Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „American Spelling books”

If for no other reason the fact that all published editions of the Pisan Cantos have been unable to execute Ezra Pound’s instructions for the insertion of Greek and have omitted over fifty sets of Chinese characters that he directed his publishers to include would be sufficient cause to re-edit the poem. But the case for a new edition is stronger than that. Owing to the extraordinary conditions of its composition and transmission, approximately five hundred corruptions of Pound’s typescript text survived into the poem’s first English and American publications. Pound’s typescript of the Pisan Cantos was prepared during his incarceration in the US Army Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) an American military prison camp near Pisa during the summer and autumn of 1945, and was the product of the harsh conditions of his imprisonment (his wavering memory following a mental breakdown, his lack of books, and the many errors he inevitably produced typing at odd hours on unfamiliar typewriters). Just as seriously, many of Pound’s emended carbons never reached his editors at New Directions and he was forced during his continued incarceration in the U.S. to delegate responsibility for many kinds of correction he would normally have made himself. He was also denied access to his originals at every stage proofing. Although there can never be a definitively “corrected edition” of the Pisan Cantos because Pound made inconsistent emendations on different typescript leaves and kept his publishers in the dark about which instances of idiosyncratic spelling, quotation, and punctuation he wished them to correct, this does not mean that an edition cannot be established that eliminates the corruptions that later crept into the text and that carries out Pound’s implicit and explicit expectations for producing the poem, many of which his first editors never fully understood. A critical edition based on the typescripts Pound produced at Pisa and including a complete historical apparatus is currently in preparation with Oxford University Press and will not only achieve these aims but also make it possible to understand the deficiencies of the poem’s currently circulating texts.

The article deals with the representation of literary characters’ pronunciation in books by modern Russian, British, American (USA), Australian and Spanish writers. It shows how the author’s comments, as well as alternative spellings and other visual means of registering segmental and prosodic features of speech are used to point to a foreign accent, a regional or social dialect, or individual pronunciation patterns, etc. Frequencies of the use of the literary tool in Russian, English and Spanish literatures are presented. The conclusion emphasizes the sociolinguistic validity of book characters’ phonetic portraying and the adequate picture of the sociolinguistic situation in the country drawn with its help.

Martin Chuzzlewit is considered a very rich linguistic mosaic where a number of characters are in the habit of speaking 'private languages' or idiolects. In this travel-book we find a source of Dickens's impressions of America and a treatment of a linguistic problem: to make each class, each group and profession speak in its own characteristic way. In the representation of American speech the Victorian writer uses features such as deviant spellings, unusual morpho-syntactic patterns, standard words used in a different context, extralinguistic capitals and hyphens. The technique in the dialogues of Martin Chuzzlewit is especially the graphic and humorous, by means of which he exhibits the most trifling and commonplace things in a new and amusing light.

During the mid-nineteenth century American physicians were greatly troubled by what they thought were the evils of excessive academic demands placed on children in our public schools. The editorial below, published in 1854 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, is typical of many of a similar nature. Our city prides itself on the superiority of its public schools; and we think Boston is justly entitled to take the highest rank among the cities of the civilized world for the facilities afforded by its citizens for the education of youth. But notwithstanding the large expenditure of money for the erection of beautiful and commodious school-houses, for mathematical and other instruments, for teachers, &c., all which give a character to our Boston schools, there exists an evil in the present system of educating, which seriously demands attention, and, if possible, a remedy. It is the ambition of the teachers of our schools, to have their scholars thoroughly instructed, and that they may appear well before the committees at examinations; and for that purpose, lessons in great numbers and requiring toilsome study, are imposed upon them. No discrimination is made, as regards the mental or physical capacity of the individual members of the class, but all are required to be perfect in their answers, or else they lose their position in the class and school. Not one fifth of the time devoted to school hours is allowed for study, being occupied in recitations; and the severe tasks the poor children have in getting their lessons must be apparent, when it is known that so long a time is required in reciting them. The scholars of the second class, for instance, have to commit to memory from twelve to twenty-five pages of geography, three to six pages of arithmetic, the same of grammar, three pages in spelling, besides exercises in reading, writing, &c. Now these lessons must be studied out of school, at the time which should be devoted to exercise and recreation. The imposition of such severe tasks upon the young and growing children, must enfeeble their constutions, and often incapacitates them, if they arrive at maturity, for enjoying life. We have seen many children who were ambitious to accomplish all that was required of them by teachers; and to do so, the greatest portion of the twenty-four hours was necessarily devoted to their books, scarcely allowing any time for taking their meals. It must be obvious to every one, that such close application to study, produces, in their turn, a train of diseases which cannot always be eradicated. Aching heads, loss of appetite, sleepless nights, inflamed eyes, with other deviations from health, are the accompaniments and the consequences of excessive mental exertion.

