Articoli di riviste sul tema "Abduction – Fiction"

The paper seeks to explore the concept of the secondary world as developed in Susanna Clarke’s 2020 fantasy novel Piranesi. The analysis is conducted in the context of the evolution of the literary motif of fairy abduction between the classic medieval texts and its current incarnations in modern speculative fiction. The argument relates the unique secondary world model found in Clarke’s novel to the extensive intertextual relationship Piranesi has with the tradition of portal fantasy narratives, and discusses it in the context of the progressive cognitive internalisation of the perception of the fantastic which has taken place between the traditional medieval paradigm and contemporary fantasy fiction.

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

Ironizing the violence to convey the political message about minority, Saadat Hasan Monto uses humanistic radical irony as a vehicle for political commentary by demystifying the politics of the representation of violence in official texts of both modern India and Pakistan. Partition affected every sector of human affairs badly. So, partition stories depict the irreplaceable loss displacement, dispossession, abduction, rape, painful death and other forms of violence that common people suffered from all three communities: Hindu, Sikh and Muslim. Manto counts the prime position who dealt with reality of the existing violence by showing it at various levels as familial, social, economic, political, religious others. In that course Manto also subverts the limited and biased notion of partition, which took partition of India as only the partition of territory and people. In the light of Hutcheon’s notion of ‘radical use of irony’, I argue that Manto’s use of irony in “Cold Meat” and “Open it” shows the utter cruelty of the people in power and authority at the time of partition violence and humanity shown by the marginalized section of society. His writing encapsulates his empathy for the victims and his belief in the essential goodness of humanity. The humanity that shines through in his writings about the down-trodden people living in the fringes of society, and the victims of partition violence of 1947 are an integral part of his stories.

This essay investigates literary representations of border violence in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians (2007) in order to revise the north-south paradigms central to contemporary understanding of the US-México border. Explanatory models that reduce the border to a geopolitical barrier fail to recognize its nonterritorial and historical dimensions. To make this argument, the essay examines the representational strategies of multiple realisms and shows how Castillo’s adaptation of these techniques provides a counternarrative to popular discourses of the border. Less a fixed set of concrete traits, realism designates a range of literary practices such as multimodal narration and accumulated detail as a way of mediating lived experience for those on the social and cultural margins. While it foregrounds questions of literary form, the essay situates its analysis in the context of twenty-first-century border fiction and its emphasis on border violence. A more thorough account of how the US-México border’s discursive representation legitimizes border asymmetries such as gender-based violence, drug manufacture, and abduction requires a new critical vocabulary that looks beyond the territorial.

This article is embedded in discourses surrounding the new mobility of people as well as scientific, technological and socio-cultural changes in a late-colonial setting. It investigates how a number of prominent and less-known male authors from the centre and margins of the twentieth-century Hindi literary canon, including Rishabhcharan Jain, Shriyut ‘Arun’ and Durgadas Bhaskar, depict unconventional family constellations and human relationships that challenge normative conceptions of family, fatherhood, conjugality and blood bonds as well as gender roles and responsibilities. The short stories under investigation suggest that human relationships require constant negotiation and investigation of the meaning of kinship, caste, class and the human. In the process, we encounter adulterous husbands, strong wives and nurturing fathers’ life struggles and tribulations. These short stories centre on husband–wife, man–mistress, wife–mistress and father–son relationships. Their male protagonists are authoritative towards their wives, caring towards their mistresses and nurturing towards children. At times, their self-sacrifice goes as far as to complete self-annihilation for the sake of the offspring, and, at other times, they lead double lives. Mothers are absent in these short stories. Instead, male protagonists claim parenthood and are ready to go as far as to abduct infants in order to perform fatherhood. I argue that parenting constellations and conjugality became negotiable for a number of factors that are addressed in my selection of Hindi short stories: (a) parenthood was not contingent upon biology (as stories on adoption and abduction suggest), (b) contraception was readily available to women and men (as promoted in periodicals of the time) and in the process also changing attitudes towards sexuality and conjugality, (c) abortion emerged as a medical option to undo a pregnancy emerging from an illicit love affair and (d) the new mobility enabled people to get around easily and frequently and even lead double lives. In addressing these factors, fiction published and circulated in periodicals offered novel imaginative and innovative spaces for the negotiation of family models once projected as normative in social reformist and nationalist discourses.

The article examines personification in the speech of a child narrator. Along with other grammatical and lexical features of a child’s speech, the use of personification by children is distinguished. Personification in a child’s speech, as well as in human speech, can be explained by metaphorical nature of human thinking as well as anthropocentrism of human thinking and speech. Personification can be a characteristic of the speech of a child narrator in fiction intended for adult readership. It is worth noticing that the use of a child narrator as a device is not new in literature. In the course of research, we conducted an analysis of two modern novels written in English: Room by Emma Donoghue (2010) and All the Lost Things by Michelle Sacks (2019). The two novels tell the reader about a traumatic experience that happened to the children or their significant others. The novels discuss the topics of abuse (physical and psychological), abduction, isolation, lying and memory. The narrators in the chosen novels are children of preschool and primary school age (5 and 7 years old). The analysis of the narrators’ speech allowed us to find numerous examples of personification, expressed by different parts of speech. All the found examples can be divided into groups according to the object of personification: household items and objects of the world, parts of the human body, animals, abstract notions, plants, and inorganic nature. The analysis showed that personification as a characteristic of speech can fulfill several functions: make the narrator more plausible, express the narrator’s emotions, communicate the reader the information that is crucial for the understanding of the plot.

Abstract John Searle argues that (literary) fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty fictional name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions.

AbstractThis article argues that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, changes in the perceived value of children, both materially and emotionally, put them in a new position of possible danger. The valorization of childhood brought new risks to children. Children were thought to be vulnerable to child abduction, or “child stealing,” as contemporaries termed it. Between 1790 and 1849, 108 cases of child abduction were tried at the Old Bailey and then recorded in its Proceedings or heard before magistrates in London's police courts and at county sessions courts and subsequently reported in newspapers. These cases, along with fictional accounts of child abduction, give insights into what were considered the most common motives for this crime. While some child abductors were motivated by poverty and saw children's clothes as economic assets that could be sold, others were driven by a desire to assume a mother role and represented stolen children as their own. Popular interest in abduction stories was sustained while contemporaries shared common fears about the loss of children and the limitations of adults to protect children from harm.

