Articoli di riviste sul tema "Siblings, fiction"

Abstract This article critically examines the figure of the “mother-sister” in Victorian popular fiction. Sisters whose main function in the household comprises mothering their siblings, combines several narrative possibilities in nineteenth-century fiction, while constructively complicating the representation of domestic work. Whereas canonical fiction depicts sisters taking care of motherless siblings more often than their general absence from critical discussion might suggest, for several Victorian women writers, the mother-sister’s experience offers an opportunity to detail everyday domestic labor, to validate homemaking without sentimentalizing it, and to express frustration without rejecting domestic ideals. After a general discussion of the significance of this hitherto neglected figure in Victorian culture, this article juxtaposes the mother-sister’s representation in novels by otherwise markedly different popular authors of the time: the religious writer Charlotte Yonge and Mrs. Henry Wood, one of the most successful sensation novelists of the time. Their contrasting portrayal of reluctant, resentful, and resented mother-sisters offers a different angle on expected depictions of capable homemaking as a sign of value in Victorian fiction.

Jennifer Egan is known for her formal and thematic virtuosity, a constant reinvention that makes each of her novels feel fresh and surprising. “If I've read it or done it before then I'm not interested,” she claims, describing an “aesthetic … guided by curiosity and desire” (Julavitz). But this isn't the whole story; an exacting reader will find familiar threads running through Egan's fiction. Among the most consistent is an interest in siblings (or cousins, in The Keep): how their relationships evolve over time, as they develop horizontal intimacies apart from the world of parents, and how they negotiate various forms of inequality—for instance, how a more typical sibling contends with a beloved other who is ill or disabled. These themes carry over into Egan's most recent novel, Manhattan Beach. Although many reviewers described it as an abrupt departure (Franklin; O'Rourke; Charles), the novel is consistent with Egan's previous work in featuring a disabled sibling and in being concerned with how genre—whether mystery, romance, PowerPoint presentation, or text message—shapes family dynamics. But where earlier projects are marked by unexpected generic combinations, Manhattan Beach hews closely to the contours of two interrelated forms: the historical novel and literary sentimentalism. At the heart of its thick portrait of a particular time and place is a sibling relationship that becomes an occasion for exploring the possibilities and limitations of genre.

This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish called “La Manda" reflects upon faith and ritual practices from a personal and transnational perspective. From dance, to fairs, to nun school, this story focuses on the difference in religious perspective held by two American siblings raised in Mexico. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.

This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish called “Gringos Mexicanos" stems from feelings of nostalgia and unrest within biculturalism and national identity. The piece centers around the degrees of belonging that two Americans siblings raised in Mexico have when contrasted to each other and to (Mexican or American) peer groups. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.

Using a thematic analysis, this study examines the presentation of donor conception in 30 books of fiction written for young adults. Most of the donor-conceived characters in these books live in single mother families, the majority are girls, and most have some kind of status as outsiders. Donor conception is presented differently depending on the type of family in which the teen lives. Children living with single mothers are most often endangered. Children living with lesbian-couple parents are most often marked as outsiders. Among children living with heterosexual-couple parents, donor conception is often presented as a significant issue that can unsettle family dynamics and lead to a search for the donor or donor siblings.

Depicting a world stricken with an ice age in the North and drought in the South, Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) recounts the survival story of two siblings, Mara and Dann, amidst un/natural and societal havoc. The sequel, The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog (2005) pictures the dramatic transformations both in the nonhuman nature and the protagonists’ lives after the devastating disasters in the first novel. Migrating among thousands of people from the south towards northern Ifrik and passing through desolate lands scorched with drought, 4re, 3ood, and diseases in Mara and Dann, the protagonists mature as they learn to live in a perilous and erratic world populated with survivalists solely focused on personal gain. Through the horrendous picture of an Ifrik parched with drought in the South and frosted with a solid layer of ice at the top north, the novel pictures the helplessness of humankind through Mara and Dann’s quest for life in the face of unstoppable and inevitable environmental calamities. With the melting of the ice in the Northern Yerrup and the flooding in the Northern Ifrik, General Dann delivers Dann’s struggle to cope with his personal loss as the world changes once again, and the climate gets cooler. Obsessed with knowledge and set on to save a library, he races against time, human beings, and the hostile nonhuman environment. In this light, this study aims to analyse Doris Lessing’s climate fiction (cli-fi) duology, Mara and Dann: An Adventure and General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog as climate fiction novels reflecting the destructive impact of climate change on humans and nonhuman nature in the anthropogenic conditions of the fictional world, which is not a far cry from our world in the twenty-first century.

The study aimed at identifying whether there exists a language shift towards English among Saudi children studying in international schools in Riyadh. This was approached through investigating the code choices they prefer to use in different life domains (such as the home domain (parents and siblings), school domain (friends and teachers), neighbors, and relatives…etc.), i.e. from their parents' perspectives. To achieve the aim of the study, a descriptive survey approach was followed, where the study sample consisted of (382) parents. The questionnaire was also used as a data collection tool. The results revealed that Saudi children studying in international schools in Riyadh showed different tendencies towards language choice, while communicating in different domains. More specifically, they tend to use English more than their native tongue (Arabic) in daily spontaneous communication. The findings thus indicate that the children are in fact going through early stages of Language Shift.

What inalienable rights belong to those with intellectual disabilities? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Ellen, who has Down syndrome, overhears her older siblings, and caretakers, talking about her. They are discussing her recent pregnancy, and the suicide of the person they believe coerced her into sex, or raped her. While Ellen doesn’t understand everything they are talking about, she understands there is a life growing inside her, and they are debating if they should have her keep it, abort it, or give it up for adoption. They believe, if Ellen keeps the child, she will be poorly equipped for motherhood and the burden of childcare will fall on them. Later, Ellen takes matters into her own hands, gathers what little belongings she has, and heads out to the street to hitchhike away.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery is a Canadian Classic children’s fiction published in 1908. It revolves around an eleven-year-old orphan girl named Anne Shirley who is vibrant, witty, has a vivid imagination and a positive outlook on life. This coming-of-age story begins as Anne Shirley arrives at the Green Gables house on Prince Edward Island, Canada, to assist the upper-middle-aged siblings Marilla and Gilbert Cuthbert on their farm. The Cuthbert siblings were disappointed to see a girl as they were expecting to foster a boy to assist with the field labor. Anne Shirley landed in Green Gables as a mishap but won everyone over time with her spirited personality and charming nature. In the predominant literary narrative, children’s literature is under-represented and forgotten as childhood, after all is seen as a state from which we grow away. But children’s literature provokes an intense response and engagement amongst its readers through its congruence. A coming-of-age story in children’s literature focuses on the psychological and moral growth of a protagonist from youth to adulthood and confounds the audience to experience the surrounding of the protagonist to impact the readers’ thoughts and attain self-growth. In light of the above information, this paper aims to substantiate Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery as a coming-of-age novel to understand the impact that children’s literature has on its audience through various elements such as culture, identity, positivity, friendship, love, growth, and imagination.

The charming world of fairy tales used to be, for many ages, the favorite world for readers of fiction. Until the moment, these magical tales, their adventurous journeys, and happy endings provide a vital source of enchanting entertainment. Throughout her literary career, Angela Carter (1940-1992), a contemporary British novelist and a short story writer, shows interest in the employment of fairy tales in her works, producing what is called modern fairy tales. Her rewriting of these tales rendered her a remarkable woman advocate who calls for women’s legitimate rights and an appreciation and a recognition of their active position in societies, things that men enjoy and always receive. This paper tackles The Magic Toyshop (1967), Carter’s second novel. It discusses the fate of its young heroine, Melanie, and her siblings, Jonathan and Victoria, who have become orphans by the death of their parents in a plane crash while in America. Melanie journeys from her middle-class luxurious house to Uncle Phillip’s poor house located in South London. Like Cinderella, the orphan girl dreams of being a bride and marrying a handsome man while suffering under the oppression of a stepfather, Uncle Phillip. Unlike her, Melanie will be shocked to meet a different version of Prince Charming of her imagination.

Cultural Studies have played a pivotal role in understanding and evaluating the power dynamics of the social, political, economic and ethical world order by empirically engaging and focusing on the present-day culture, tracing its historical roots and explicating its attributes with reference to a particular literary text and its reception in a society. Arvind Adiga, the Man-Booker Prize winning Indo-Australian author, in Selection Day, has adroitly detailed how cricket as an individual entity impacts the cultural phenomena of a society by confronting its inherent myriad issues. The narrative delves deep into the lives of two siblings – Radha and Manju, witnesses the dramatic turnaround of events and tries to capture the themes of unfulfilled desires and preordained destinies. The novel also explores how the sport holds different meanings and significance for different characters, each of whom view the game in the light of their own ideology. The author foresees and sensitizes the theme of homosexuality, which is still a taboo and been unheard of, within the sports fraternity. Adiga’s critique of the parental felony, embodied in Mohan Kumar, and its repercussions is the most compelling theme at the heart of this work of fiction. Selection Day powerfully binds together the societal phenomena of class construction, unquenchable thirst for money, sexual orientations and ideologies with a single thread and studies how culture, in itself, is an ever-evolving phenomenon.

Gretchen Murphy, “Revising the Law of the Mother in the Adoption-Marriage Plot” (pp. 342–365) This essay traces a common plot in British and American fiction in which an outsider is first adopted and then later marries into a family. Such plots have been linked with the transition from blood to voluntary association in liberal society, but this essay examines the apparent superfluity of adoption and marriage in bringing the outsider into the family. Surveying historicist and psychoanalytic interpretations of the role of incest in the formation of democratic and contractual community in these works, the essay uses Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic theory of siblings to propose that these plots address a central challenge of democracy: mediating equality and freedom when a legally imposed equality among all stands at odds with the freedom to create closed communities of choice. Shifting from adopted siblinghood to marriage enables a fantasy of social relations that are entirely chosen rather than imposed. Novels discussed include Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814); James Fenimore Cooper’s Wyandotté (1843); Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854); Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857); Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne (1858); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862); Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo (1866); María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872); and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884).

Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe's award-winning memoir, of this earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (2006), invites readers into a warm subjective realm in which a meditative Wiebe (b. 1934) recounts his growing-up years from birth to age thirteen. As self-reflexive "rememberer," Wiebe explores the sensate freshness of a boy's ways of seeing, touching, and, not least, hearing the world. The young Wiebe lives with his parents and siblings and neighbours in an emotionally warm Christian community of 1920s immigrants to Canada who have fled from the Soviet Union in the wake of the 1917 Revolution and who struggle for economic survival in a remote corner of rural Saskatchewan during the 1930s and 1940s. But Wiebe's memoir of childhood is not only autobiography and social history; it is also a linguistic text that subtly invites readers to look beyond its textual boundaries to his earlier work. In particular, it has the effect of carrying alert readers back to the setting—at least physically and geographically if not altogether socially and culturally—of Wiebe's first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962). That early novel was a caustic work notoriously controversial especially among Mennonite readers in Canada when it appeared almost a half-century ago. The 2006 memoir—with intertextual allusion—invites readers to recall especially one layer of that early novel barely noticed by readers, a layer eclipsed and partially hidden by the dominant narrative. Specifically, it invites readers to see the virtually sinless and prelapsarian world of the idealistic young Hal Wiens whose idyllic life in the fictional spaces of Peace Shall Destroy Many goes unnoticed because it is so very much in the shadow of the doubts and tensions that inform the much larger world of his spiritually troubled older brother, nineteen-year old Thom Wiens. The memoir pushes readers into re-thinking the reception of that novel, and into finding anew beneath its severe and satiric treatment of the austere adult world the linguistic and spiritual joy of life given shape in the playful perceptions of the young Hal. The memoir becomes a stimulus for a transformational re-reading of the novel. This essay explores the two works in light of each other and of conventions that govern the two respective genres. It attempts, also, to account for the reading strategies that Wiebe's 2006 memoir proposes to readers of his first novel, and for key influences informing the two respective works.