The many different authors that have examined Webster’s speller agree on its influence in establishing American English. However, this examination seeks to accomplish something different from these works: to further explore the author’s linguistic and political concerns to reveal how they influenced the design of the speller. For that reason, this article compares Webster’s American Spelling Book of 1793 to Thomas Dilworth’s American edition of A New Guide to the English Tongue (1796). The essay identifies the changes that Webster introduces in his speller, set apart from Dilworth’s, and reveals how they were determined by his nationalistic beliefs and how the alterations might have contributed, from the author’s perspective, to the creation of a national character in the United States. Still, the investigation concludes that this edition of the speller does not, yet, define what it is to be American.

This paper presents a corpus-driven analysis of the linguistic competition between the suffixes -our/-or in Early Modern English. It is conceived as a state of the art to provide an explanation of the development and distribution of these competing suffixes in Early Modern English. The study is based on the distribution of the most common set of words with alternative spellings in the period to investigate the development and the standardisation of the -our and -or groups. The study offers the quantitative distribution of the suffixes in the period corroborating the participation of phenomena such as linguistic extinction, specialisation, blocking and lexicalisation in the configuration of the contemporary morphological paradigm. The source of evidence comes from the corpus of Early English Books Online (Davies, 2017) for the period 1470–1690. In addition to this, the study also relies on sources such as the Evans Corpus (2011), the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008).

Not all homo sapiens are human subjects. This paper explores the lived experience of homo sapiens but not human that I call “lived flesh.” A lived experience/distinction that shouldn’t be possible on Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm.” The use of flesh is deliberate and emerges from my engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” through Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The affective, experiential, and ethical practices of american Blackwomxn in these texts problematize Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity and his account of the generality of Being (“The Intertwining – The Chiasm”). Merleau-Ponty’s effacement of raced, sexed, and gendered difference results in a construct of the human subject that cannot include all homo sapiens.

Mikrogeophagus Meulengracht-Madsen, 1968 is the oldest available generic name that has Apistogramma ramirezi as type species. Papiliochromis Meulengracht-Madsen, 1975 is an objective junior synonym of Mikrogeophagus. Papiliochromis Kullander, 1977 is an objective junior synonym of Mikrogeophagus and an objective junior synonym and homonym of Papiliochromis Meulengracht-Madsen, 1975. The name Microgeophagus used in an aquarium book by Frey 1957 is a nomen nudum because it was not used as a valid name. Many usages of Microgeophagus are erroneous subsequent spellings of Mikrogeophagus. Pseudogeophagus used by Hoedeman 1969 and Pseudoapistogramma used by Axelrod 1971 are nomina nuda. Mikrogeophagus, Microgeophagus, Pseudogeophagus, and Pseudoapistogramma were proposed with a direct or inferred reference to a non-existent publication about the behaviour of A. ramirezi. The case of A. ramirezi suggests that ornamental fish magazines may be unreliable sources of nomenclatural information.

The analysis of American and British English's Vocabularies. The purpose of thisresearch was to find out and analyze the vocabularies in American English andBritish English. The research was held by using the qualitative descriptive analysismethod and library research where data made in form of words, sentences,quotations or definitions by using the sources of data from books, articles alsojournals which the data related to the analysis. It was found from the research thatalthough there were similarities between American and British English but it wasalso found the differences, that is : (1). Past and Past Participle Forms of Verb, (2).Past Simple Vs Present Perfect, (3). Subject-verb Agreement, (4). Prepositions, (5).Vocabulary Differences, (6). Writing Dates, (7). Articles, (8). Auxiliary verbs, (9).Tag questions and (10). Spelling, (11). Punctuation, (12). StressKeywords : Vocabularies, American English, British English