This article showcases how transmediation via digital tools enhanced students’ writing and revision during a three-week flash science-fiction unit of study. It begins with a brief rationale for pairing transmediation with revision. Then, I share two students’ stories of how they revised while transmediating their thinking of their initial flash sci-fi drafts. I end by showcasing students’ thoughts on how transmediating encouraged deeper revision and connected transmediation to play as inquiry. Transmediation paired with revision increases student motivation, engagement, and learning; increases taking risks with thinking and writing; encourages deeper revision with macrostructural changes in writing; increases abductive thinking and creativity; and allows students to work within out-of-school literacies.

Corrective flight steering with the hindlegs was investigated in intact tethered flying locusts inside a wind tunnel as well as in animals dissected for intracellular recording and showing fictive flight activity. In intact tethered flying animals, activity in the second coxal abductor muscle (M126) was highly correlated with hindleg steering and was coupled to the elevator phase of the flight cycle. Fictive flight and steering could also be elicited in animals dissected for intracellular recording of motoneurones innervating M126. During fictive flight activity, motoneurones 126 were rhythmically excited in the elevator phase, presumably from central elements of the neuronal oscillator generating the flight motor pattern, as is the case for motoneurones innervating wing muscles. During fictive straight flight, this input was subthreshold, and it could be demonstrated that simulated deviation from the flight course resulted in recruitment of motoneurones 126. Statistical analysis of the latencies of fast muscle spikes in M126 and in one wing elevator muscle showed that both received common input during flight steering. One source of this common input was identified as the sensory information from the lateral ocelli, which play an important role in the detection of course deviation. The experiments demonstrated that processing in the sensory-motor system for hindleg steering is probably organized in a very similar way to that responsible for steering with the wings.

The expiration reflex is a distinct airway defensive response characterized by a brief, intense expiratory effort and coordinated adduction and abduction of the laryngeal folds. This study addressed the hypothesis that the ventrolateral medullary respiratory network participates in the reflex. Extracellular neuron activity was recorded with microelectrode arrays in decerebrated, neuromuscularblocked, ventilated cats. In 32 recordings (17 cats), 232 neurons were monitored in the rostral (including Bötzinger and pre-Bötzinger complexes) and caudal ventral respiratory group. Neurons were classified by firing pattern, evaluated for spinal projections, functional associations with recurrent laryngeal and lumbar nerves, and firing rate changes during brief, large increases in lumbar motor nerve discharge (fictive expiration reflex, FER) elicited during mechanical stimulation of the vocal folds. Two hundred eight neurons were respiratory modulated, and 24 were nonrespiratory; 104 of the respiratory and 6 of the nonrespiratory-modulated neurons had altered peak firing rates during the FER. Increased firing rates of bulbospinal neurons and expiratory laryngeal premotor and motoneurons during the expiratory burst of FER were accompanied by changes in the firing patterns of putative propriobulbar neurons proposed to participate in the eupneic respiratory network. The results support the hypothesis that elements of the rostral and caudal ventral respiratory groups participate in generating and shaping the motor output of the FER. A model is proposed for the participation of the respiratory network in the expiration reflex.

In many animals, limb movements transition between gait patterns with increasing locomotor speed. While for tetrapod systems several well-developed models in diverse taxa (e.g., cat, mouse, salamander, turtle) have been used to study motor control of limbs and limb gaits, virtually nothing is known from fish species, including zebrafish, a well-studied model for axial motor control. Like tetrapods, fish have limb gait transitions, and the advantages of the zebrafish system make it a powerful complement to tetrapod models. Here we describe pectoral fin motoneuron activity in a fictive preparation with which we are able to elicit two locomotor gaits seen in behaving larval zebrafish: rhythmic slow axial and pectoral fin swimming and faster axis-only swimming. We found that at low swim frequencies (17–33 Hz), fin motoneurons fired spikes rhythmically and in coordination with axial motoneuron activity. Abductor motoneurons spiked out of phase with adductor motoneurons, with no significant coactivation. At higher frequencies, fin abductor motoneurons were generally nonspiking, whereas fin adductor motoneurons fired spikes reliably and nonrhythmically, suggesting that the gait transition from rhythmic fin beats to axis-only swimming is actively controlled. Using brain and spinal cord transections to localize underlying circuit components, we demonstrate that a limited region of caudal hindbrain and rostral spinal cord in the area of the fin motor pool is necessary to drive a limb rhythm while the full hindbrain, but not more rostral brain regions, is necessary to elicit the faster axis-only, fin-tucked swimming gait.

This study aims to identify and describe the prior text used as a reference text in writing the title Program Kreatifitas Mahasiswa 5 in the Field of Funding for the 2018 Fiscal Year. This research belongs to qualitative descriptive research that is naturalistic in nature. The data source used in this study is in the form of Program Kreatifitas Mahasiswa Title 5 Fields funded in 2018. The data generated in the form of words and sentences contained in the data source is Title Program Kreatifitas Mahasiswa 5 in Funding Budget Year 2018. Data analysis methods in the form of translational matching methods, abductive inference methods, and the referential equivalent method. Test the validity of the data using theory triangulation. The results of the study found the writing of Program Kreatifitas Mahasiswa Title 5 in Funding for the Fiscal Year 2018 is a transformation or adaptation text that utilizes several names of characters, including: (1) the names of public figures; (2) the name of the hero; (3) the name of an animated or fictional character; and (4) the name of the artist. The findings in this study indicate that the name of the artist as a reference text has a high appeal to attract readers.