This paper makes a review of Chandra Prakash Baniya's Madan Puraskar winning novel, Maharani (2019). Written in local colour, the book is a historical fiction that unveils an untold history of the Parbat Rajya (one of the 24 states before the unification of modern Nepal by Prithvi Narayan Shah). The main story revolves round the rivalry of two siblings, Bhadribam and Malebam for the ascendency to the throne. Bhadribam is elder by conception whereas Malebam by birth. As per the prevailing practice, the royal court decides in favour of Malebam. Bhadribam rebels. Vishwaprabha, the princess of Deupur who is engaged with Malebam for marriage, becomes victimized in the rivalry. Despite being engaged with Malebam, she gets ready to marry Bhadribam to save the Parbat Rajya from being divided. Ambitiously, even after having Vishwaprabha, Bhadribam continues to plot against Malebam for the throne. Vishwaprabha spoils his conspiracy and saves the Parbat Rajya. In recognition of this, Malebam awards her with the title of Maharani (Queen Mother). But Vishwaprabha does not enjoy this political title. She rather chooses the life of a recluse and goes missing soon. However, after her disappearance, she remains deeply in the collective memory of the people of Beni and the neighbouring areas. In course of time, mythicizing her as goddess, they begin to worship her. But Baniya defies this myth and simply regards her as a brave and patriotic lady. This review revolves around the question: how and why does the writer dismantle the myth in the novel, Maharani?

A sample of parents in Saudi Arabia was surveyed to find out the reading technologies that children under the age of 12 use, children’s digital reading habits and interests, parents’ roles in encouraging the children to read digitally, the effects of digital reading on children’s reading ability, and to compare digital reading before, during and after the Pandemic. Survey results showed that all the children in the sample use a smart phone to access apps, games, cartoons, and YouTube videos. About 41% use an iPad or tablet and few use their parents or older siblings’ laptops. None of the children in the sample uses an e-reader such as Kindle. 5% do not like to use an iPad/tablet and prefer to use their parents’ smart phones. Children below the age of 6 use touch screen devices in reading the English and Arabic letters, numeracy and words. They enjoy reading on touch screens. 36% of the children in grades 1-3 use touch screen devices in learning to read and 64% use them for games and entertainment. Children in grades 4-6 mainly use touch screen devices to play games, soccer, car races and watch movies mostly in English and do not use those devices for reading purposes. Older children feel that educational and language learning and reading apps are boring. During the pandemic, children used technology intensively due to remote teaching and learning, i.e., more than before and after the Pandemic. About half of the parents do not share, nor supervise reading from touch screen devices with their children whether during, before or after the pandemic. Despite the advancements in digital reading, most parents and children in Saudi Arabia still prefer print books and stories. Mobile audiobooks, electronic reading games, storybooks, picture books and glossy magazines, reading lessons with a digital, human-like character, WhatsApp remote reading, online book clubs, and children's digital libraries are not used. Therefore, this study recommends the integration of digital reading in the school curriculum, raising parents and teachers’ awareness of digital reading devices, reading apps and websites and designing mobile reading apps with interactive features to motivate older children to read Arabic fiction and short stories.

It is now 10 years that Muhammad Asad, the twentieth-century's most influ­ential European Muslim, left us. But aside from his own biographical writ­ings-the best-seller The Road to Mecca (1954) and his 1988 interview with his old employer, the Franlifitrter (Allgemeine) 'ZeJtung- until recently there was no comprehensive biography of this illustrious man. This lacuna has now been filled -at least up to his official conversion to Islam in Berlin (1926) and Cairo (1927). This covers his quest as a student, film librettist, and jour­nalist "from Galicia [his native Lemberg and Czernovitz] to Arabia," ending with his preparations for ha]. The author is an unassuming but enthusiastic research assistant for eth­nology at Vienna's Austrian Academy of Sciences. Working like a detective and a good prosecutor (never taking a confession at face value), he has writ­ten what promises to become the definite biography of the early Leopold Weiss. His pioneering book is welcome for its set of rare (and mostly unpub­lished) photographs. Of these, a 1932 portrait makes the front cover haunt­ingly compelling by showing a Ghandi-like Asad with a shaven head and penetrating yet sensitive black eyes. Even better, it includes a three-page chronology, a complete list of his publications that tracks 45 German news­paper articles, and a three-page list of publications on Asad. And yet, despite its being so uncompromisingly academic, his text reads like a novel. It is no surprise that the author discovered that some of The Road to Mecca is elegantly fictitious and, according to Pola Hamida Asad, essen­ tially a "spiritual autobiography." (Did not Johann Wolfgang van Goethe entitle his Fact and Fiction?) Thus it is now established that his first wife, Elsa Schiemann (nee Sprecht) was not 15 but 22 years older than him, that her little son accompanied them on both "Oriental Journeys" (1922-23 and 1924-26), and that Zayd (their Arab companion) was a literary invention. Windhager reveals other more important facts: details about his moth­er's Feigenbawn family; the fate of his father, stepmother, and siblings (Dr. med. Heinrich Weiss and Dr.jur. Rachel Weiss) under Nazism, and Asad's attempts to save them from the concentration camps; his days at Vienna University, where he not only studied the history of art and philosophy but ...

This article emphasizes the importance of studies which look at changes and similarities in mourning over time. It argues that relevant evidence can come from creative fiction as well as from other sources, provided that this is analyzed rigorously in terms of structures and patterns. As an illustration of this approach, it examines the evidence in recurring features of Shakespeare's plays that his writing was deeply and lastingly affected by the death of his only son Hamnet, a twin, at the age of 11, and identifies five motifs which support this interpretation: the resurrected child or sibling; androgynous and twin-like figures; a growing emphasis on father-daughter relationships; paternal guilt; family division and reunion. The article suggests that this approach could be applied to other instances where a body of creative writing shows traces of overt or buried grief.

The recurring pastiches of journalistic writing in Max Jacob’s seminal collection are more complex than they initially appear—critical, not merely of this discourse’s supposed objectivity, but of the assumption that the transmission of valid, valuable news is ever really sought in the first place. The indiscretions of sensationalist, and even fallacious news items appear far less surprising when we acknowledge, along with Jacob, that the esthetic pleasure orienting poetic expression – which is dependent, precisely, on a certain distortion of truthful communication – is what the public expects from its news sources as well, if unconsciously. By identifying the texts in this collection that reference topics and discursive tropes of Belle Époque journalism (and its often indistinguishable sibling, le roman feuilleton), we find that the poet simultaneously draws on the “attractive force” of such writing, drawing his reader into its intrigue, while continually disrupting any stable referential function, through linguistic play. While Jacob is hardly an engaged artist, by laying bare the ultimately unsatisfying quick fix of headline news, reconstituting the latter as an objet d’art, he reminds us of an important truth after all: the most rewarding esthetic experiences are at once more transparent – fiction acknowledged as such – and more resistant to understanding.

‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, a fairytale that is widely known across the Western world, was originally written by the Brothers Grimm, and published in 1812 as ‘Snow White’. Though each dwarf was first given an individual name in the 1912 Broadway play, in Walt Disney’s 1937 film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, they were renamed, and the dwarfs have become household names. It is well known that myths, fables, and fairytales, though appearing to be merely children’s tales about fictional magical beings and places, have, more often than not, originated from real facts. Therefore, the presence of the seven brothers with short stature in the story is, from an endocrinological point of view, highly intriguing, in fact, thrilling. The diversity of the phenotypes among the seven dwarfs is also stimulating, although puzzling. We undertook a differential diagnosis of their common underlying disorder based on the original Disney production’s drawings and the unique characteristics of these little gentlemen, while we additionally evaluated several causes of short stature and, focusing on endocrine disorders that could lead to these clinical features among siblings, we have, we believe, been able to reveal the underlying disease depicted in this archetypal tale.

This paper discusses the influence of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s teachings on community development in India, as depicted in Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things The novel highlights the struggle of the lower-caste population against the rigid social hierarchy prevalent in India, and how Ambedkar’s ideology of social equality and empowerment has impacted the community’s development. Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things presents a powerful depiction of the impact of Ambedkar’s teachings on community development in India. The novel portrays the lives of twin siblings, Rahel and Estha, who grow up in Ayemenem, a fictional town in Kerala. Their family, the Ipes, is part of the Syrian Christian community, which occupies a higher position in the social hierarchy than the local Dalits. However, the novel also portrays the Dalits’ plight, highlighting the systemic oppression they face, which is deeply entrenched in the social and cultural fabric of the region. This paper analyses the novel’s portrayal of Ambedkar’s ideas and their real-world implications, identifying different ways in which Ambedkar’s teachings have inspired collective action and mobilization, paving the way for more just and equitable social systems.

This thesis is an analysis of the Play Fairview (2018) by Jackie Siblies Drury. The purpose of this analysis is to expose the issue of instilling negative stereotypes. It is also intended to expose how the contribution of fictional elements (character, setting, plot/conflict, and stage direction) in revealing the issue of instilling negative stereotypes. This analysis is done through text-based and context-based interpretation which are related to the concept of The Fact of Blackness by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White mask. The result of this analysis shows white has instilled the negative stereotypes toward black by circulating and perpetuating through the media that black is forever inferior.

Hispanic/Latino men who have sex with men (MSM) have the second largest HIV infection rate in the United States and Puerto Rico (PR) has ranked number five with the greatest number of Hispanics living with HIV. This study aims to understand how family affects HIV risk and protective factors for young adults. PR MSM ages 21 through 30 in San Juan, PR completed semi-structured interviews exploring the influence interpersonal family relationships have on HIV risk and protective factors. PR MSM (N = 15) completed a semi-structured in-depth individual interview. NVivo was used for administering a thematic analysis based on the transcripts in the original language of the interview, 14 in Spanish and one in English. The following five general themes emerged from the data analysis: 1) Immediate versus Extended Family; 2) The Matriarch; 3) Fractured Paternal Relationships; 4) Siblings Influence; and 5) Fictive Kin–Creating My Own Family. Findings suggest that the immediate family play an integral role in enhancing HIV protective factors for PR MSM as young adults. This study highlights the importance for developing family-based interventions that reinforce cultural beliefs and values through a strengths-based approach towards enhancing HIV protective behaviors for PR MSM.