Many Canadians feel that there is some difference between Canadian and American speech beyond simply the spelling of "colour," and linguistic research has confirmed that many vocabulary items, like poutine, eavestrough, and skate-a-thon, are found only in Canada. Although this topic has been popularized somewhat by books like Katherine Barber's Only in Canada, You Say, the extent to which Canadians are aware of the distinctness of their everyday vocabulary is still uncertain. This survey of 54 Queen's students, all native English-speaking Canadians age 24 and under, shows that real and false Canadianisms can be placed in categories based on meaning association and frequency of usage that correlate to the likelihood that respondents will judge them as "uniquely Canadian." Comparing identification and usage also reveals some intriguing characteristics of this demographic, including the decline of "chesterfield," contact with "francophones," and gender differences in food-related Canadianisms. This presentation will examine both specific examples and general trends found in the survey, as well as suggesting potential areas for further related study.

Early nonsectarian Sunday Schools provided instruction in spelling, reading, writing, and singing in the years prior to the introduction of free, public education in the United States. This study explores the Sunday school as a laboratory for public school music education. Several of the first Sunday school tunebooks included theoretical introductions with elementary instruction in music reading much like the early school songbooks that followed. Three early tunebooks will be considered, E. Osborn’s The Sunday School Music Book (1826), Ezra Barrett’s Sabbath School Psalmody (1828), and Elam Ives, Jr’s American Sunday-School Psalmody (1832). In each case, the various “experiments” introduced in the tunebooks will be discussed. Some of these experiments were rejected in the public schools, but others had lasting importance.

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

The purpose of this research was to describe the students’ ability in writing cause and effect sentence at Grade XII of Culinary Art, SMKN 2 Pariaman. The descriptive method was used as the design of this research. The researcher used a total sampling technique and the sample was 29 students. The instrument for collecting the data in this research was a writing test of cause and effect. The result of the analysis showed that the test was reliable. It was supported by the fact that the coefficient correlation was 0.98. It was categorized as having a very high correlation. Then the test was valid in terms of content because it had covered the material that students had learned. Generally, all of the twelfth grade students have been able to write cause and effect sentence. 20.68% of students got good, 55.17% of students got moderate and 36.84% of students got low. In applying grammar 17.24 % of students got good, 44.82% of students got moderate, and 37.93% of students got low. In using vocabulary 17.24 % of students got good, 65.51% of students got moderate, 17.24% of students got low. In mechanics 6.89% of students got very good, 58.62% of students got good, 27.58% of students got moderate, and 6.89% of students got low. REFERENCES Agustrianti, S. (2014). Improving The Eleventh Grade Students’Ability in Writing Simple Cause Effect Sentences Through Flow Chart. E-Journal of English Language Teaching Society (ELTS). (2) 1. Retrieved April 15, 2021, from http://jurnal.untad.ac.id/jurnal/index.php/ELTS/article/ view/3018 Andersen, S. (2014). Sentence Types and Structures. California: San José State University Writing Center. Retrieved March 20, 2021, fromhttps://www.sjsu.edu/writingcenter/docs/handouts/ Sentence%20Types%20and%20Functions.pdf Field, M. (2009). Improve Your Written English : Master the essential of grammar, punctuation, and spelling and write wth greater confidence. United Kingdom: How to Book. Retrieved March 25, 2021, from https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=53AFCD2CAA9D8CD4491322978CB72281 Harmer, Jeremy. (2007). How to Teach English. England: Pearson Education Limited. Indriana, F. S. (2020). An Error Analysis of Using Conjunction in Students’ Writing Cause aand Effect Sentence (A Qualitative Research At The Eleventh Grade Students Of SMA Islam Sudirman Ambarawa In The Academic Year Of 2019/2020). E-repository perpus IAIN Salatiga. Retrieved February 2, 2021, from http://e-repository.perpus.iainsalatiga.ac.id/8469/ Khalel, A., F. (2020). An Analysis of the Third Year Students’ Difficulties to Use Expressions of Quantity in Writing Positive Simple Sentences at the English Department of Bung Hatta University. E-journal Bung Hatta. 5 (2). Retrieved February 15, 2021, from https://ejurnal. bunghatta.ac.id/index.php/JFKIP/article/view/18066 Landon, B. (2013). Building Great Sentences : How to Wrtie The Kinds Of Sentences You Love to Read. New York: The CoursesTM. Retrieved March 22, 2021, from https://libgen.is/book/ index. php?md5=A4084FE55A161955A94104337715BD24 Nainggolan, E, S. (2021). Error Analysis on Simple Present Tense of Students’ Sentences. Universitas Pamulang. Open Journal unpam. Retrieved August 19, 2021, from http://openjournal.unpam.ac.id/index.php/NOSLLTL/article/viewFile/9317/5892 Raimes A. (1983). Techniques in Teaching Writing. New York: Oxford American English. Refnita, L. (2018). Educational research: A guide for beginners. Padang: LPPM Universitas Bung Hatta. Riggs, Ann. (2012). Sentence Types and Punctuation. UK: WFRANKLIN WATTS.