Several studies have shown that noradrenergic mechanisms are important for locomotion. For instance, L-dihydroxyphenylalanine (L-DOPA) can initiate “fictive” locomotion in immobilized acutely spinalized cats and α2-noradrenergic agonists, such as 2,6,-dichloro- N-2-imidazolidinylid-enebenzenamine (clonidine), can induce treadmill locomotion soon after spinalization. However, the activation of noradrenergic receptors may be not essential for the basic locomotor rhythmicity because chronic spinal cats can walk with the hindlimbs on a treadmill in the absence of noradrenergic stimulation because the descending pathways are completely severed. This suggests that locomotion, in intact and spinal conditions, is probably expressed and controlled through different neurotransmitter mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we compared the effect of the α2 agonist, clonidine, and the antagonist (16α, 17α)-17-hydroxy yohimbine-16-carboxylic acid methyl ester hydrochloride (yohimbine), injected intrathecally at L3–L4before and after spinalization in the same cats chronically implanted with electrodes to record electromyograms (EMGs). In intact cats, clonidine (50–150 μg/100 μl) modulated the locomotor pattern slightly causing a decrease in duration of the step cycle accompanied with some variation of EMG burst amplitude and duration. In the spinal state, clonidine could trigger robust and sustained hind limb locomotion in the first week after the spinalization at a time when the cats were paraplegic. Later, after the spontaneous recovery of a stable locomotor pattern, clonidine prolonged the cycle duration, increased the amplitude and duration of flexor and extensor bursts, and augmented the foot drag at the onset of swing. In intact cats, yohimbine at high doses (800–1600 μg/100 μl) caused major walking difficulties characterized by asymmetric stepping, stumbling with poor lateral stability, and, at smaller doses (400 μg/100 μl), only had slight effects such as abduction of one of the hindlimbs and the turning of the hindquarters to one side. After spinalization, yohimbine had no effect even at the largest doses. These results indicate that, in the intact state, noradrenergic mechanisms probably play an important role in the control of locomotion since blocking the receptors results in a marked disruption of walking. In the spinal state, although the receptors are still present and functional since they can be activated by clonidine, they are seemingly not critical for the spontaneous expression of spinal locomotion since their blockade by yohimbine does not impair spinal locomotion. It is postulated therefore that the expression of spinal locomotion must depend on the activation of other types of receptors, probably related to excitatory amino acids.

Draper, Sharon M. PANIC. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013. Print.Imagine ... waking up, tied to a bed, groggy, naked, and alone. What would you do?PANIC is a gripping tale of two teenage girls and their experience with manipulation, abduction, and abuse. After meeting Thane, the handsome Hollywood movie director, 15-year-old Diamond is easily persuaded to accompany him back to his family's home to audition for an exciting part in upcoming movie. It's a dream come true for the aspiring dancer! Diamond ignores everything she's been taught since she was a little girl, and willingly gets into a car with the stranger. Still unaware of the looming danger, Diamond is lured into Thane's house, accepts a drink, and then pays the unthinkable price for the promise of starring in a Hollywood movie. She is now being held captive and forced to "play her part" in Thane's horrifying production, all while her family and friends, who are desperately waiting for news of her safety, live through their own horrors and traumas. While each girl fights for escape from their own personal prison, they desperately search for an inner strength they hope is there. From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author, Sharon M. Draper, this is a heart-breaking story that quickly turns into an exhilarating examination of power and loss, and the inspiring fight to take it all back.Sharon M. Draper's PANIC is a heart-pounding saga that will easily appeal to a wide age and range of readers. Defined as hi-lo contemporary fiction, it is a novel originally written for a young adult audience, and is a story that addresses important issues like abduction, sexual abuse, and bullying. It is a book that teaches valuable lessons, and so, may also appeal to parents and caregivers, and act as an important discussion piece for families. While offering insightful symbolism and the opportunity to dig deep into heavy themes (like the objectification of women and abusive teen relationships), it will work well for strong and inquisitive readers, however, with its short chapters, sobering plot, and strong young characters, this novel will attract many reluctant readers who are looking for a quick yet interesting read. Although the action is intense, emotional, and distressing at times the ease of dialogue and growth of the characters draws the reader in and forces them to think about their own risky behaviour, and the potential for resulting danger. Be aware that the trivial language used too often by the young characters can become tedious and annoying, and with a religious element to the book, some readers may feel uncomfortable at certain points. Yet, it is Draper's ability to so vividly capture the mind and heart of the adolescent, and the important and powerful life lessons the story delivers, that makes PANIC a must-have addition to any collection.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 StarsReviewer: Kimberley K. MortonKim Morton is a secondary History teacher and Learning Coordinator with the Saskatoon Public School Division. She is currently working toward her Masters of Education, specializing in Teacher-Librarianship, through the University of Alberta. She strives to make research and inquiry meaningful, relevant, and fun for her students, and is looking to gain more experience with current technology, trends, and tools. She enjoys sports, is an avid reader of historical novels, and loves going to the movies.