The objective of this research is to describe about body image of 5-6 years old children in Human Doll Stimulation that include human doll stimulation process, doll choosen by children to be played with, wanted physical character when children grow up, child's opinion about self physical condition, inspiring figure for children about physical beauty (beautiful or handsome), how parents and teachers grow a positive body image to children. This research was held in Early Childhood Education (PAUD) Cikita, Bogor. This research was foccused on Matahari class (class of 4-6 years old chilren) and implemented qualitative method. Data collecting was done with triangulation, which consists of interview, observation, and documentation. Data analyzing was done by transcripting, data organizing, recognition, and coding. Result of this research found that: (1) human doll stimulation process started with children choose dolls they wanted, enrobe clothing and accessories, role play. (2) the selected dolls of children for a puppet play is a representation of the human adult than baby dolls. Physical doll that children preferred are well-lean and white doll, (3) the desired physical characteristics by female children when they grow-up are well-lean and white, the desired physical characteristics of male children when they grow-up are are well-lean / muscular and white, (4) children's opinion about their own physical and well-colored fat (5) figures that inspired children about physical beauty (beautiful / handsome) is a fictional character from television as Cinderella, Barbie, the army, siblings and a cousin that phisically attractive(6) how teachers and parents instill a positive body image in children's materials in the body, body functions, religious approach, masculinitiy learning. Implications of this research is the emergence of cooperation between parents, schools, teachers, directorates of the Early Childhood Education in implementing a positive body image in children, can also be used as a discourse for the readers, especially for next researchers.

Abstract Wonder, a fictional story told both in print (2/2012) and movie (11/2017) formats, depicts a middle-school student, Auggie, who struggles with social exclusion and being the target of school based relational bullying due to his genetically based facial deformity. Internationally popular, abundant everyday reviews by non-professional commenter are easily accessible on-line, e.g., on Douban (Chinese) and Common-Sense Media (English). Access to these comments enables the investigation of what perspectives (knowledge and understanding, beliefs and opinions, etc.) reviewers draw upon in sharing their thoughts about the protagonist’s struggles. In this study we undertook two analyses. In analysis 1, we asked, how do Chinese -/English -speaking reviewers comment on Auggie’s struggles to be accepted by his peers at school, both the causes of his social problem and the ways Auggie dealt (or might deal) with his situation. In analysis 2, we explored comments that reviewers made about Auggie’s only sibling, his elder sister, Via, a first-year high school students who, in the story, struggles to find a balance between meeting her own need for her parents’ love and attention, and fulfilling her familial role and obligations, given Auggie’s special needs. Based on data from open-source “every day” books/movies review websites, we compared, culturally, the perspectives on the story expressed by Chinese and English commenters through emic (both thematic and discursive) exploratory analyses. Analysis 1 suggests that comparatively, Chinese-speaking reviewers tend to more often focus on the value of solving the problem, and in doing so, articulating the corresponding ways a victim of bullying or neglect can be or become both strong and interdependent, whereas English-speaking reviewers more often tend to emphasize exploring and understanding the causes of the relational problems and tend to suggest independence-oriented ways of solving the social problem by changing the actions of others. Analysis 2 suggests differences across Chinese- and English-speaking reviewers in perceptions of and judgements about the fundamental “culture based” determinants and ways for Via to deal with her relational struggle within the family.

Abstract Food practices (preparation and consumption) have long been viewed as mere domestic routines, and thus, often dismissed for being too “frivolous [a] realm” to receive the same scholarly attention as “great topics” such as “politics, economics, justice and power” (Shapiro 2). Emerging during the 1970s, food studies owe their theoretical model to research in fields of enquiry such as anthropology, sociology, structuralism, or women's studies, which have highlighted the aesthetic value of food and its transformative implications for the intermediation of social relations with others. Accordingly, food occasions various socio-cognitive activities that help an individual achieve a sense of attachment and belonging to a community. Based on the premise that food is instrumental in social relations, as well as in expressing a wide range of values, experiences and emotions, the present analysis gives an insight into the epistemic potential of food to attribute new meanings to Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere memoir. Laura Shapiro's non-fictional account, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells their Stories Laura Shapiro's What She Ate consists of the biographies of six notable female figures from different centuries and continents and highlights the importance of food in making them “recognizable” throughout history (7). Shapiro's collection of these women's personal stories and struggles gives insight into the more subtle meanings of food and its capacity to restore the balance of power between genders. In each story, food shapes the character's mind and body through evocations of endurance, resilience, internalized oppression, political statement or trendsetting dietary habits. serves as a useful starting point for the present reading of Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal as food narrative that has family relations, daily experiences and emotions constantly mediated through food. In brief, The Journal represents an intimate record of Dorothy's life, household activities and personal observations of the (natural and social) world surrounding Dove Cottage, which she shared with her famous sibling, Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, between May 1800 and January 1803. In this sense, I propose a constructivist-relational approach to Dorothy's narrative as interconnected with food, with the primary aim to explore how her numerous food references in the Journal contribute to the construction of her personal narrative and identity. As posited here, The Grasmere Journal offers a glimpse of Dorothy and William Wordsworth's dietary, social and writing routines, but also projects an image of Dorothy in a position of power, a woman ahead of her time, with a progressive stance, which goes beyond the societal expectations with regard to women's domestic role during the Romantic period.

This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish is called "La vaca.” The overarching themes of this story are birth, motherhood, siblings and the creative force in a non-conventional American family raised in Mexico. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.

This article analyzes Kathy Kacer’s Masters of Silence (2019), a novel about Marcel Marceau – the renowned mime artist who during the war cooperated with the French Resistance – and two fictional Jewish siblings struggling with the trauma of losing their parents, anti-Semitism, and the suppression of identity in a Catholic convent in southern France. The author examines the narrative techniques used by Kacer, including the combination of fiction with history and some elements of the biography of Marceau, and demonstrates that she not only shares the next-generation memory of World War II with her young readers but also depicts nonverbal ways of coping with trauma as potentially effective and empowering. Whereas Kacer’s indifference to historical dates may be connected to her determination to portray Marceau as an adolescent role model, the novel is a successful narrative about trauma and the Holocaust history, and the depiction of Marceau’s acts of resistance does not overshadow the young protagonists who do not just quiver and follow the instructions of the adults but mainly try to gain agency.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Intra- and inter-generational family singing is found throughout the world’s cultures. Children’s songs across many traditions are often performed with adult family members, whether simultaneously (in unison or harmony) or sequentially (as in call-and-response). In one corpus of printed children’s songs, however, such musical partnering between young and old was scripted, arguably for the first time. Children’s periodicals and readers in late eighteenth-century Germany offered a variety of poems, theatricals, riddles, songs, stories, and non-fiction content, all promoting norms around filial obedience, virtue, and productivity. Readers were encouraged to share and read aloud with members of their extended families. But the “disciplining” going on in this literature was as much emotional as it was moral. Melodramatic plots to dialogues, plays, and Singspiele allowed for tenderness and affection to be role-played in the family drawing room. And the poems and songs included in and spun off from these periodicals constituted, for the first time, a shared repertoire meant to be sung and played by young and old together. Duets for brothers and sisters, parents and children—with such prescriptive titles as “Brotherly Harmony” and “Song from a Young Girl to Her Father, On the Presentation of a Little Rosebud”—not only trained children how to be ideal sons, daughters, and siblings. They also habituated mothers and fathers to the new culture of sentimental, devoted parenthood. In exploring songs for family members to sing together in German juvenile print culture from 1700 to 1800, I uncover the reciprocal learning implied in text, music, and the act of performance itself, as adults and children alike rehearsed the devoted bourgeois nuclear family.

Telgemeier, Raina. Sisters. New York: Scholastic, 2014. Print.In this graphic novel, Telgemeier tells the story of two sisters - namely herself, Raina, and her sister, Amara. Raina dreams of the day she will become a big sister but, when that day arrives, it is nothing like she imagined. Her younger sister likes to play by herself, is always cranky and does not want much interaction with anybody, including the long-lost cousins they visit. We watch as the family grows bigger in an apartment that seems to shrink. Tight quarters do not help the relationship between Raina and Amara especially when each girl wants her own privacy. In a story told over a long family road trip mixed in with memories from the past, Raina comes to see maybe having a sister, even one who is different than she expected, is maybe not so bad after all.Telgemeier’s drawing will delight readers with her characteristic colourful pictures that are easy to absorb and understand. Young readers will know when the author is in the present tense and when she is relating a story in the past as the colours of the pages turn a time-worn yellow. This makes the jumping back and forth in time a smooth transition for readers. In a story that is relatable about siblings, family life and growing up, young readers will find her humour funny and timely. This book is a must-have for every school and public library.Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Shawna ManchakowskyShawna Manchakowsky recently completed her MLIS at the University of Alberta. When she is not working at Rutherford Library as a Public Service Assistant, she can be found with her husband parenting her two young girls; avoiding any kind of cooking; and reading for her two book clubs. In between book club titles, she tries to read as much teen fiction as she can get away with.

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor & Park. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2013. Print.“Disintegrated. Like something had gone wrong beaming her onto the Starship Enterprise. If you’ve ever wondered what that feels like, it’s a lot like melting, but more violent. Even in a million different pieces, Eleanor could still feel Park holding her hand. Could still feel his thumb exploring her palm. She sat completely still because she didn’t have any other option. She tried to remember what kind of animals paralyzed their prey before they ate them...Maybe Park had paralyzed her with his ninja magic, his Vulcan handhold, and now he was going to eat her. That would be awesome” (p. 72).Eleanor & Park is a smart, funny young adult romance that takes place over one school year in 1986. Told in alternating voices, this is the story of two teenagers who don’t quite fit in. Eleanor comes from the wrong side of the tracks and has big red hair and wears all the wrong clothes. Park is half Asian, loves comic books and alternative music. Eleanor has had a rough life, living with her mother, her mother’s new husband, and her four siblings in a rundown house without even a door on the bathroom. Park’s family is much more stable, yet his military veteran father and immigrant mother do not quite know what to make of Park, with his black clothes, eye makeup and love of music. Pushed together on Eleanor’s first day of school when she takes the only seat left on the bus, the one beside Park, they bond over comic books and mixed tapes and help each other survive the tumult that is high school, and life. The characters, young and old, in Eleanor & Park are far from perfect, and their imperfections and weirdness make them likeable. Young adult readers will identify with these outsiders and will be cheering for them from the beginning. Some of the pop culture references may not be recognized by today’s young adults; however, the specific music and comic book references are less important than what they represent in the story. Rowell has written a nuanced and balanced story that will appeal to young adult fans of realistic and romantic fiction. The ending is satisfying without being easy and Rowell has created characters that are believable and heartwarming. Eleanor & Park won the 2013 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for Best Fiction Book. Rainbow Rowell is the author of Attachments (2011) and the recently released Fangirl (2013). The book contains some scenes with some mild sexuality, violence, and language. It will make an excellent addition to any school or public library collection for young adult readers ages 14 and up.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewed by: Joanne de GrootJoanne de Groot is a teacher, librarian and mom who loves to read children's literature (especially with her two kids!). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta and teaches primarily in the Teacher-Librarianship by Distance Learning program. Joanne teaches courses on resources for children and young adults, children's literature, educational technology and Web 2.0, and contemporary literacies.