Vermond, Kira. The Secret Life of Money: A Kid’s Guide to Cash. Illus. Clayton Hanmer. Toronto: Owl Kids, 2012. Print. As a kid, I learned about money early from a banker father, an entrepreneurial great-aunt, a compulsory grade 9 consumer education class, and high school elective in economics. This book amalgamates all those types of sources in a great introduction for kids, parents, and adults alike. It is written in a breezy style with clever phrasing, illustrations, variation in presentation format, and is peppered with quotes from the likes of Groucho Marx, ABBA, and Maya Angelou. Although written by a Canadian with many Canadian examples, there is a distinct American flavour in the spelling (ex. paycheck vs. paycheque), green colour scheme, and choice of pithy quotations. Three main themes emerge: what is money, how to get it, and how to keep and grow it. The chapter on the history and nature of money has some great examples of “wacky” forms of cash used throughout history. There is, however, little if anything about world currencies today. Vermond confronts the many problems with the expectations or hopes of “free” money (ex. lottery winnings, stealing, counterfeiting, scams and frauds) and guides the reader towards developing good long-term habits, realistic wage and salary expectations, and the importance of ongoing learning about saving and growing money through investing and compound interest. For example, few of us will make millions as CEOs or sports stars so benchmarks such as $7.25 per hour as a busboy or $45,000 as a firefighter are more realistic. The examples of how kids can earn money seem a bit standard (ex. mow lawns, babysit, paper route, deliver goods to old people) but I suppose opportunities for youth don’t change much. There is lots of discussion on how to keep your hard-earned money including smart spending, the pros and cons of credit as well as references to interesting research in behavioural economics, advertising shenanigans, and the cost of being cool. I especially appreciate the author’s willingness to tackle social justice issues. She introduces some research on the social value of various careers (ex. advertising managers ‘waste’ $17 for every dollar they earn while hospital cleaners ‘create’ $15). There is also coverage of microcredit, societal costs of poverty, causes of the gaps between rich and broke countries, unintended consequences of donating old clothing to charity, consumerism vs. consumption, and even the notion that salary satisfaction is all relative. The overall message seems to be that media-inspired dreams of mansions and pools are unrealistic so hard work and life-long learning about money is required. Fortunately, work also contributes to our overall life-satisfaction. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: David SulzDavid is a Public Services Librarian at University of Alberta and liaison librarian to Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. He has university studies in Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics; he formerly taught in schools and museums. His interests include physical activity, music, home improvements, and above all, things Japanese.