Հայոց ցեղասպանութիւնն ուրանալու եւ ժխտելու Թուրքիայի պաշտօնական քաղաքականութիւնը դրսեւորւում է տարբեր ոլորտներում։ Բացառութիւն չէ նաեւ գեղարուեստական գրականութիւնը: Հայոց ցեղասպանութեանը յաջորդող տարիներին թուրքական գրականութիւնը եւս հետեւելով այդ պարտադրանքին` կամ լռութիւն է պահպանել, կամ սատարել է ցեղասպան քաղաքականութեանը: Սակայն արդէն 1950-ական թուականներից ընդդիմադիր թուրք գրողներից ոմանք իրենց ստեղծագործութիւններում սկսում են անուղղակի կամ ակնարկներով խօսել հայերի կոտորածների, տեղահանութեան մասին: 2000-ական թուականների կէսերից, Թուրքիայի արտաքին եւ ներքին քաղաքական որոշ փոփոխութիւնների արդիւնքում, թուրքական գրականութեան մէջ հայկական նիւթն սկսում է ուշագրաւ զարգացում ապրել։ Դա պայմանաւորուած էր Հայոց ցեղասպանութիւնը վերապրած եւ բռնի իսլամացուած հայուհիների անձնական յիշողութիւնների ու ողբերգութիւնների հրատարակմամբ: Այս յուշագրական ստեղծագործութիւնները աշխուժացրին Թուրքիայում Հայոց ցեղասպանութեան վերաբերեալ քննարկումները եւ բացեցին խնդրի մէկ այլ կողմ․ ցեղասպանութեան տարիներին հայուհիների առեւանգումներն ու բռնի իսլամացումը, որը եւս ցեղասպանութեան անհերքելի ապացոյցներից է: Հրատարակուած մէկ տասնեակից աւելի յուշագրական վէպերն ու վիպակները, որոշ ժամանակ անց իրենց տեղը զիջեցին աւելի ցածրարժէք ստեղծագործութիւնների։ Սակայն յընթացս տարիների նիւթը կորցրեց իր ճանաչելիութիւնը եւ դուրս եկաւ գրական գործընթացներից: Edebiyatın büyük oranda toplumu ilgilendiren anlık ve güncel sorunları irdelediği ve onları ön plana çıkardığı bilinen bir gerçektir. Lâkin, bununla birlikte, ülke içinde ve toplum bünyesinde hüküm süren ortamın, edebi konuların seçimi konusunda etkili olduğunu da belirtmek gerekir. Bu açıdan, 20. yüz yıl Türk edebiyatının da, tabu olarak kabul edilen bazı konulara karşı genel olarak benzer tutum takındığına şahit olmaktayız. Bu konular arasında Ermeni konusunu da sayabiliriz. Türk edebiyatının, yakın zamanlara kadar bireysel ve yüzeysel bazı değinmelerin haricinde, Ermeni konusuna yeterince ilgi göstermemiş olduğunu söylemek mümkündür. Официальная политика Турции по опровержению и отрицанию Геноцида армян проявляется в самых разных сферах. Художественная литература также не является исключением. После Геноцида армян турецкая литература, следуя этому принуждению, либо хранила молчание, либо поддерживала политику геноцида. Однако с 1950-х годов некоторые оппозиционные турецкие писатели стали косвенно упоминать массовые убийства и депортации армян в своих произведениях. С середины 2000-х годов, в результате некоторых внешне и вну- триполитических изменений в Турции, армянская тематика начинает заметно развиваться в турецкой литературе. Это было связано с публикацией личных воспоминаний жертв трагедии — армянских женщин, переживших Геноцид армян и насильственно исламизированных. Эти мемуарные произведения оживили дискуссии о Геноциде армян в Турции и открыли новые аспекты проблемы: похищение и насильственная исламизация армянских женщин в годы геноцида, что также является одним из неопровержимых доказательств геноцида. Более десятка опубликованных мемуарных романов и рассказов через некоторое время уступили место более мелким произведениям. Однако в последние годы материал потерял свое признание и вышел из литературных процессов. The official policy of Turkey to refute and deny the Armenian Genocide manifests itself in a variety of spheres. Fiction is no exception, either. After the Armenian Genocide, Turkish literature, following this compulsion, either remained silent or supported the policy of genocide. However, since the 1950s, some opposition Turkish writers have begun to indirectly mention mass killings and deportations of the Armenians in their works. Since the mid-2000s, as a result of some external and internal political changes in Turkey, the Armenian theme has begun to develop noticeably in Turkish literature. This was due to the publication of personal memoirs of the victims of the tragedy — Armenian women who survived the Armenian Genocide and were forcibly Islamized. These memoirs have revived discussions about the Armenian Genocide in Turkey and opened up new aspects of the issue: the abduction and violent Islamization of Armenian women during the genocide, which is also one of the irrefutable proofs of the genocide. More than a dozen published memoir novels and short stories gave way to smaller works after a while. However, in recent years, the material has lost its recognition and has withdrawn from literary processes.

Memory is everywhere. We remember, more often than not, who and what we are, recognise friends and acquaintances, remember (hopefully) birthdays and anniversaries, and don't forget, as much as we'd sometimes like to, our everyday tasks and duties. But that's just the tip of the iceberg: we also speak of computer memory (usually in the context of needing more to run the latest Microsoft-made memory hog), of digital archives where we store what we don't want to bother our braincells with, and of those storerooms of human knowledge -- libraries -- which are gradually moving from analogue to digital storage as they join the new global memory that is the Internet (according to the visionaries). And then there are the alternatives to this 'official' memory: repressed memories, oppositional views of history, new discoveries that challenge our ideas of the past. It is in this wide field of possible cultural interaction that this, the second issue of M/C operates. At a time when half the world remembers the first anniversary of Princess Diana's death, with the other half trying desperately to avoid the tabloids' crocodiles' tears, at a time when most of us are looking forward to forgetting all about the White House sex scandals, and at a time, finally, when cultural commentators the world over are beginning to sort out which events of the past decade, century, and millennium will have been worth remembering, we review the idea of 'memory' from a variety of angles -- some broad, some narrow, some focussed on individual human memory, some on the memory of humanity as such. Our featured M/C guest writer, Canadian scholar Paul Attallah, opens this issue. In his article "Too Much Memory", he covers a lot of ground -- from the growing nostalgia for cultural products of the past to the recovery of political memory of past wrongs, to the memory of Princess Diana and other deceased celebrities. The media, he writes, are today in the business of creating 'pseudo-events' -- but the public are getting better at looking behind the façades: they might come to reject this constant stream of too much (fake) memory. As P. David Marshall writes, the problem becomes even more complicated if you're in Australia, at some distance from the centres of mainstream cultural production. As publicity leaks across the Internet and similar channels, Australians collect 'anticipatory memories' of those pseudo-events created by the media -- before the events even take place in the local channels of popular culture. The result of this phenomenon, Marshall suggests, may be an even stronger hegemonic grip of American broadcast standards. Adam Dodd takes us from memories of events in the immediate future to repressed memories -- of alien abductions. He points out that whatever the truth behind abduction stories, we should take note of the fact that these stories are reported as truth, and promptly rejected by the scientific establishment. This raises age-old questions of the nature of 'reality' in a postmodern world where objectivity has come to be recognised as an unattainable dream. Continuing the extraterrestrial theme, Nick Caldwell turns to the possible revival of 1950s science fiction iconography. After the cynical 80s with its dark and dirty SF designs, fond memories of the curvy, stylish interstellar dreams of post-war times are beginning to emerge again -- at a time of frantic artistic recycling of works from all eras, and at the dawn of a new millennium where again everything seems possible, perhaps now the rocketship designs of the 50s can finally come true. Axel Bruns returns the focus earth-wards, but remains on the topic of modern technology. He points to the opportunities and threats brought about by Internet archives such as Deja News -- with every newsgroup article at every user's fingertips, the potential for abuse is immense. As the perfect digital memory offered by Deja News is becoming a favourite search tool, it is high time to question the ethical implications of archiving the ephemeral. Paul Mc Cormack's article offers some more general thoughts on the future of the Internet. Comparing what still are the early days of this new medium with the first decades of radio, he suggests that we may 'remember' the future of the Net by learning from the past. The commercialisation of radio after its 'anarchic' childhood may be what's in store for the Internet, too -- despite the obvious differences between the two media. Finally, in her article on "Memory and the Media", Felicity Meakins closes the circle by returning to an issue touched on by Paul Attallah -- the death of Princess Diana. She describes how since Diana's demise the media's rhetoric has changed profoundly to consist almost exclusively of forms of eulogy. Using Speech Act Theory, Meakins identifies the performative function of this rhetoric, and points out how it has influenced our memories of Diana. Finally, in her article on "Memory and the Media", Felicity Meakins closes the circle by returning to an issue touched on by Paul Attallah -- the death of Princess Diana. She describes how since Diana's demise the media's rhetoric has changed profoundly to consist almost exclusively of forms of eulogy. Using Speech Act Theory, Meakins identifies the performative function of this rhetoric, and points out how it has influenced our memories of Diana. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Editorial: 'Memory'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/edit.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Editorial: 'Memory'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (199x) Editorial: 'memory'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Max Silverman’s Palimpsestic Memory describes a “transgenerational voice of memory” which may emerge from diverse histories of victimisation. This article will seek to expand upon how this “transgenerational voice” is significant within manifold cultural contexts through examining how the mother-daughter relationship is becoming increasingly prominent within recent Francophone women’s literature from Algeria. Within the fiction which reflects upon the destruction wrought by the Algeria’s civil crisis (c. 1992-1998), the mother-daughter bond connects women’s suffering during this “black decade” with the preceding War of Independence (1956-1962). Female protagonists in literary works by authors including Malika Mokeddem and Leila Marouane are inspired to challenge and resist civil upheaval and violence through recollecting and celebrating their mothers’ earlier resistance during the War of Independence. Presenting Mokeddem’s Of Dreams and Assassins and Marouane’s The Abductor as key texts, this article considers how the mother-daughter bond emerges as a literary theme which, through exemplifying the transnational emphasis on the associations between distinct atrocities, draws attention to female suffering within both Algerian wars, developing a productive and intercultural consciousness of female-specific suffering within multiple historical traumas.