Aveyard, Victoria. Red Queen. New York: Harper Teen, 2015. Print.In a world where having red blood means you are nothing but the lowest kind of human and where having silver blood means you are a part of the God-like humans who have unique, individual powers, life is grueling when you are born with red blood. Mare Barrow has chosen a life of crime to survive and knows she will soon be conscripted to fight in the war that no red returns from, just like her older brothers. Her life changes when she gets a job at the palace and accidentally discovers she has a power too. In order to hide this impossibility, the king betroths her to one of his sons. What happens next is a story of rebellion, lies, love, loyalty, friendship and deceit. In a place where it is red against silver and where loyalties can change, the side you choose will seal your fate.This teen book touched on many themes: friendship, class, siblings, unrequited love, family and war. With this broad diversity of themes, Red Queen should appeal to many readers. For me, however, it was not a book I would highly recommend. For example, I found Mare to be one-dimensional in her character development. She did not grow or change as much as I expected her to, especially when she came from such humble beginnings and travels to the grand palace. There was a lot more violence than I thought was necessary as well, and the graphic descriptions made Red Queen less enjoyable. It read more like an adult book than a teen book. I would recommend this book with reservations to high school students in grades ten to twelve.Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 starsReviewer: Shawna ManchakowskyShawna Manchakowsky recently completed her MLIS at the University of Alberta. When she is not working at Rutherford Library as a Public Service Assistant, she can be found with her husband parenting their two young girls; avoiding any kind of cooking; and reading for her two book clubs. In between book club titles, she tries to read as much teen fiction as she can get away with.

“Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it”-- Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future”The attacks of 9/11 generated a public discourse of suspicion, with Osama bin Laden occupying the role of the quintessential “most wanted” for nearly a decade, before being captured and killed in May 2011. In the novel, Falling Man (DeLillo), set shortly after the attacks of September 11, Justin, the protagonist’s son, and his friends, the two Siblings, spend much of their time at the window of the Siblings’ New York apartment, “searching the skies for Bill Lawton” (74). Mishearing bin Laden’s name on the news, Robert, the younger of the Siblings, has “never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing” (73), and so the “myth of Bill Lawton” (74) is created. In this paper, I draw on postclassical, cognitive narratology to “defamiliarise” processes undertaken by both narrator and reader (Palmer 28) in order to explore how narrative elements impact on readers’ and characters’ perceptions of the terrorist. My focus on select episodes within the novel “pursue[s] the author’s means of controlling his reader” (Booth i), and I refer to a generic reader to identify a certain intuitive reaction to the text. Assuming that “the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications” (Iser 281), I trace a path from the uttered or printed word, through the reading act, to the process of meaning-making. I demonstrate how renaming the terrorist, and other language games, challenge the notion that terror can be synonymous with a locatable, destructible source by activating a suspicion towards the text in particular, and towards language in general.Falling Man tells the story of Keith who, after surviving the attacks on the World Trade Centre, shows up injured and disoriented at the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne, and their son, Justin. The narrative, set at different periods between the day of the attacks and three years later, focuses on Keith’s and Lianne’s lives as they attempt to deal, in their own ways, with the trauma of the attacks and with the unexpected reunion of their small family. Keith disappears into games of poker and has a brief relationship with another survivor, while Lianne searches for answers in the writings of Alzheimer sufferers, in places of worship, and in conversations with her mother, Nina, and her mother’s partner, Martin, a German art-dealer with a questionable past. Each of the novel’s three parts also contains a short narrative from the perspective of Hammad, a fictional terrorist, starting with his early days in a European cell under the leadership of the real terrorist, Mohamed Atta, through the group’s activities in Florida, to his final moments aboard the plane that crashes into the World Trade Centre. DeLillo’s work is noted for treating language as central to society and culture (Weinstein). In this personalised narrative of post-9/11, DeLillo’s choices reflect his “refusal to reproduce the mass media’s representations of 9/11 the reader is used to” (Grossinger 85). This refusal is manifest not so much in an absence of well-known, mediated images or concepts, but in the reshaping and re-presenting of these images so that they appear unexpected, new, and personal (Apitzch). A notable example of such re-presentation is the Falling Man of the title, who is introduced, surprisingly, not as the man depicted in the famous photograph by Richard Drew (Leps), but a performance artist who uses the name Falling Man when staging his falls from various New York buildings. Not until the final two sentences of the novel does DeLillo fully admit the image into the narrative, and even then only as Keith’s private vision from the Tower: “Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246). The bin Laden/Bill Lawton substitution shows a similar rejection of recycled concepts and enables a renewed perspective towards the idea of bin Laden. Bill Lawton is first introduced as an anonymous “man” (17), later to be named Bill Lawton (73), and later still to be revealed as bin Laden mispronounced (73). The reader first learns of Bill Lawton in a conversation between Lianne and the Siblings’ mother, Isabel, who is worried about the children’s preoccupation at the window:“It has something to do with this man.”“What man?”“This name. You’ve heard it.”“This name,” Lianne said.“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”“I don’t think so.”“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”“No. What man?”“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said. (17)If “the piling up of data [...] fulfils a function in the construction of an image” (Bal 85), a delayed unravelling of the bin Laden identity distorts this data-piling so that by the time the reader learns of the Bill Lawton/bin Laden link, an image of a man is already established as separate from, and potentially exclusive of, his historical identity. The segment beginning immediately after Isabel’s comment, “What man? Exactly” (17), refers to another, unidentified man with the pronoun “he” (18), as if to further sway the reader’s attention from the subject of that man’s identity. Fludernik notes that “language games” are a key feature of the postmodern text (Towards 221), adding that “techniques of linguistic emasculation serve implicitly to question a simple and naive view of the representational potential of language” (225). I propose that, in Falling Man, bin Laden is emasculated by the Bill Lawton misnomer, and is thereby conceptualised as two entities, one historical and one fictional. The name-switch activates what psychologists refer to as a “dual-process,” conscious and unconscious, that forms the reader’s experience of the narrative (Gerrig 37), creating a cognitive dissonance between the two. Much like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit drawing, bin Laden and Bill Lawton exist as two separate entities, occupying the same space of the idea of bin Laden, but demanding to be viewed singularly for the process of recognition to take place. Such distortion of a well-known figure conveys the sense that, in this novel, “all identities are either confused [...] or double [...] or merging [...] or failing” (Kauffman 371), or, occasionally, doing all these things simultaneously.A similar cognitive process is triggered by the introduction of aliases for all three characters that head each of the novel’s three parts. Ernst Hechinger is revealed as Martin Ridnour’s former, ‘terrorist’ identity (DeLillo, Falling 86), and performance artist David Janiak (180) as the Falling Man’s everyday name. But the bin Laden/Bill Lawton switch offers an overt juxtaposition of the historical with the fictional or, as Žižek would have it, “the Raw real” with the “virtual” (387), and allows the mutated bin Laden/Bill Lawton figure to shift, in the mind of the reader, between the two worlds, as well as form a new, blended entity.At this point, it is important to notice that two, interconnected, forms of suspicion exist in the novel. The first is invoked in the story-level towards various terrorist-characters such as Bill Lawton, Hammad, and Martin. The second form is activated when various elements within the narrative prompt the reader to treat the text itself as suspicious, triggering in the reader a cognitive reaction that mirrors that of the narrated character. One example is the “halting process” (Leps) that is forced on the reader when attempting to manoeuvre through the narrative’s anachronical arrangement that mirrors Keith’s mental perception of time and memory. Another such narrative device is the use of “unheralded pronouns” (Gerrig 50), when ‘he’ or ‘she’ is used ambiguously, often at the beginning of a chapter or segment. The use of pronouns in narrative must adhere to strict grammatical rules (Fludernik, Introduction) and when these rules are ignored, the reading pattern is affected. First, the reader of Falling Man is immersed within an element in the story, then becomes puzzled about the identity of a character, and finally re-reads the passage to gain clarity. The reader, after a while, distances somewhat from the text, scanning for alternative possibilities and approaching interpretation with a tentative sense of doubt.The conversation between the two mothers, the Bill Lawton/bin Laden split, and the use of unheralded pronouns also destabilises the relationship between person and name, and appears to create a world in which “personality has disintegrated into a mere semiotic mark” (Versluys 21). Keith’s obsession with correcting the spelling of his surname, Neudecker, “because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled” (DeLillo, Falling 31), Lianne’s fondness of the philosopher Kierkegaard, “right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a” (118), her consideration of “Marko [...] with a k, whatever that might signify” (119), and Rumsey, who is told that “everything in his life would be different [...] if one letter in his name was different” (149), are a few examples of the text’s semiotic emphasis. But, while Versluys sees this tendency as emblematic of the novel’s portrayal of a decline in humanity, I suggest that the text’s preoccupation with the shape and constitution of words may work to “de-automatise” (Margolin 66) the relationship between sign and perception, rather than to denigrate the signified human. With the renamed terrorist, the reader comes to doubt not only the printed text, but also his or her automatic response to “bin Laden” as a “brand, a sort of logo which identifies and personalises the evil” (Chomsky, September 36). Bill Lawton, according to Justin, speaks in monosyllables (102), a language Justin chooses, for a time, for his own speech (66), and this also contributes to the de-automatisation of the text. The language game, in which a speaker must only use words with one syllable, began as a classroom activity “designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts” (66). The game also gives players, and readers, an embodied understanding of what Genette calls the gap between “being and saying” (93) that is inevitable in the production of language and narrative. Justin, who continues to play the game outside the classroom, because “it helps [him] go slow when [he] thinks” (66), finds comfort in the silent pauses that are afforded by widening the gap between thought and utterance. History in Falling Man is a collection of the private narratives of survivors, families, terrorists, artists, and the host of people that are affected by the attacks of 9/11. Justin’s character, with the linguistic and psychic code of a child, represents the way in which all participants, to some extent, choose their own antagonist, language, plot, and sequence to personalise this mega-public event. He insists that the towers did not collapse (72), but that they will, “this time coming” (102); Bill Lawton, for Justin, “has a long beard [...] speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives [and] has the power to poison what we eat” (74). Despite being confronted with the factual inaccuracies of his narrative, Justin resists editing his version precisely because these inaccuracies form his own, non-mediated, authentic account. They are, in a sense, a work of fiction and, paradoxically, more ‘real’ because of that. “We want to pass beyond the limits of safe understandings”, thinks Lianne, “and what better way to do it than through make-believe” (63). I have so far shown how narrative elements create a suspicion in the way characters operate within their surrounding universe, in the reader’s attitude towards the text, and, more implicitly, in the power of language to accurately represent a personal reality. Within the context of the novel’s historical setting—the period following the 9/11 attacks—the narration of the terrorist figure, as represented in Bill Lawton, Hammad, Martin, and others, may function as a response to the “binarism” of Bush’s proposal (Butler 2), epitomised in his “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Silberstein 14) approach. Within the novel’s universe, its narration of terrorist-characters works to free discourse from superficial categorisations and to provide “a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations” (Versluys 23) of the events of 9/11 by de-automatising a response to “us” and “them.” In his essay published shortly after the attacks, DeLillo notes that “the sense of disarticulation we hear in the term ‘Us and Them’ has never been so striking, at either end” (“Ruins”), and while he draws distinctions, in the same essay, with technology on ‘our’ side and religious fanaticism on ‘their’ side, I believe that the novel is less settled on the subject. The Anglicisation of bin Laden’s name, for example, suggests that Bush’s either-or-ism is, at least partially, an arbitrary linguistic construct. At a time when some social commentators have highlighted the similarity in the definitions of “terror” and “counter terror” (Chomsky, “Commentary” 610), the Bill Lawton ‘error’ works to illustrate how easily language can destabilise our perception of what is familiar/strange, us/them, terror/counter-terror, victim/perpetrator. In the renaming of the notorious terrorist, “the familiar name is transposed on the mass murderer, but in return the attributes of the mass murderer are transposed on one very like us” (Conte 570), and this reciprocal relationship forms an imagined evil that is no longer so easily locatable within the prevailing political discourse. As the novel contextualises 9/11 within a greater historical narrative (Leps), in which characters like Martin represent “our” form of militant activism (Duvall), we are invited to perceive a possibility that the terrorist could be, like Martin, “one of ours […] godless, Western, white” (DeLillo, Falling 195).Further, the idea that the suspect exists, almost literally, within ‘us’, the victims, is reflected in the structure of the narrative itself. This suggests a more fluid relationship between terrorist and victim than is offered by common categorisations that, for some, “mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality” (Said 12). Hammad is visited in three short separate sections; “on Marienstrasse” (77-83), “in Nokomis” (171-178), and “the Hudson corridor” (237-239), at the end of each of the novel’s three parts. Hammad’s narrative is segmented within Keith’s and Lianne’s tale like an invisible yet pervasive reminder that the terrorist is inseparable from the lives of the victims, habituating the same terrains, and crafted by the same omniscient powers that compose the victims’ narrative. The penetration of the terrorist into ‘our’ narrative is also perceptible in the physical osmosis between terrorist and victim, as the body of the injured victim hosts fragments of the dead terrorist’s flesh. The portrayal of the body, in some post 9/11 novels, as “a vulnerable site of trauma” (Bird, 561), is evident in the following passage, where a physician explains to Keith the post-bombing condition termed “organic shrapnel”:The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outwards with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range...A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. (16)For Keith, the dead terrorist’s flesh, lodged under living human skin, confirms the malignancy of his emotional and physical injury, and suggests a “consciousness occupied by terror” (Apitzch 95), not unlike Justin’s consciousness, occupied from within by the “secret” (DeLillo, Falling 101) of Bill Lawton.The macabre bond between terrorist and victim is fully realised in the novel’s final pages, when Hammad’s death intersects, temporally, with the beginning of Keith’s story, and the two bodies almost literally collide as Hammad’s jet crashes into Keith’s office building. Unlike Hammad’s earlier and clearly framed narratives, his final interruption dissolves into Keith’s story with such cinematic seamlessness as to make the two narratives almost indistinguishable from one another. Hammad’s perspective concludes on board the jet, as “something fell off the counter in the galley. He fastened his seatbelt” (239), followed immediately by “a bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that” (239). The ambiguous use of the pronoun “he,” once again, and the twin bottles in the galleys create a moment of confusion and force a re-reading to establish that, in fact, there are two different bottles, in two galleys; one on board the plane and the other inside the World Trade Centre. Victim and terrorist, then, share a common fate as acting agents in a single governing narrative that implicates both lives.Finally, Žižek warns that “whenever we encounter such a purely evil on the Outside, [...] we should recognise the distilled version of our own self” (387). DeLillo assimilates this proposition into the fabric of Falling Man by crafting a language that renegotiates the division between ‘out’ and ‘in,’ creating a fictional antagonist in Bill Lawton that continues to lurk outside the symbolic window long after the demise of his historical double. Some have read this novel as offering a more relative perspective on terrorism (Duvall). However, like Leps, I find that DeLillo here tries to “provoke thoughtful stillness rather than secure truths” (185), and this stillness is conveyed in a language that meditates, with the reader, on its own role in constructing precarious concepts such as ‘us’ and ‘them.’ When proposing that terror, in Falling Man, can be found within ‘us,’ linguistically, historically, and even physically, I must also add that DeLillo’s ‘us’ is an imagined sphere that stands in opposition to a ‘them’ world in which “things [are] clearly defined” (DeLillo, Falling 83). Within this sphere, where “total silence” is seen as a form of spiritual progress (101), one is reminded to approach narrative and, by implication, life, with a sense of mindful attention; “to hear”, like Keith, “what is always there” (225), and to look, as Nina does, for “something deeper than things or shapes of things” (111).ReferencesApitzch, Julia. "The Art of Terror – the Terror of Art: Delillo's Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 93–110.Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narratology. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.Bird, Benjamin. "History, Emotion, and the Body: Mourning in Post-9/11 Fiction." Literature Compass 4.3 (2007): 561–75.Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.Chomsky, Noam. "Commentary Moral Truisms, Empirical Evidence, and Foreign Policy." Review of International Studies 29.4 (2003): 605–20.---. September 11. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002.Conte, Joseph Mark. "Don Delillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 557–83.DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. London: Picador, 2007.---. "In the Ruins of the Future." The Guardian (22 December, 2001). ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo›.Duvall, John N. & Marzec, Robert P. "Narrating 9/11." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 381–400.Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. Taylor & Francis [EBL access record], 2009.---. Towards a 'Natural' Narratology. Routledge, [EBL access record], 1996.Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse. New York: Columbia U P, 1982.Gerrig, Richard J. "Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Reader's Narrative Experiences." Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter [EBL access record], 2011. 37–60.Grossinger, Leif. "Public Image and Self-Representation: Don Delillo's Artists and Terrorists in Postmodern Mass Society." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 81–92.Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." New Literary History 3.2 (1972): 279–99.Kauffman, Linda S. "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo's in the Ruins of the Future, Baadermeinhof, and Falling Man." Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008): 353–77.Leps, Marie-Christine. "Falling Man: Performing Fiction." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 184–203.Margolin, Uri. "(Mis)Perceiving to Good Aesthetic and Cognitive Effect." Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter [EBL access record], 2011. 61–78.Palmer, Alan. "The Construction of Fictional Minds." Narrative 10.1 (2002): 28–46.Said, Edward W. "The Clash of Ignorance." The Nation 273.12 (2001): 11–13.Silberstein, Sandra. War of Words : Language Politics and 9/11. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia U P, 2009.Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody's Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. Oxford U P [EBL Access Record], 1993.Žižek, Slavoj. "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!" The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 385–89.