This paper argues that artist Dope Saint Jude is transforming South African hip-hop by queering a genre that has predominantly been male and heteronormative. Specifically, I analyse the opening skit of her music video “Keep in Touch” in order to unpack the ways which she revives Gayle, a gay language that adopted double-coded forms of speech during the apartheid era—a context in which homosexuals were criminalised. The use of Gayle and spaces close to the city centre of Cape Town (such as Salt River and Woodstock) speaks to the city as it was before it was transformed by the decline of industries due to the country’s adoption of neoliberal economics and, more recently, by the gentrification of these spaces. Dope Saint Jude therefore reclaims these city spaces through her use of gay modes of speech that have a long history in Cape Town and by positioning her work as hip-hop, which has been popular in the city for well over two decades. Her inclusion of transgender MC and DJ Angel Ho pushes the boundaries of hegemonic and binary conceptions of gender identity even further. In essence, Dope Saint Jude is transforming local hip-hop in a context that is shaped significantly by US cultural imperialism. The artist is also transforming our perspective of spaces that have been altered by neoliberal economics.Setting the SceneDope Saint Jude (DSJ) is a queer MC from Elsies River, a working class township located on Cape Town's Cape Flats in South Africa. Elsies River was defined as a “coloured” neighbourhood under the apartheid state's Group Areas Act, which segregated South Africans racially. With the aid of the Population Registration Act, citizens were classified, not merely along the lines of white, Asian, or black—black subjects were also divided into further categories. The apartheid state also distinguished between black and “coloured” subjects. Michael MacDonald contends that segregation “ordained blacks to be inferior to whites; apartheid cast them to be indelibly different” (11). Apartheid declared “African claims in South Africa to be inferior to white claims” and effectively claimed that black subjects “belonged elsewhere, in societies of their own, because their race was different” (ibid). The term “coloured” defined people as “mixed race” to separate communities that might otherwise have identified as black in the broad and inclusive sense (Erasmus 16). Racial categorisation was used to create a racial hierarchy with white subjects at the top of that hierarchy and those classified as black receiving the least resources and benefits. This frustrated attempts to establish broad alliances of black struggles against apartheid. It is in this sense that race is socially and politically constructed and continues to have currency, despite the fact that biologically essentialist understandings of race have been discredited (Yudell 13–14). Thanks to apartheid town planning and resource allocation, many townships on the Cape Flats were poverty-stricken and plagued by gang violence (Salo 363). This continues to be the case because post-apartheid South Africa's embrace of neoliberal economics failed to address racialised class inequalities significantly (Haupt, Static 6–8). This is the '90s context in which socially conscious hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City or Black Noise, came together. They drew inspiration from Black Consciousness philosophy via their exposure to US hip-hop crews such as Public Enemy in order to challenge apartheid policies, including their racial interpellation as “coloured” as distinct from the more inclusive category, black (Haupt, “Black Thing” 178). Prophets of da City—whose co-founding member, Shaheen Ariefdien, also lived in Elsies River—was the first South African hip-hop outfit to record an album. Whilst much of their work was performed in English, they quickly transformed the genre by rapping in non-standard varieties of Afrikaans and by including MCs who rap in African languages (ibid). They therefore succeeded in addressing key issues related to race, language, and class disparities in relation to South Africa's transition to democracy (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire). However, as is the case with mainstream US hip-hop, specifically gangsta rap (Clay 149), South African hip-hop has been largely dominated by heterosexual men. This includes the more commercial hip-hop scene, which is largely perceived to be located in Johannesburg, where male MCs like AKA and Cassper Nyovest became celebrities. However, certain female MCs have claimed the genre, notably EJ von Lyrik and Burni Aman who are formerly of Godessa, the first female hip-hop crew to record and perform locally and internationally (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166; Haupt, “Can a Woman in Hip-Hop”). DSJ therefore presents the exception to a largely heteronormative and male-dominated South African music industry and hip-hop scene as she transforms it with her queer politics. While queer hip-hop is not new in the US (Pabón and Smalls), this is new territory for South Africa. Writing about the US MC Jean Grae in the context of a “male-dominated music industry and genre,” Shanté Paradigm Smalls contends,Heteronormativity blocks the