Abstract On 14 April 1923, in the dead of night, an English girl was kidnapped from her bedroom in a military bungalow in the Kohat Cantonment on India's North-West Frontier. The kidnapping is a notorious incident that has been told and retold in multiple languages, disciplines, and media for almost a century. From the colonial perspective, the kidnapping was seen as an ‘outrage’ that demonstrated the lawless savagery of the tribes who inhabited this strategically significant Indo-Afghan borderland. From the local perspective, the kidnappers led by Ajab Khan Afridi were valiant heroes who boldly challenged an alien and oppressive regime. This article adopts a gendered lens of historical analysis to argue that the case offers important conceptual insights about the colonial preoccupation with frontier security. In the British empire, the idea of the frontier signified a racial line dividing civilization from savagery. The colonial frontier was also a zone of hyper-masculinity where challenges to state power were met with brutal violence in a muscular performance of masculine authority. In this space where ‘no signs of weakness’ could be shown, the abduction of Molly Ellis represented an assault on the fictive image of white, male invincibility and the race–gender hierarchy that defined the colonial system.

Throughout the years 1953-1979, bloomed a popular Brazilian cycle of films closely related to the North-American Western gender. Notwithstanding, these Westerns fell quickly into oblivion, mainly due their lack of aesthetics innovations and their undisguised commercial drive. Nevertheless, once it was bound to satisfy the collective phantasies of its audience, the corpus of these films displayed a plethora of representations pertaining to their sociocultural, historical and political environment. They provided a profuse amount of audiovisual material open to researches in a variety of fields – gender representation, psychosocial culture, authoritarian politics and ethics – which are still at work in actual Brazilian social, institutional and political practices. And since they were bound to please a masculine audience, Brazilian Western movies framed a striking fictional world underlined by the psychoanalytical theme of the figuration of women as the absolute model of alterity. Women were usually placed as imaginary emblems of private property, democratic values and/or Christian faith, which, by their turn, performed dramatically under three signifiers: the “Bull”, the “Bullet”, and the “Bible”. Depicted not as proper characters and deprived of dramatic motivations, they were, by consequence, liable to specific modalities of physical violence – abduction, torture, rape and murder. Cruelty against the feminine body blended together the misogynistic bias of Brazilian culture with the masculine impotence during the authoritarian dictatorship epoch in a framework which could only be furnished by the imaginary themes and structures of Western movie.