Like any genre or mode, the Gothic is malleable, changing according to time and place. This is particularly apparent when what is considered Gothic in one era is compared with that of another. The giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very different threat to the ravenous vampires that stalk the novels of Anne Rice, just as Ann Radcliffe’s animated portraits may not inspire anxiety for a contemporary reader of Stephen King. The mutability of Gothic is also apparent across various versions of national Gothic that have emerged, with the specificities of place lending Gothic narratives from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Australia a distinctive flavour. In New Zealand, the Gothic is most commonly associated with Pakeha artists exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. Instead of the haunted castles, ruined abbeys and supernatural occurrences of classic Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those produced by writers as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Walpole, New Zealand Gothic fiction tends to focus on psychological horror, taking its cue, according to Jenny Lawn, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which ushered in a tendency in the Gothic novel to explore the idea of a divided consciousness. Lawn observes that in New Zealand “Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families” (“Kiwi Gothic”). Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain (1994), which focuses on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community, exemplifies the tendency of New Zealand Gothic to omit the supernatural in favour of the psychological, with its spectres being sexual predation, parental neglect and the death of an innocent. Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt (2000) is set primarily in a psychiatric hospital, detailing various forms of psychiatric disorder, as well as the acts that spring from them, such as one protagonist’s concealment for several years of her baby in a shed, while Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird (1987) is another example, with a young character’s decision to shoot his two younger siblings in the head as they sleep in an attempt to protect them from the religious beliefs of his fundamentalist parents amply illustrating the intense psychological states that characterise New Zealand Gothic. Although there is no reason why Gothic literature ought to include the supernatural, its omission in New Zealand Gothic does point to a confusion that Timothy Jones foregrounds in his suggestion that “In the absence of the trappings of established Gothic traditions – castles populated by fiendish aristocrats, swamps draped with Spanish moss and possessed by terrible spirits” New Zealand is “uncertain how and where it ought to perform its own Gothic” (203). The anxiety that Jones notes is perhaps less to do with where the New Zealand Gothic should occur, since there is an established tradition of Gothic events occurring in the bush and on the beach, while David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) uses a derelict slaughterhouse as a version of a haunted castle and Maurice Gee successfully uses a decrepit farmhouse as a Gothic edifice in The Fire-Raiser (1986), but more to do with available ghosts. New Zealand Gothic literature produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certainly tends to focus on the psychological rather than the supernatural, but earlier writing that utilises the Gothic mode is far more focused on spooky events and ghostly presences. There is a tradition of supernatural Gothic in New Zealand, but its representations of Maori ghosts complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. The stories in D. W. O. Fagen’s collection Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand (1952) illustrate the tendency in colonial New Zealand literature to represent Maori in supernatural terms expressive both of anxieties surrounding Maori agency and indigeneity, as well as Western assumptions regarding Maori culture. In much colonial Gothic, Maori ghosts, burial grounds and the notion of tapu express settler anxieties while also working to contain those anxieties by suggesting the superstitious and hence backward nature of indigenous culture. In Fagan’s story “Tapu”, which first appeared in the Bulletin in 1912, the narrator stumbles into a Maori burial ground where he is confronted by the terrible sight of “two fleshless skeletons” that grin and appear “ghastly in the dim light” (37). The narrator’s desecration of land deemed tapu fills him with “a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape” (39). This expresses a sense of the authenticity of Maori culture, but the narrator’s thought “Was there any truth in heathen devilry after all?” is quickly superseded by the relegation of Maori culture as “ancient superstitions” (40). When the narrator is approached by a tohunga following his breach of tapu, his reaction is outrage: "Here was I – a fairly decent Englishman, reared in the Anglican faith and living in the nineteenth century – hindered from going about my business, outcast, excommunicated, shunned as a leper, my servant dying, all on account of some fiendish diablerie of heathen fetish. The affair was preposterous, incredible, ludicrous" (40). Fagan’s story establishes a clear opposition between Western rationalism and “decency”, and the “heathen fetishes” associated with Maori culture, which it uses to infuse the story with the thrills appropriate to Gothic fiction and which it ultimately casts as superstitious and uncivilised. F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) includes an episode of Maori women grieving that is represented in terms that would not be out of place in horror. A group of women are described as screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived. (Maning 120–21) The gory quality of this episode positions Maori as barbaric, but Patrick Evans notes that there is an incident in Old New Zealand that grants authenticity to indigenous culture. After being discovered handling human remains, the narrator of Maning’s text is made tapu and rendered untouchable. Although Maning represents the narrator’s adherence to his abjection from Maori society as merely a way to placate a local population, when a tohunga appears to perform cleansing rituals, the narrator’s indulgence of perceived superstition is accompanied by “a curious sensation […] like what I fancied a man must feel who has just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness” (qtd. in Evans 85). Evans points out that Maning may represent the ritual as solely performative, “but the result is portrayed as real” (85). Maning’s narrator may assert his lack of belief in the tohunga’s power, but he nevertheless experiences that power. Such moments of unease occur throughout colonial writing when assertions of European dominance and rational understanding are undercut or threatened. Evans cites the examples of the painter G. F. Angus whose travels through the native forest of Waikato in the 1840s saw him haunted by the “peculiar odour” of rotting vegetation and Edward Shortland whose efforts to remain skeptical during a sacred Maori ceremony were disturbed by the manifestation of atua rustling in the thatch of the hut in which it was occurring (Evans 85). Even though the mysterious power attributed to Maori in colonial Gothic is frequently represented as threatening, there is also an element of desire at play, which Lydia Wevers highlights in her observation that colonial ghost stories involve a desire to assimilate or be assimilated by what is “other.” Wevers singles out for discussion the story “The Disappearance of Letham Crouch”, which appeared in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901. The narrative recounts the experiences of an overzealous missionary who is received by Maori as a new tohunga. In order to learn more about Maori religion (so as to successfully replace it with Christianity), Crouch inhabits a hut that is tapu, resulting in madness and fanaticism. He eventually disappears, only to reappear in the guise of a Maori “stripped for dancing” (qtd. in Wevers 206). Crouch is effectively “turned heathen” (qtd. in Wevers 206), a transformation that is clearly threatening for a Christian European, but there is also an element of desirability in such a transformation for a settler seeking an authentic New Zealand identity. Colonial Gothic frequently figures mysterious experiences with indigenous culture as a way for the European settler to essentially become indigenous by experiencing something perceived as authentically New Zealand. Colonial Gothic frequently includes the supernatural in ways that are complicit in the processes of colonisation that problematizes them as models for contemporary writers. For New Zealanders attempting to produce a Gothic narrative, the most immediately available tropes for a haunting past are Maori, but to use those tropes brings texts uncomfortably close to nineteenth-century obsessions with Maori skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape, which Edmund G. C. King notes is a way of expressing “the sense of bodily and mental displacement that often accompanied the colonial experience” (36). R. H. Chapman’s Mihawhenua (1888) provides an example of tropes particularly Gothic that remain a part of colonial discourse not easily transferable into a bicultural context. Chapman’s band of explorers discover a cave strewn with bones which they interpret to be the remains of gory cannibalistic feasts: Here, we might well imagine, the clear waters of the little stream at our feet had sometime run red with the blood of victims of some horrid carnival, and the pale walls of the cavern had grown more pale in sympathy with the shrieks of the doomed ere a period was put to their tortures. Perchance the owners of some of the bones that lay scattered in careless profusion on the floor, had, when strong with life and being, struggled long and bravely in many a bloody battle, and, being at last overcome, their bodies were brought here to whet the appetites and appease the awful hunger of their victors. (qtd. in King) The assumptions regarding the primitive nature of indigenous culture expressed by reference to the “horrid carnival” of cannibalism complicate the processes through which contemporary writers could meaningfully draw on a tradition of New Zealand Gothic utilising the supernatural. One answer to this dilemma is to use supernatural elements not specifically associated with New Zealand. In Stephen Cain’s anthology Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side (1996) there are several instances of this, such as in the story “Never Go Tramping Alone” by Alyson Cresswell-Moorcock, which features a creature called a Gravett. As Timothy Jones’s discussion of this anthology demonstrates, there are two problems arising from this unprecedented monster: firstly, the story does not seem to be a “New Zealand Gothic”, which a review in The Evening Post highlights by observing that “there is a distinct ‘Kiwi’ feel to only a few of the stories” (Rendle 5); while secondly, the Gravatt’s appearance in the New Zealand landscape is unconvincing. Jones argues that "When we encounter the wendigo, a not dissimilar spirit to the Gravatt, in Ann Tracy’s Winter Hunger or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we have a vague sense that such beings ‘exist’ and belong in the American or Canadian landscapes in which they are located. A Gravatt, however, has no such precedent, no such sense of belonging, and thus loses its authority" (251). Something of this problem is registered in Elizabeth Knox’s vampire novel Daylight (2003), which avoids the problem of making a vampire “fit” with a New Zealand landscape devoid of ancient architecture by setting all the action in Europe. One of the more successful stories in Cain’s collection demonstrates a way of engaging with a specifically New Zealand tradition of supernatural Gothic, while also illustrating some of the potential pitfalls in utilising colonial Gothic tropes of menacing bush, Maori burial caves and skeletal remains. Oliver Nicks’s “The House” focuses on a writer who takes up residence in an isolated “little old colonial cottage in the bush” (8). The strange “odd-angled walls”, floors that seem to slope downwards and the “subterranean silence” of the cottage provokes anxiety in the first-person narrator who admits his thoughts “grew increasingly dark and chaotic” (8). The strangeness of the house is only intensified by the isolation of its surroundings, which are fertile but nevertheless completely uninhabited. Alone and unnerved by the oddness of the house, the narrator listens to the same “inexplicable night screeches and rustlings of the bush” (9) that furnish so much New Zealand Gothic. Yet it is not fear inspired by the menacing bush that troubles the narrator as much as the sense that there was more in this darkness, something from which I felt a greater need to be insulated than the mild horror of mingling with a few wetas, spiders, bats, and other assorted creepy-crawlies. Something was subtlely wrong here – it was not just the oddness of the dimensions and angles. Everything seemed slightly off, not to add up somehow. I could not quite put my finger on whatever it was. (10) When the narrator escapes the claustrophobic house for a walk in the bush, the natural environment is rendered in spectral terms. The narrator is engulfed by the “bare bones of long-dead forest giants” (11) and “crowding tree-corpses”, but the path he follows in order to escape the “Tree-ghosts” is no more comforting since it winds through “a strange grey world with its shrouds of hanging moss, and mist” (12). In the midst of this Gothicised environment the narrator is “transfixed by the intersection of two overpowering irrational forces” when something looms up out of the mist and experiences “irresistible curiosity, balanced by an equal and opposite urge to turn and run like hell” (12). The narrator’s experience of being deep in the threatening bush continues a tradition of colonial writing that renders the natural environment in Gothic terms, such as H. B. Marriot Watson’s The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure (1891), which includes an episode that sees the protagonist Palliser become lost in the forest of Te Tauru and suffer a similar demoralization as Nicks’s narrator: “the horror of the place had gnawed into his soul, and lurked there, mordant. He now saw how it had come to be regarded as the home of the Taniwha, the place of death” (77). Philip Steer points out that it is the Maoriness of Palliser’s surroundings that inspire his existential dread, suggesting a certain amount of settler alienation, but “Palliser’s survival and eventual triumph overwrites this uncertainty with the relegation of Maori to the past” (128). Nicks’s story, although utilising similar tropes to colonial fiction, attempts to puts them to different ends. What strikes such fear in Nicks’s narrator is a mysterious object that inspires the particular dread known as the uncanny: I gave myself a stern talking to and advanced on the shadow. It was about my height, angular, bony and black. It stood as it now stands, as it has stood for centuries, on the edge of a swamp deep in the heart of an ancient forest high in this remote range of hills forming a part of the Southern Alps. As I think of it I cannot help but shudder; it fills me even now with inexplicable awe. It snaked up out of the ground like some malign fern-frond, curving back on itself and curling into a circle at about head height. Extending upwards from the circle were three odd-angled and bent protuberances of unequal length. A strange force flowed from it. It looked alien somehow, but it was man-made. Its power lay, not in its strangeness, but in its unaccountable familiarity; why did I know – have I always known? – how to fear this… thing? (12) This terrible “thing” represents a return of the repressed associated with the crimes of colonisation. After almost being devoured by the malevolent tree-like object the narrator discovers a track leading to a cave decorated with ancient rock paintings that contains a hideous wooden creature that is, in fact, a burial chest. Realising that he has discovered a burial cave, the narrator is shocked to find more chests that have been broken open and bones scattered over the floor. With the discovery of the desecrated burial cave, the hidden crimes of colonisation are brought to light. Unlike colonial Gothic that tends to represent Maori culture as threatening, Nicks’s story represents the forces contained in the cave as a catalyst for a beneficial transformative experience: I do remember the cyclone of malign energy from the abyss gibbering and leering; a flame of terror burning in every cell of my body; a deluge of shrieking unreason threatening to wash away the bare shred that was left of my mind. Yet even as each hellish new dimension yawned before me, defying the limits even of imagination, the fragments of my shattered sanity were being drawn together somehow, and reassembled in novel configurations. To each proposition of demonic impossibility there was a surging, answering wave of kaleidoscopic truth. (19) Although the story replicates colonial writing’s tendency to represent indigenous culture in terms of the irrational and demonic, the authenticity and power of the narrator’s experience is stressed. When he comes to consciousness following an enlightenment that sees him acknowledging that the truth of existence is a limitless space “filled with deep coruscations of beauty and joy” (20) he knows what he must do. Returning to the cottage, the narrator takes several days to search the house and finally finds what he is looking for: a steel box that contains “stolen skulls” (20). The narrator concludes that the “Trophies” (20) buried in the collapsed outhouse are the cause for the “Dark, inexplicable moods, nightmares, hallucinations – spirits, ghosts, demons” that “would have plagued anyone who attempted to remain in this strange, cursed region” (20). Once the narrator returns the remains to the burial cave, the inexplicable events cease and the once-strange house becomes an ideal home for a writer seeking peace in which to work. The colonial Gothic mode in New Zealand utilises the Gothic’s concern with a haunting past in order to associate that past with the primitive and barbaric. By rendering Maori culture in Gothic terms, such as in Maning’s blood-splattered scene of grieving or through the spooky discoveries of bone-strewn caves, colonial writing compares an “uncivilised” indigenous culture with the “civilised” culture of European settlement. For a contemporary writer wishing to produce a New Zealand supernatural horror, the colonial Gothic is a problematic tradition to work from, but Nicks’s story succeeds in utilising tropes associated with colonial writing in order to reverse its ideologies. “The House” represents European settlement in terms of barbarity by representing a brutal desecration of sacred ground, while indigenous culture is represented in positive, if frightening, terms of truth and power. Colonial Gothic’s tendency to associate indigenous culture with violence, barbarism and superstition is certainly replicated in Nicks’s story through the frightening object that attempts to devour the narrator and the macabre burial chests shaped like monsters, but ultimately it is colonial violence that is most overtly condemned, with the power inhabiting the burial cave being represented as ultimately benign, at least towards an intruder who means no harm. More significantly, there is no attempt in the story to explain events that seem outside the understanding of Western rationality. The story accepts as true what the narrator experiences. Nevertheless, in spite of the explicit engagement with the return of repressed crimes associated with colonisation, Nicks’s engagement with the mode of colonial Gothic means there is a replication of some of its underlying notions relating to settlement and belonging. The narrator of Nicks’s story is a contemporary New Zealander who is placed in the position of rectifying colonial crimes in order to take up residence in a site effectively cleansed of the sins of the past. Nicks’s narrator cannot happily inhabit the colonial cottage until the stolen remains are returned to their rightful place and it seems not to occur to him that a greater theft might underlie the smaller one. Returning the stolen skulls is represented as a reasonable action in “The House”, and it is a way for the narrator to establish what Linda Hardy refers to as “natural occupancy,” but the notion of returning a house and land that might also be termed stolen is never entertained, although the story’s final sentence does imply the need for the continuing placation of the powerful indigenous forces that inhabit the land: “To make sure that things stay [peaceful] I think I may just keep this story to myself” (20). The fact that the narrator has not kept the story to himself suggests that his untroubled occupation of the colonial cottage is far more tenuous than he might have hoped. References Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne: Text, 2010. Bannister, Bronwyn. Haunt. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000. Calder, Alex. “F. E. Maning 1811–1883.” Kotare 7. 2 (2008): 5–18. Chapman, R. H. Mihawhenua: The Adventures of a Party of Tourists Amongst a Tribe of Maoris Discovered in Western Otago. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1888. Cresswell-Moorcock, Alyson. “Never Go Tramping Along.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 63-71. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Postcolonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Fagan, D. W. O. Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1952. Gee, Maurice. The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Penguin, 1986. Gunn, Kirsty. Rain. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Hardy, Linda. “Natural Occupancy.” Meridian 14.2 (October 1995): 213-25. Jones, Timothy. The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic. PhD thesis. Wellington: Victoria University, 2010. King, Edmund G. C. “Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century Zealand Writing,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28.2 (2010): 35-57. “Kiwi Gothic.” Massey (Nov. 2001). 8 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/magazine/2001_Nov/stories/gothic.html›. Maning, F. E. Old New Zealand and Other Writings. Ed. Alex Calder. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Marriott Watson, H. B. The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure. London: Hutchinson, 1891. Nicks, Oliver. “The House.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 8-20. Rendle, Steve. “Entertaining Trip to the Dark Side.” Rev. of Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side, ed. Stephen Cain. The Evening Post. 17 Jan. 1997: 5. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Patrick Nobes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Steer, Philip. “History (Never) Repeats: Pakeha Identity, Novels and the New Zealand Wars.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 114-37. Virtue, Noel. The Redemption of Elsdon Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 2010. Wevers, Lydia. “The Short Story.” The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. Ed. Terry Sturm. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991: 203–70.