materiality of the experiences of Black people. Yet, many Black people strive for a heteronormative effect if not “reality”. In hip hop, there is a particular emphasis on maintaining the rigidity of categories, even if those categories fail [sic]. (87) DSJ challenges these rigid categories. Keep in TouchDSJ's most visible entry onto the media landscape to date has been her appearance in an H&M recycling campaign with British Sri Lankan artist MIA (H&M), some fashion shoots, her new EP—Reimagine (Dope Saint Jude)—and recent Finnish, US and French tours as well as her YouTube channel, which features her music videos. As the characters’ theatrical costumes suggest, “Keep in Touch” is possibly the most camp and playful music video she has produced. It commences somewhat comically with Dope Saint Jude walking down Salt River main road to a public telephone, where she and a young woman in pig tails exchange dirty looks. Salt River is located at the foot of Devil's Peak not far from Cape Town's CBD. Many factories were located there, but the area is also surrounded by low-income housing, which was designated a “coloured” area under apartheid. After apartheid, neighbourhoods such as Salt River, Woodstock, and the Bo-Kaap became increasingly gentrified and, instead of becoming more inclusive, many parts of Cape Town continued to be influenced by policies that enable racialised inequalities. Dope Saint Jude calls Angel Ho: DSJ: Awêh, Angie! Yoh, you must check this kak sturvy girl here by the pay phone. [Turns to the girl, who walks away as she bursts a chewing gum bubble.] Ja, you better keep in touch. Anyway, listen here, what are you wys?Angel Ho: Ah, just at the salon getting my hair did. What's good? DSJ: Wanna catch on kak today?Angel Ho: Yes, honey. But, first, let me Gayle you this. By the jol by the art gallery, this Wendy, nuh. This Wendy tapped me on the shoulder and wys me, “This is a place of decorum.”DSJ: What did she wys?Angel Ho: De-corum. She basically told me this is not your house. DSJ: I know you told that girl to keep in touch!Angel Ho: Yes, Mama! I'm Paula, I told that bitch, “Keep in touch!” [Points index finger in the air.](Saint Jude, Dope, “Keep in Touch”)Angel Ho's name is a play on the male name Angelo and refers to the trope of the ho (whore) in gangsta rap lyrics and in music videos that present objectified women as secondary to male, heterosexual narratives (Sharpley-Whiting 23; Collins 27). The queering of Angelo, along with Angel Ho’s non-binary styling in terms of hair, make-up, and attire, appropriates a heterosexist, sexualised stereotype of women in order to create room for a gender identity that operates beyond heteronormative male-female binaries. Angel Ho’s location in a hair salon also speaks to stereotypical associations of salons with women and gay subjects. In a discussion of gender stereotypes about hair salons, Kristen Barber argues that beauty work has traditionally been “associated with women and with gay men” and that “the body beautiful has been tightly linked to the concept of femininity” (455–56). During the telephonic exchange, Angel Ho and Dope Saint Jude code-switch between standard and non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans, as the opening appellation, “Awêh,” suggests. In this context, the term is a friendly greeting, which intimates solidarity. “Sturvy” means pretentious, whilst “kak” means shit, but here it is used to qualify “sturvy” and means that the girl at the pay phone is very pretentious or “full of airs.” To be “wys” means to be wise, but it can also mean that you are showing someone something or educating them. The meanings of these terms shift, depending on the context. The language practices in this skit are in line with the work of earlier hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap, to validate black, multilingual forms of speech and expression that challenge the linguistic imperialism of standard English and Afrikaans in South Africa, which has eleven official languages (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire; Williams). Henry Louis Gates’s research on African American speech varieties and literary practices emerging from the repressive context of slavery is essential to understanding hip-hop’s language politics. Hip-hop artists' multilingual wordplay creates parallel discursive universes that operate both on the syntagmatic axis of meaning-making and the paradigmatic axis (Gates 49; Haupt, “Stealing Empire” 76–77). Historically, these discursive universes were those of the slave masters and the slaves, respectively. While white hegemonic meanings are produced on the syntagmatic axis (which is ordered and linear), black modes of speech as seen in hip-hop word play operate on the paradigmatic axis, which is connotative and non-linear (ibid). Distinguishing between Signifyin(g) / Signification (upper case, meaning black expression) and signification (lower case, meaning white dominant expression), he argues that “the signifier ‘Signification’ has remained identical in spelling to its white counterpart to demonstrate [. . .] that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe” (Gates 49). The meanings of terms and expressions can change, depending on the context and manner