"These days information is so readily available and so instant in transferral that people start to feel that they have a more active role in the process of history." -- William B. Davis, M.A. ("Cigarette Smoking Man" from The X-Files) Space is, as its history shows, an experiential phenomenon open for interpretation. The methods by which this phenomenon comes to be known are equally arbitrary and tend to vary through time (to which space is intimately related), from culture to culture, and are always specifically related to what is known about the world within these circumstances. For example, Caroline McLeod presents a story recorded by Colin Turnball about a tribe of pygmies living deep in the rainforests of Africa. Some of them once journeyed to Lake Victoria for the first time, but were unable to perceive the people on the boats in the distance. Because they had never been in an environment with large expanses of space, the pygmies had never seen an object recede into the distance. They were unable to perceive what psychologists call size constancy. After several weeks of observing the boats, however, they were able to shift their understanding of reality to include this new mode of perceptual experience, a shift producing considerable ontological change for their culture. Postmodern society represents a similar attempt to deal with a new perceptual realm made accessible through new media forms such as the Internet, and the implications of developments in quantum physics, demonstrating a subtle renegotiation of space that challenges the hegemonic ontological paradigm of the scientific establishment. That is, it represents a pull away from a model which insists that movement necessarily involves a crossing of literal, measurable space between two points. Electronic communications such as the Internet have, as the Cigarette Smoking Man notes, led to an increased sense of public responsibility in the process of history and, by their very nature, demonstrated the ethereal quality of space itself. To isolate the origin of the negotiation of space in western culture requires a short journey back to the sixth century B.C. Zeno, Parmenides's most famous pupil, was already powerfully demonstrating that the common conceptualisation of space -- although it appeared 'natural' and 'obvious' -- was actually fundamentally flawed. Suppose you want to move your cursor from this word to this one. There is about a three centimetre gap between the two. As part of the trip, you must travel half the distance between the two points -- 1.5 centimetres. To travel 1.5 centimetres, you must travel half of this distance -- 75 millimetres......and so on. Every distance can be halved, so there is always a space between you and your destination. Logically, not only can you not move the cursor from word to word, you cannot move yourself from one side of the room to the other, or move at all for that matter. The implication is that the perception that reality changes is an illusion, since distance and movement are themselves both illusory: you do step into the same river twice. What are some cultural markers of the growing acceptance of a more ethereal conceptualisation of space? The first, and perhaps most noticeable, is a marked reduction in the linear representation of time, which manifests as an unprecedentedly heterogeneous set of trends that essentially collapses the past, the future, and past representations of the future. Andrew Niccol's 1998 film, Gattaca, thus presents a fifties-style nineties version of the future. Fashion and music are clearer sites of this nonlinear trend, the influence of the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties all being observable in contemporary popular culture. And already, the nineties are beginning to take on a nostalgia all their own as the millennium draws us closer to the 'future' that 2,000 signifies and away from the 'pre-future' tension of the nineties. Another, more complex cultural effect of this renegotiation of space, apart from its implications for time, is the decline in usefulness of literalised spatial metaphor. This situation has developed in part from the ability of electronic communications, particularly the Internet, to allow active participation in nonliteral space -- cyberspace, an experience which until recently did not exist outside the fiction of writers such as William Gibson. Cyberspace is unique in its ability to electronically replicate the mystical notion of transcendence: in cyberspace, you are a figure of your own creation, existing nowhere and everywhere. Unrestrained by the physical body, 'movement' becomes both unnecessary and undesirable for participation and interaction. Cyberspace is not even genuinely 'meta-space', since space is a concept which only becomes useful as an unstable metaphor to describe an experience which exists so vividly outside of its possible parameters. The nonlocalised experience of cyberspace itself reflects the findings of recent work on sub-atomic phenomena, explored most famously by quantum physicist David Bohm. When scientists observed that, under certain conditions, subatomic particulars ('quanta') communicate with each other over vast distances instantaneously (faster than light), like twins who feel each other's pain, Bohm realised that they were observing the 'principle of nonlocality': the information was not travelling through time and space from one location to another, the subatomic particles simply existed in a dimension that rendered time and space irrelevant, and where information existed in all places at the same time (Lewels 69). Since quanta are the building blocks of matter, Bohm concluded that all matter is connected at the subatomic level. This seemed to explain, for example, why quanta only appear as solid objects, as opposed to particles or waves, when they are observed; there seems to be a profound relationship between the observer and the observed. Scientists eventually stopped trying to distinguish between one subatomic particle and another because they are all identical and encoded with the same information. When grouped in great quantities, they cease to behave as individuals (that is, independently unpredictable), and begin to demonstrate a 'group consciousness', similar to a man'o'war, which is actually a conglomerate of individual creatures operating as one. Bohm eventually concluded that a holographic model of the universe was the most useful for explaining the unpredictable behaviour of quanta, postulating that every subatomic particle may be encoded with the information necessary to replicate the entire universe (Lewels 70). Like a regular holograph, each part contains the whole. In postmodern society, too, each artefact, each act, contains the meanings of the whole, becoming inevitable signs of accumulation. In an ironic, spatial sort of way then, postmodern physics and culture have come full circle to meet up with Zeno, who, like us, apparently never actually went anywhere (indeed, the idea that he could would be contrary to his philosophy). Apart from the scientific and philosophical compulsions to renegotiate conceptualisations of space is the possibility that the traditional model is simply unuseful for articulating the wide, varying range of contemporary human experience which western culture increasingly rushes to acknowledge, from cybersex to alien abduction. So even if there is room for space in postmodern society, we may not have time for it. References Clifton, Paul. "Interview with William B. Davis." Fortean Times Sep. 1998: 66. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989. Lewels, Joe. The God Hypothesis: Extraterrestrial Life and Its Implications for Science and Religion. Mild Spring, NC: Wild Flower, 1997. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1988. McLeod, Caroline. "Extraordinary Experience and Research at PEER." PEER. 23 Sep. 1998. 24 Nov. 1998 <http://www.peer-mack.org/mcleod.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Adam Dodd. "'The Truth Is Over There': Is There Room for Space in Postmodernity?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/truth.php>. Chicago style: Adam Dodd, "'The Truth Is Over There': Is There Room for Space in Postmodernity?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/truth.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Adam Dodd. (1998) 'The truth is over there": is there room for space in postmodernity? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/truth.php> ([your date of access]).