Laidlaw, S.J. An Infidel in Paradise. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2013. Print.In S.J. (Susan) Laidlaw’s first novel, she takes us to a contemporary Canadian diplomatic compound in Pakistan. Emma, the sixteen-year-old protagonist, has been suddenly uprooted from a comfortable life in the Philippines. Her father has left her family and her mother has moved Emma and her two siblings to Islamabad. Suffering from culture shock, adjusting to a new school, and playing parent to her younger sister, Emma is frustrated and takes her anger out on her family. Emma offends a dreamy young man, Mustapha, whom she meets on her first day at her new school and she is subsequently labeled as rude and racist. However, we know from listening to Emma’s inner dialogue that she is neither, and her interactions reinforce this. In the time-honored literary romance tradition, Emma’s clash with Mustapha does not prevent them from developing feelings for each other. Mustapha, however, is promised in an arranged marriage. Their drama comes to a head when threats against the American embassies shake the international community in Islamabad, leaving Emma in a life threatening situation.This novel is well-written and wonderfully real. Emma’s anger with a sub-text of guilt, her raw frustration with her new situation, and her inability to deal with her feelings all rang true. The little touches, like Emma’s interaction with a slobbery dog, hit home: “He licks my hand, which is gross but also comforting. I wipe it on my jeans when he’s not looking”. Emma cares about the people and creatures around her, although she is terrified of being hurt. She is angry at her parents, but she also understands why they separated. Her feelings of being alone are exasperated by the extreme culture shock and she is having trouble coping. Emma’s flouting of local tradition caught me by surprise; for one so well-traveled with a diplomat parent, she did not give much credence to local customs. Perhaps it is her form of rebellion.Laidlaw addresses socio-cultural issues with honesty and frankness. She does not separate the ‘us’ from the ‘them,’ identifying cultural boundaries but noting the permeability of those boundaries. Laidlaw broaches intercultural conflict openly, acknowledging that her protagonists’ countrymen are not necessarily welcome, but few people mean to cause harm.I would recommend this book for anyone 12 and up. A somewhat graphic scene near the end of the book may be too much for younger readers. I hope Laidlaw continues with additional novels as these themes are critical to explore and she does it so well. Note: my favorite part of the novel is the Urdu glossary at the back; it’s a very nice touch.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Jorden SmithJorden Smith joins the team as a book reviewer. Jorden is a Public Services Librarian in Rutherford Humanities and Social Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. She is an avid fiction reader and subscribes to Hemingway’s belief that “there is no friend as loyal as a book.”