in which they are used. It is therefore the shared experiences of speech communities (such as slavery or racist/sexist oppression) that determine the negotiated meanings of certain forms of expression. Gayle as a Parallel Discursive UniverseDSJ and Angel Ho's performance of Gayle takes these linguistic practices further. Viewers are offered points of entry into Gayle via the music video’s subtitles. We learn that Wendy is code for a white person and that to keep in touch means exactly the opposite. Saint Jude explains that Gayle is a very fun queer language that was used to kind of mask what people were saying [. . .] It hides meanings and it makes use of women's names [. . . .] But the thing about Gayle is it's constantly changing [. . .] So everywhere you go, you kind of have to pick it up according to the context that you're in. (Ovens, Saint Jude and Haupt)According to Kathryn Luyt, “Gayle originated as Moffietaal [gay language] in the coloured gay drag culture of the Western Cape as a form of slang amongst Afrikaans-speakers which over time, grew into a stylect used by gay English and Afrikaans-speakers across South Africa” (Luyt 8; Cage 4). Given that the apartheid state criminalised homosexuals, Gayle was coded to evade detection and to seek out other members of this speech community (Luyt 8). Luyt qualifies the term “language” by arguing, “The term ‘language’ here, is used not as a constructed language with its own grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, but in the same way as linguists would discuss women’s language, as a way of speaking, a kind of sociolect” (Luyt 8; Cage 1). However, the double-coded nature of Gayle allows one to think of it as creating a parallel discursive universe as Gates describes it (49). Whereas African American and Cape Flats discursive practices function parallel to white, hegemonic discourses, gay modes of speech run parallel to heteronormative communication. Exclusion and MicroaggressionsThe skit brings both discursive practices into play by creating room for one to consider that DSJ queers a male-dominated genre that is shaped by US cultural imperialism (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166) as a way of speaking back to intersectional forms of marginalisation (Crenshaw 1244), which are created by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 116). This is significant in South Africa where “curative rape” of lesbians and other forms of homophobic violence are prominent (cf. Gqola; Hames; Msibi). Angel Ho's anecdote conveys a sense of the extent to which black individuals are subject to scrutiny. Ho's interpretation of the claim that the gallery “is a place of decorum” is correct: it is not Ho's house. Black queer subjects are not meant to feel at home or feel a sense of ownership. This functions as a racial microaggression: “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 60). This speaks to DSJ's use of Salt River, Woodstock, and Bo-Kaap for the music video, which features black queer bodies in performance—all of these spaces are being gentrified, effectively pushing working class people of colour out of the city (cf. Didier, Morange, and Peyroux; Lemanski). Gustav Visser explains that gentrification has come to mean a unit-by-unit acquisition of housing which replaces low-income residents with high-income residents, and which occurs independent of the structural condition, architecture, tenure or original cost level of the housing (although it is usually renovated for or by the new occupiers). (81–82) In South Africa this inequity plays out along racial lines because its neoliberal economic policies created a small black elite without improving the lives of the black working class. Instead, the “new African bourgeoisie, because it shares racial identities with the bulk of the poor and class interests with white economic elites, is in position to mediate the reinforcing cleavages between rich whites and poor blacks without having to make more radical changes” (MacDonald 158). In a news article about a working class Salt River family of colour’s battle against an eviction, Christine Hogg explains, “Gentrification often means the poor are displaced as the rich move in or buildings are upgraded by new businesses. In Woodstock and Salt River both are happening at a pace.” Angel Ho’s anecdote, as told from a Woodstock hair salon, conveys a sense of what Woodstock’s transformation from a coloured, working class Group Area to an upmarket, trendy, and arty space would mean for people of colour, including black, queer subjects. One could argue that this reading of the video is undermined by DSJ’s work with global brand H&M. Was she was snared by neoliberal economics? Perhaps, but one response is that the seeds of any subculture’s commercial co-option lie in the fact it speaks through commodities (for example clothing, make-up, CDs, vinyl, or iTunes / mp3 downloads (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45). Subcultures have a window period in which to challenge hegemonic ideologies before they are delegitimated or commercially co-opted. Hardt and Negri contend that the means that extend the reach of corporate globalisation could be used to challenge it from within it (44–46; Haupt, Stealing