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

Each year, The Economist magazine’s “Economist Intelligence Unit” ranks cities based on “healthcare, education, stability, culture, environment and infrastructure”, giving the highest-ranking locale the title of most ‘liveable’ (Wright). For the past six years, The Economist has named Melbourne “the world’s most liveable city” (Carmody et al.). A curious portmanteau, the concept of liveability is problematic: what may feel stable and safe to some members of the community may marginalise others due to several factors such as gender, disability, ethnicity or class.The subjective nature of this term is referred to in the Australian Government’s 2013 State of Cities report, in the chapter titled ‘Liveability’:In the same way that the Cronulla riots are the poster story for cultural conflict, the attack on Jillian Meagher in Melbourne’s Brunswick has resonated strongly with Australians in many capital cities. It seemed to be emblematic of their concern about violent crime. Some women in our research reported responding to this fear by arming themselves. (274)Twenty-nine-year-old Jill Meagher’s abduction, rape, and murder in the inner northern suburb of Brunswick in 2012 disturbs the perception of Melbourne’s liveability. As news of the crime disseminated, it revived dormant cultural narratives that reinforce a gendered public/private binary, suggesting women are more vulnerable to attack than men in public spaces and consequently hindering their mobility. I investigate here how texts written by women writers based in Melbourne’s inner north can latently serve as counter narratives to this discourse, demonstrating how urban public space can be benign, even joyful, rather than foreboding for women. Cultural narratives that promote the vulnerability of women oppress urban freedoms; this paper will use these narratives solely as a catalyst to explore literary texts by women that enact contrary narratives that map a city not by vicarious trauma, but instead by the rich complexity of women’s lives in their twenties and thirties.I examine two memoirs set primarily in Melbourne’s inner north: Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (2013) and Lorelai Vashti’s Dress, Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses (2014). In these texts, the inner north serves as ‘true north’, a magnetic destination for this stage of life, an opening into an experiential, exciting adult world, rather than a place haunted. Indeed, while Lee and Vashti occupy the same geographical space that Meagher did, these texts do not speak to the crime.The connection is made by me, as I am interested in the affective shift that follows a signal crime such as the Meagher case, and how we can employ literary texts to gauge a psychic landscape, refuting the discourse of fear that is circulated by the media following the event. I wish to look at Melbourne’s inner north as a female literary milieu, a site of boldness despite the public breaking that was Meagher’s murder: a site of female self-determination rather than community trauma.I borrow the terms “boldness”, “bold walk” and “breaking” from Finnish geographer Hille Koskela (and note the thematic resonances in scholarship from a city as far north as Helsinki). Her paper “Bold Walks and Breakings: Women’s spatial confidence versus fear of violence” challenges the idea that “fearfulness is an essentially female quality”, rather advocating for “boldness”, seeking to “emphasise the emancipatory content of … [women’s] stories” (302). Koskela uses the term “breaking” in her research (primarily focussed on experiences of Helsinki women) to describe “situations … that had transformed … attitudes towards their environment”, referring to the “spatial consequences” that were the result of violent crimes, or threats thereof. While Melbourne women obviously did not experience the Meagher case personally, it nevertheless resulted in what Koskela has dubbed elsewhere as “increased feelings of vulnerability” (“Gendered Exclusions” 111).After the Meagher case, media reportage suggested that Melbourne had been irreversibly changed, made vulnerable, and a site of trauma. As a signal crime, the attack and murder was vicariously experienced and mediated. Like many crimes committed against women in public space, Meagher’s death was transformed into a cautionary tale, and this storying was more pronounced due to the way the case played out episodically in the media, particularly online, allowing the public to follow the case as it unfolded. The coverage was visually hyperintensive, and particular attention was paid to Sydney Road, where Meagher had last been seen and where she had met her assailant, Adrian Bayley, who was subsequently convicted of her murder.Articles from media outlets were frequently accompanied by cartographic images that superimposed details of the case onto images of the local area—the mind map and the physical locality both marred by the crime. Yet Koskela writes, “the map of everyday experiences is in sharp contrast to the maps of the media. If a picture of a place is made by one’s own experiences it is more likely to be perceived as a safe ordinary place” (“Bold Walks” 309). How might this picture—this map—be made through genre? I am interested in how memoir might facilitate space for narratives that contest those from the media. Here I prefer the word memoir rather than use the term life-writing due to the former’s etymological adherence to memory. In Vashti and Lee’s texts, memory is closely linked to place and space, and for each of them, Melbourne is a destination, a city that they have come to alone from elsewhere. Lee came to the city after growing up in Canberra, and Vashti from Brisbane. In Dress, Memory, Vashti writes that the move to Melbourne “… makes you feel like a pioneer, one of those dusty and determined characters out of an American history novel trudging west to seek a land of gold and dreams” (83).Deeply engaging with Melbourne, the text eschews the ‘taken for granted’ backdrop idea of the city that scholar Jane Darke observes in fiction. She writes thatmodern women novelists virtually take the city as backdrop for granted as a place where a central female figure can be or becomes self-determining, with like-minded female friends as indispensable support and undependable men in walk-on roles. (97)Instead, Vashti uses memoir to self-consciously examine her relationship with her city, elaborating on the notion of moving from elsewhere as an act of self-determination, building the self through geographical relocation:You’re told you can find treasure – the secret bars hidden down the alleyways, the tiny shops filled with precious curios, the art openings overflowing onto the street. But the true gold that paves Melbourne’s footpaths is the promise that you can be a writer, an artist, a musician, a performer there. People who move there want to be discovered, they want to make a mark. (84)The paths are important here, as Vashti embeds herself on the street, walking through the text, generating an affective cartography as her life is played out in what is depicted as a benign, yet vibrant, urban space. She writes of “walking, following the grid of the city, taking in its grey blocks” (100), engendering a sense of what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘topophilia’: “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (4). There is a deep bond between Vashti and Melbourne that is evident in her work that is demonstrated in her discussion of public space. Like her, friends from Brisbane trickle down South, and she lives with them in a series of share houses in the inner North—first Fitzroy, then Carlton, then North Melbourne, where she lives with two female friends and together they “roamed the streets during the day in a pack” (129).Vashti’s boldness not only lies in her willingness to take bodily to the streets, without fear, but also in her fastidious attention to her physical appearance. Her memoir is framed sartorially: chronologically arranged, from age twenty to thirty, each chapter featuring equally detailed reports of the events of that year as well as the corresponding outfits worn. A dress, transformative, is spotlighted in each of these chapters, and the author is photographed in each of these ‘feature’ dresses in a glossy section in the middle of the book. Koskela writes that, “if women dress up to be part of the urban spectacle, like 19th-century flâneurs, and also to mediate their confidence, they oppose their erasure and reclaim urban space”. For Koskela, the appearance of the body in public is an act of boldness:dressing can be seen as a means of reproducing power relations; in Foucaultian terms, it is a way of being one’s own overseer, and regulating even the most intimate spheres … on the other hand, interpreted in another way, dressing up can be seen as a form of resistance against the male gaze, as an opposition to the visual mastery over women, achieved by not being invisible or absent, but by dressing up proudly. (“Bold Walks” 309)Koskela’s affirmation that clothing can enact urban boldness contradicts reportage on the Meagher case that suggested otherwise. Some news outlets focussed on the high heels Meagher was wearing the night she was raped and murdered, as if to imply that she may have been able to elude her fate had she donned flats. The Age quotes witnesses who saw her on Sydney Road the night she was killed; one says she was “a little unsteady on her feet but not too bad”, another that she “seemed