Among the large group of Harry Potter fans who write their own stories about the boy wizard, his friends, and his foes, and publish them on the Internet, some are interested in the exploration of the erotic and romantic bond between identical twins. Because the Harry Potter saga features two sets of identical twin pairs of different gender—the Weasley brothers and the Patil sisters—the series not only provides a unique playground for the recipients in terms of the possibilities for twincest stories; more importantly, it offers ample opportunity for researchers to examine how fans actually use such pairings. In this essay, the examination of twin relationships as portrayed within Rowling's works, the movies, and in twincest fan fiction are confronted with each other to outline how Rowling's different concepts of the sibling pairs and the author's general ongoing interest in doubling motifs is consistently expanded by fan fiction writers to discuss the complex relationship between source and fan text.

This essay explores Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley as a literary endeavour to recreate the sibling dynamic of the Brontës’ childhoods, and the psychological effect of being the ‘surviving’ sibling of a formally collaborative unit. In their adolescent years, the Brontës famously forged fictional kingdoms together, known collectively as “The Glass Town Saga”. Throughout adulthood, each Brontë continuously returned to these stories, oftentimes due to nostalgia and occasionally for creative reinvention. However, by the summer of 1849, their familial collaboration was at an end. Charlotte was the last sibling standing, having lost all her co-authors in the space of nine months. In despair, as a form of catharsis, she turned to her writing and this essay will focus on how protagonist Caroline Helstone became an elegy for both Branwell and Anne Brontë. Mere weeks before Charlotte began volume 1 of Shirley, Branwell was determined to return to a heroine created in his childhood, also named “Caroline (1836)”. This juvenilia piece explores themes of waning sibling connections, death and heartbreak – issues which tormented Branwell and Charlotte throughout his prolonged final illness. Yet Caroline Helstone’s ethereal femininity and infantilization mirrors Anne Brontë’s reputation as the ‘obedient’ sibling, as well as the views expressed in her semi-autobiographical novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

This essay explores Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley as a literary endeavour to recreate the sibling dynamic of the Brontës’ childhoods, and the psychological effect of being the ‘surviving’ sibling of a formally collaborative unit. In their adolescent years, the Brontës famously forged fictional kingdoms together, known collectively as “The Glass Town Saga”. Throughout adulthood, each Brontë continuously returned to these stories, oftentimes due to nostalgia and occasionally for creative reinvention. However, by the summer of 1849, their familial collaboration was at an end. Charlotte was the last sibling standing, having lost all her co-authors in the space of nine months. In despair, as a form of catharsis, she turned to her writing and this essay will focus on how protagonist Caroline Helstone became an elegy for both Branwell and Anne Brontë. Mere weeks before Charlotte began volume 1 of Shirley, Branwell was determined to return to a heroine created in his childhood, also named “Caroline (1836)”. This juvenilia piece explores themes of waning sibling connections, death and heartbreak – issues which tormented Branwell and Charlotte throughout his prolonged final illness. Yet Caroline Helstone’s ethereal femininity and infantilization mirrors Anne Brontë’s reputation as the ‘obedient’ sibling, as well as the views expressed in her semi-autobiographical novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

