Barry yet? Where, Barry, is the “Barryness” of Barry?’ (19 Sep. 2003). But in broad terms, with factory workers, waitresses or train drivers turning into superstars, contestants are often imagined as being more ‘authentic’ because of their class background, something which has historically been conceived to signify ‘ordinariness’ within narratives of fame. This is again paradigmatic of the older, traditional discourse of the success myth (and its close companion, the American Dream) (Dyer, Stars). In the Reality format, this is also factored though the sense that we have ‘known’ them in the moment of authentic ‘pre-fame’, when, in short, they were ‘just like us’. In the context of his wider argument that stars work to articulate ideas of personhood or selfhood (Dyer, Stars), one of Richard Dyer’s key interventions was to suggest that stars function to work through discourses of individualism (see also Marshall). Working from a broadly Marxist perspective, he explained how the perpetual attempt to negotiate authenticity in the star image worked to promote a particular concept of personhood on which capitalist society depends. Dyer conceptualised this as ‘a separable, coherent quality, located “inside” consciousness and variously termed “the self”, “the soul”, “the subject”…’ (9). Although, in the context of contemporary celebrity culture and the discourses of postmodernism, Dyer’s model of the self has been critiqued and challenged (see Lovell, King), it by no means seems redundant here. We are absolutely encouraged to seek out, recognise, and believe in, the ‘inner’ self in Reality TV, while the highly performative and mediated context of the form makes this quest more paradoxical than ever. In fact, while programmes such as Big Brother and Pop Idol may display significantly different discourses on, or explanations of fame, this ideology of selfhood permeates much of Reality TV. While in Big Brother there is much self-reflexive and dizzying discussion of ‘who is being their real selves? Who is simply playing up for the camera?’, we are asked to judge the contestants (and they are asked to judge each other), precisely by this criteria of ‘authenticity’. We only need note that – from Big Brother, the pop programmes to the celebrity-reality shows – winners are often chosen and applauded because they are seen to have been the most ‘true’ to themselves. Again, despite the self-reflexive and performative context of Reality TV, this suggests highly conservative ideologies of selfhood and individualism. As Dyer reminds us, we have historically valued stars who appear to ‘bear witness to the continuousness of their own selves’, given that ‘sincerity and authenticity are two qualities greatly prized in stars’ (11). While it is not my intention to make assumptions about audience reading strategies here, it is worth noting that existing audience research (Hill, Jones) into Reality TV has emphasised how viewers indeed obtain satisfaction from the search for ‘the real’ in Reality TV, and from actively negotiating the tensions between construction, performance and authenticity. Annette Hill describes how the ‘game’ is ‘to find the “truth” in the spectacle/performance environment’ (337), and as this quote implies, this is far from suggesting that audiences have given up on the idea of ‘the real’ in Reality TV (Hill, Jones). The primary site on which this is played out is the representation of the self – an arena which stardom and celebrity has historically placed centre stage (Dyer, Marshall). As this suggests, then, the two fields have much to discuss. While I have only touched briefly on the detail of the formats here, this discussion emphasises how Reality TV demands closer consideration in the context of claims suggesting its ‘transformation’ of celebrity. Its position with a longer history of fame, the specificities of particular formats, and the ideological parameters in which they function, all question any simple or homogenous interpretation of its impact on celebrity culture. References Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” 1941. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. 22-38. Bazalgette, Peter. “Big Brother and Beyond.” Television (Oct. 2001): 20-3. Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn “The Especially Remarkable: Celebrity and Social Mobility in Reality TV.” Mediactive 2 (2004): 44-58. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979 (reprinted 1998). Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: BFI, 1986. Gamson, Joshua. 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Jones, Janet. “Show Your Real Face: A Fan Study of the UK Big Brother Transmissions (2000, 2001, 2002).” New Media and Society 5.3 (2003): 400-21. King, Barry. “Embodying an Elastic Self: The Parametrics of Contemporary Stardom.” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 29-44. Lovell, Alan. “I Went in Search of Deborah Kerr, Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore But Got Waylaid…” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 259-70. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Holmes, Susan. "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>. APA Style Holmes, S. (Nov. 2004) "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>.