to be struggling to walk up the hill in her high heels” (Russell). But Vashti is well aware of the spatial confidence that the right clothing provides. In the chapter “Twenty-three”, she writes of being housebound by heartbreak, that “just leaving the house seemed like an epic undertaking”, so she “picked a dress a dress that would make me feel good … the woman in me emerged when I slid it on. In it, I instantly had shape, form. A purpose” (99). She and her friends don vocational costumes to outplay the competitive inner Melbourne rental market, eventually netting their North Melbourne terrace house by dressing like “young professionals”: “dressed up in smart op-shop blouses and pencil skirts to walk to the real estate office” (129).Michele Lee’s text Banana Girl also delves into the relationship between personal aesthetics and urban space, describing Melbourne as “a town of costumes, after all” (117), but her own style as “indifferently hip to the outside world without being slavish about it” (6). Lee’s world is East Brunswick for much of the book, and she establishes this connection early, introducing herself in the first chapter, as one of the “subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner North of Melbourne” (6). She describes the women in her local area – “Brunswick Girls”, she dubs them: “no one wears visible make up, or if they do it’s not lathered on in visible layers; the haircuts are feminine without being too stylish, the clothing too; there’s an overall practical appearance” (89).Lee displays more of a knowingness than Vashti regarding the inner North’s reputation as the more progressive and creative side of the Yarra, confirmed by the Sydney Morning Herald:The ‘northside’ comprises North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Abbotsford, Thornbury, Brunswick and Coburg. Bell Street is the boundary for northsiders. It stands for artists, warehouse parties, bicycles, underground music, lightless terrace houses, postmodernity and ‘awareness’. (Craig)As evidenced in late scholar John Maclaren’s book Melbourne: City of Words, the area has long enjoyed this reputation: “After the war, these neighbourhoods were colonized by migrants from Europe, and in the 1960s by the artists, musicians, writers, actors, junkies and layabouts whose stories Helen Garner was to tell” (146). As a young playwright, Lee sees herself reflected in this milieu, writing that she’s “an imaginative person, I’m university educated, I vote the way you’d expect me to vote and I’m a member of the CPSU. On principle I remain a union member” (7), toeing that line of “awareness” pithily mentioned by the SMH.Like Vashti, there are constant references to Lee’s exact geographical location in Melbourne. She ‘drops pins’ throughout, cultivating a connection to place that blurs home and the street, fostering a sense of belonging beyond one’s birthplace, belonging to a place chosen rather than raised in. She plants herself in this local geography. Returning to the first chapter, she includes “jogger by the Merri Creek” in her introduction (7), and later jokingly likens a friendship with an ex as “no longer on stage at the Telstra Dome but still on tour” (15), employing Melbourne landmarks as explanatory shorthand. She refers to places by name: one could physically tour inner North and CBD hotspots based on Lee’s text, as it is littered with mentions of bars, restaurants, galleries and theatre venues. She frequents the Alderman in East Brunswick and Troika in the city, as well as a bar that Jill Meagher spent time in on the night she went missing – the Brunswick Green.While offering the text a topographical authenticity, this can sometimes prove distracting: rather than simply stating that she goes to the library, she writes that she visits “the City of Melbourne library” (128), and rather than just going to a pizza parlour, they visit “Bimbo’s” (129) or “Pizza Meine Liebe” (101). Yet when Lee visits family in Canberra, or Laos on an arts grant, business names are forsaken. One could argue that the cultural capital offered by namedropping trendy Melburnian bars, restaurants and nightclubs translates awkwardly on the page, and risks dating the text considerably, but elevates the spatiality of Lee’s work. And these landmarks are important within the text, as Lee’s world is divided spatially. She refers to “Theatre Land” when discussing her work in the arts, and her share house not as ‘home’ but consistently as “Albert Street”. She partitions her life into these zones: zones of emotion, zones of intellect/career, zones of family/heritage – the text offers close insight into Lee’s personal cartography, with her traversing the map “stubbornly on foot, still resisting becoming part of Melbourne’s bike culture” (88).While not always walking alone – often accompanied by an ex-boyfriend she nicknames “Husband” – Lee is independently-minded, stating, “I operate solo, I pay my own way” (34), meeting up with various romantic and sexual interests through the text for daytime trysts in empty office buildings or late nights out in the CBD. She is adventurous, yet reminds that she was not always so. She recalls a time when she was still residing in Canberra and visited a boyfriend who was living in Melbourne and felt intimidated by the “alien city”, standing in stark contrast to the familiarity she demonstrates otherwise.Lee and Vashti’s texts both chronicle women who freely occupy public space, comfortable in their surroundings, not engaging on the page with cultural narratives and media reportage that suggest they would be safer off the streets. Both demonstrate what Koskela calls the “pleasure to be able to take possession of space” (“Bold Walks” 308) – yet it could be argued that the writer’s possession of space is so routine, so unremarkable that it transcends pleasure: it is comfortable. They walk the streets alone and catch public transport alone without incident. They contravene advice such as that given by Victorian Police Homicide Squad chief Mick Hughes’s comments that women shouldn’t be “alone in parks” following the fatal stabbing of teenager Masa Vukotic in a Doncaster park in 2015.Like Meagher’s death, Vukotic’s murder was also mobilised by the media – and one could argue, by authorities – to contain women, to further a narrative that reinforces the public/private gender binary. However, as Koskela reminds, the fact that some women are bold and confident shows that women are not only passively experiencing space but actively take part in producing it. They reclaim space for themselves, not only through single occasions such as ‘take back the night’ marches, but through everyday practices and routinized uses of space. (“Bold Walks” 316)These memoirs act as resistance, actively producing space through representation: to assert the right to the city, one must be bold, and reclaim space that is so often overlaid with stories of violence against women. As Koskela emphasises, this is only done through use of the space, “a way of de-mystifying it. If one does not use the space, … ‘the mental map’ of the place is filled with indirect descriptions, the image of it is constructed through media and the stories heard” (“Bold Walks” 308). Memoir can take back this image through stories told, demonstrating the personal connection to public space. Koskela writes that, “walking on the street can be seen as a political act: women ‘write themselves onto the street’” (“Urban Space in Plural” 263). ReferencesAustralian Government. Department of Infrastructure and Transport. State of Australian Cities 2013. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2013. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/files/2013_00_infra1782_mcu_soac_full_web_fa.pdf>.Carmody, Broede, and Aisha Dow. “Top of the World: Melbourne Crowned World's Most Liveable City, Again.” The Age, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://theage.com.au/victoria/top-of-the-world-melbourne-crowned-worlds-most-liveable-city-again-20160817-gqv893.html>.Craig, Natalie. “A City Divided.” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Feb. 2012. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/about-town/a-city-divided-20120202-1quub.html>.Darke, Jane. “The Man-Shaped City.” Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City. Eds. Chris Booth, Jane Darke, and Susan Yeadle. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996. 88-99.Koskela, Hille. “'Bold Walk and Breakings’: Women's Spatial Confidence versus Fear of Violence.” Gender, Place and Culture 4.3 (1997): 301-20.———. “‘Gendered Exclusions’: Women's Fear of Violence and Changing Relations to Space.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, 81.2 (1999). 111–124.———. “Urban Space in Plural: Elastic, Tamed, Suppressed.” A Companion to Feminist Geography. Eds. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager. Blackwell, 2005. 257-270.Lee, Michele. Banana Girl. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2013.MacLaren, John. Melbourne: City of Words. Arcadia, 2013.Russell, Mark. ‘Happy, Witty Jill Was the Glue That Held It All Together.’ The Age, 19 June 2013. 30 Jan. 2017 <http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/happy-witty-jill-was-the-glue-that-held-it-all-together-20130618-2ohox.html>Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1974.Wright, Patrick, “Melbourne Ranked World’s Most Liveable City for Sixth Consecutive Year by EIU.” ABC News, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-18/melbourne-ranked-worlds-most-liveable-city-for-sixth-year/7761642>.