The “Suspicion” issue of M/C Journal explores suspicion as both critical approach and cultural concept, inviting us to engage with its interpretive potential in a world where mistrust has become the norm. Contemporary Western culture is characterised by a climate of increased border security and surveillance, especially since 9/11. Judith Butler identifies an increase in paranoia and censorship associated with these factors, which has greatly affected freedom of speech, politics, the press, and what constitutes the public sphere. These shifts have had considerable impact on how we relate to words and images. In such a culture of distrust—of authority, of politics, and of supposed objective truth—how revealing or misleading is suspicion as a critical methodology? This issue of M/C Journal attempts to unravel that question; although it promises no answers, what it does offer is insight into the complexities of using suspicion to critique a range of texts, not all of which lend themselves so easily to a suspicious reading. The hermeneutics of suspicion, an approach introduced by Paul Ricoeur, assumes that the manifest or surface meaning of a text is a veil that masks its true agenda. As a critical approach, suspicion reads against the text, calling into question the authenticity of representation. The essays collected here use suspicion to explore contemporary fiction, film, and imagery, attempting not only to expose their hidden meanings, but to uncover the perspicacity of the suspicious approach itself. In her feature paper, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Rita Felski discusses the place of suspicion in contemporary critical theory, questioning its neglect in favour of critique, which is deemed more “intellectually rigorous” and less prone to the potential pitfalls of subjectivity. Felski challenges us to reconsider this view, positing that the “muted affective state” of suspicion may offer “an antidote to the charisma of critique,” bringing an element of pleasure and “game-like sparring” to the process of analysing a text. Felski acknowledges that “contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object.” And indeed each of the articles in this collection are concerned, across a range of disciplines, with a text’s potential to elicit an affective response, whether from within a text, outside of it, or from some uncertain position in between.Suspicion can draw us into a text and force us to think more deeply about it, even as that text may seem to evade a suspicious reading. In “‘There’s Suspicion, Nothing More’: Suspicious Readings of Michael Haneke’s Cache,” Alison Taylor discusses Haneke’s challenging 2005 film, which presents viewers with a conundrum that has no resolution. Although the film invites a suspicious reading as we follow the attempts of the protagonist, Georges, to discover who is responsible for making surveillance tapes of his home, the culprit is never identified; our suspicion is both pre-empted and never resolved. Taylor charts a frustrated suspicious response on the part of the film’s audience, its critics, scholars, and even its characters, and argues that the film is in fact a critique of the interpretive process, as it plays with and upends the expectations of the viewer.Niva Kaspi similarly questions the interpretive process, as she investigates the source of narrative suspicion towards a terrorist/victim discourse in Don DeLillo’s post 9/11 novel, Falling Man, for readers and characters alike. In “Bill Lawton by Any Other Name: Language Games and Terror in Falling Man,” Kaspi suggests that the way the text plays with language, naming and re-naming the terrorist-suspect—bin Laden is misheard by the protagonist’s son and his friends, the Siblings, and misnamed Bill Lawton—and other “tricks” and “errors,” activates our suspicion, so that “the reader, after a while, distances somewhat from the text, scanning for alternative possibilities and approaching interpretation with a tentative sense of doubt.” We come to view the printed text with suspicion, and hence question our responses to the hyper-public, press-mediated discourses that followed the events of 9/11. Nick Levey’s “‘Analysis Paralysis’: Suspicion, Trust, and David Foster Wallace’s ‘Wager’” explores how Wallace’s work deliberately evades decoding and interpretation, asking us to consider how fruitful the opposite approach to suspicion—trust—may be in light of how few answers the book yields. Infinite Jest itself poses a critique of suspicion, as only the characters in the novel who do not question their surroundings and circumstances achieve any sort of closure. Levey’s paper examines Wallace’s concern with “the existential implications of suspicion, in what might be lost in following doubt to its most ‘radical’ conclusions.” The existential implications of suspicion are further explored in Sarah Richardson’s analysis of Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home, “‘Old Father, Old Artificer’: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Bechdel’s graphic memoir charts her relationship with her troubled father, who hid his homosexuality behind “a veneer of perfect provincial Christian fatherhood and respectability.” Although Bechdel initially interprets her father’s history suspiciously, she moves towards a “positive queering of her family history and the embrace of her father’s legacy.” Thus Bechdel’s turn away from suspicion is restorative and ultimately creative.Nicola Scholes, on the other hand, explores the dilemma in facing a text that turns deliberately and self-consciously towards suspicion. In “The Difficulty of Reading Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ Suspiciously,” Scholes identifies the challenge of seeking hidden meanings in Ginsberg’s poem due to its self-exposing nature. Contrary to the potential a hermeneutic of suspicion has to expose and reveal hidden truths, “Kaddish” blatantly “parades its unpalatable truths.” However Scholes argues that a suspicious reading of “Kaddish” is still possible; indeed, it can mine the poem’s depths even further, “resisting its self-inscribed psychoanalysis to expose the gender politics of Allen’s exposé.”Gender and sexuality may infinitely complicate or subvert suspicious analysis, as two papers in this issue aptly demonstrate. Samantha Lindop’s “The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me” explores the oft-neglected figure of the homme fatal, questioning whether we can regard this figure with the same suspicion-grounded psychoanalytic perspective typically applied to the femme fatale of classic film noir. Focusing on neo-noir films Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me, Lindop exposes the homme fatal as a figure who subverts the suspicious gaze with his self-reflexive knowledge of Freudian theory. By contrast, the female protagonist in crime fiction is a figure who attracts suspicion on a number of narrative levels. As Katherine Howell argues in “The Suspicious Figure of the Female Forensic Pathologist Investigator in Crime Fiction,” female forensic pathologists in novels by popular crime writers Patricia Cornwell and Tess Gerritsen are portrayed as suspicious not simply for their performance of conventionally masculine gender roles—that of investigator and pathologist—but for their identification with the dead. These characters occupy abject space—they exist on the borderlines of life and death, self and other, masculine and feminine—and are thus coded as suspect from within the text.As the innately suspicious atmosphere of crime fiction and film noir brings us face to face with issues of morality and mortality, so too does Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2007 film The Lives of Others, which draws on the recent history of East Germany under Stasi rule. In her paper “Love in the Time of Socialism: Negotiating the Personal and the Social in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others,” Rowena Grant-Frost explores the film’s blurring of public and private—a boundary that depends on the climate of suspicion created by the Stasi as a form of State control. Through focusing on the film’s love story rather than its social milieu, Grant-Frost discusses the “affective experiences associated with constant surveillance,” suggesting this as a means for “contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate.”But can an understanding of the suspicion at the heart of systems of surveillance, power, and control that so pervade our contemporary world help to develop our moral awareness? Chari Larsson’s “Suspicious Images: Iconophobia and the Ethical Gaze” asks what happens when the images we are constantly exposed to in our media-saturated culture transgress and violates limits, and when, as spectators, we have an ethical and moral responsibility to bear witness. Considering the relationship between iconophobia—suspicion of, and anxiety towards, images—and spectatorship, Larsson draws on art critic Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the prohibition of Holocaust representation, and extrapolates his insights to analyse Laura Waddington’s 2004 film, Border, about asylum seekers in Northern France. Larsson suggests that both Didi-Huberman and Waddington argue for a model of spectatorship that undermines the relationship between viewer and image, so that “the terms of spectatorship may be relocated from suspicion to an ethical, participatory mode of engagement.”Perhaps, in the end, distrust is all we can trust as we attempt to decode the meaning of any text. What seems most important is for us to understand how to apply suspicion wisely; as the papers in this issue demonstrate, suspicious readings do not simply attempt to expose hidden meanings, but reconnect us with the pleasures of that discovery process, and equip us with the self-reflexive ability to question both a text and the efficacy of our approach to it. As Felski points out, while critique lets us sweep away a text’s surface and suspicion asks us to mine its depths, both approaches call for a “knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance” that offers new insights and prompts us to think more critically, more deeply, and more fruitfully.This issue of M/C Journal was inspired by the “Reading the Suspect” Work in Progress Conference for which Rita Felski delivered the keynote address at the University of Queensland in July 2010. ReferencesButler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. 2004.Felski, Rita. "Suspicious Minds." "Reading the Suspect": 14th Work-In-Progress Conference. University of Queensland. St Lucia, Qld. 30 July 2010. Keynote Address. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale U P, 1970. 32–56.

Nelson, Jandy. I'll Give You the Sun. New York: Dial Books, 2014. Print.At thirteen, twins Noah and Jude seem to share an unbreakable bond that goes beyond a typical sibling relationship. Three years later, at sixteen, they are barely speaking to each other; each holding on to secrets that could completely destroy or heal their fractured relationship.A winner of the 2015 Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and a 2015 YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, I’ll Give You the Sun, is an absorbing, coming-of-age tale told from the alternating perspectives of Jude and her brother Noah. Nelson skillfully pieces together a picture of the lives of the two protagonists as they struggle to come to terms with love, loss and alienation.Nelson blends poetic phrases and description with believable dialogue creating two distinct characters that readers will quickly identify with. The voices of Noah and Jude are so finely crafted that readers will find themselves drawn to the struggles and triumphs of these two characters. The use of non-linear plot progression will keep readers absorbed until the last page.I’ll Give You the Sun is an excellent choice for the high school reader, particularly those ready to transition to adult contemporary fiction. Nelson sensitively and frankly deals with issues such as sexual abuse, sexual orientation, bullying and infidelity. Due to the themes and topics of the book, it should be considered a mature read.Readers who enjoy authors such as John Green or A.S. King will be drawn to the writing of Jandy Nelson and I’ll Follow The Sun.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Rachel WildRachel Wild is an English teacher at Parkland Composite High School in Edson, Alberta. She is currently enrolled the Teacher Librarianship Masters degree program through distance education. Reading and reviewing a plethora of young adult novels has renewed her interest in and passion for this genre.

Abstract Pharmacological experiments indicate that neuropeptides can effectively tune neuronal activity and modulate locomotor output patterns. However, their functions in shaping innate locomotion often remain elusive. For example, somatostatin has been previously shown to induce locomotion when injected in the brain ventricles but to inhibit fictive locomotion when bath-applied in the spinal cord in vitro. Here, we investigated the role of somatostatin in innate locomotion through a genetic approach by knocking out somatostatin 1.1 (sst1.1) in zebrafish. We automated and carefully analyzed the kinematics of locomotion over a hundred of thousand bouts from hundreds of mutant and control sibling larvae. We found that the deletion of sst1.1 did not impact acousto-vestibular escape responses but led to abnormal exploration. sst1.1 mutant larvae swam over larger distance, at higher speed and performed larger tail bends, indicating that Somatostatin 1.1 inhibits spontaneous locomotion. Altogether our study demonstrates that Somatostatin 1.1 innately contributes to slowing down spontaneous locomotion.

Although many recognize that families shape the likelihood of getting into college, few examine variation in families’ involvement during college or its implications for sustaining inequalities. Using interviews with 51 Black and 61 Asian American college students, our analysis reveals that class and race jointly shape students’ perceptions of the financial assistance that they receive from and give to family—whether in the short term (during college) or their plans for the long term (post-college). Advantaged students across race receive more and provide less assistance than disadvantaged students. Both disadvantaged Black and Asian American students share future intentions of support, but only disadvantaged Black students give their families money during college. Race and class affect students’ framing of family and designation of the particular family members (whether parents, siblings, extended kin, or fictive kin) included in these exchanges. Lastly, we analyze the ways these different forms of assistance shape students’ college struggles; Black students experience the most strain due to their working and giving back during college. Drawing on and developing theories addressing the models and practices of familial diversity, this paper shows how class and race intersect to shape family assistance and its consequences for the persistence of inequality.

When I was a girl, I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The beauty of this book is that the reader can see pieces of herself in every March sister, and I was no exception. Mostly, I sought flattering comparisons: Amy’s creativity, Beth’s selflessness, Meg’s nurturing spirit, Jo’s ambition. But I carry no shortage of ineptitudes, particularly with Jo’s rashness. All too often I found myself biting my tongue, and like Jo, ending up receiving a good scolding from my own Marmee. Despite these imperfections, Jo became a kindred spirit of mine. Her ambition and love of writing awoke something in me. I, too, became a writer after reading this book. I begged my mom to purchase journals for me, and if I was good and did my chores and went to Sunday school, she would laminate and bind the pages together. I developed my own series of stories, each volume detailing coming-of-age experiences, like fighting with siblings, or a good friend moving across the country. The experiences in those stories were my experiences, and through this fictional world I was able to better understand my own; in this way, I sought to become Jo March.

This article examines Andrew Lang’s anthropological writings on magic and religion in relation to a broader network of literary and sociological discourses. Lang’s work, along with that of others, highlights the labors nineteenth-century anthropologists expended to segregate magic from science, religion, and utilitarian action in the capitalist public sphere. Despite such efforts at segregation, however, nineteenth-century anthropological writings expose the genealogical continuities between magic, science, religion, and self-interest. These continuities, the essay contends, also surface in anthropology’s sibling discourses: literature and political economy. Lang’s contemporaries, such as H. Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, drew on anthropological findings in their fictional representations of magical rites and beliefs either in rural Britain or at the colonial periphery. Magic’s proximity to science, religion, and capitalist self-interest also undergirds Herbert Spencer’s systems theories and reverberates in the political economists that drew on Spencer’s work. The essay thus demonstrates not only how Lang functions as a node within a broad disciplinary network, but also how the concept of magic traverses numerous discursive fields.