Empire 26). DSJ utilises her H&M work, social media, the hip-hop genre, and international networks to exploit that window period to help mainstream black queer identity politics.ConclusionDSJ speaks back to processes of exclusion from the city, which was transformed by apartheid and, more recently, gentrification, by claiming it as a creative and playful space for queer subjects of colour. She uses Gayle to lay claim to the city as it has a long history in Cape Town. In fact, she says that she is not reviving Gayle, but is simply “putting it on a bigger platform” (Ovens, Saint Jude, and Haupt). The use of subtitles in the video suggests that she wants to mainstream queer identity politics. Saint Jude also transforms hip-hop heteronormativity by queering the genre and by locating her work within the history of Cape hip-hop’s multilingual wordplay. ReferencesBarber, Kristin. “The Well-Coiffed Man: Class, Race, and Heterosexual Masculinity in the Hair Salon.” Gender and Society 22.4 (2008): 455–76.Cage, Ken. “An Investigation into the Form and Function of Language Used by Gay Men in South Africa.” Rand Afrikaans University: MA thesis, 1999.Clay, Andreana. “‘I Used to Be Scared of the Dick’: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity.” Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology. Ed. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elain Richardson, Aisha Durham, and Rachel Raimist. California: Sojourns, 2007.Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–299.Didier, Sophie, Marianne Morange, and Elisabeth Peyroux. “The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg.” Antipode 45.1 (2012): 121–39.Erasmus, Zimitri. “Introduction.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.Gqola, Pumla Dineo. Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015.Hames, Mary. “Violence against Black Lesbians: Minding Our Language.” Agenda 25.4 (2011): 87–91.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. London: Harvard UP, 2000.Haupt, Adam. “Can a Woman in Hip Hop Speak on Her Own Terms?” Africa Is a Country. 23 Mar. 2015. <http://africasacountry.com/2015/03/the-double-consciousness-of-burni-aman-can-a-woman-in-hip-hop-speak-on-her-own-terms/>.Haupt, Adam. Static: Race & Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media & Film. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012. Haupt, Adam. Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. Haupt, Adam. “Black Thing: Hip-Hop Nationalism, ‘Race’ and Gender in Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.Hogg, Christine. “In Salt River Gentrification Often Means Eviction: Family Set to Lose Their Home of 11 Years.” Ground Up. 15 June 2016. <http://www.groundup.org.za/article/salt-river-gentrification-often-means-eviction/>.hooks, bell. Outlaw: Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.Lemanski, Charlotte. “Hybrid Gentrification in South Africa: Theorising across Southern and Northern Cities.” Urban Studies 51.14 (2014): 2943–60.Luyt, Kathryn. “Gay Language in Cape Town: A Study of Gayle – Attitudes, History and Usage.” University of Cape Town: MA thesis, 2014.MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Scottsville, 2006.Msibi, Thabo. “Not Crossing the Line: Masculinities and Homophobic Violence in South Africa”. Agenda. 23.80 (2009): 50–54.Pabón, Jessica N., and Shanté Paradigm Smalls. “Critical Intimacies: Hip Hop as Queer Feminist Pedagogy.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2014): 1–7.Salo, Elaine. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” Journal of European Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 345–65.Solórzano, Daniel, Miguel Ceja, and Tara Yosso. “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students.” Journal of Negro Education 69.1/2 (2000): 60–73.Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York UP, 2007.Smalls, Shanté Paradigm. “‘The Rain Comes Down’: Jean Grae and Hip Hop Heteronormativity.” American Behavioral Scientist 55.1 (2011): 86–95.Visser, Gustav. “Gentrification: Prospects for Urban South African Society?” Acta Academica Supplementum 1 (2003): 79–104.Williams, Quentin E. “Youth Multilingualism in South Africa’s Hip-Hop Culture: a Metapragmatic Analysis.” Sociolinguistic Studies 10.1 (2016): 109–33.Yudell, Michael. “A Short History of the Race Concept.” Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.InterviewsOvens, Neil, Dope Saint Jude, and Adam Haupt. One FM Radio interview. Cape Town. 21 Apr. 2016.VideosSaint Jude, Dope. “Keep in Touch.” YouTube. 23 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ux9R839lE>. H&M. “H&M World Recycle Week Featuring M.I.A.” YouTube. 11 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MskKkn2Jg>. MusicSaint Jude, Dope. Reimagine. 15 June 2016. <https://dopesaintjude.bandcamp.com/album/reimagine>.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. 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Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. 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“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.

In recent years, the US television landscape has been flooded with reboots, remakes, and revivals of “classic” nineties television series, such as Full/er House (1987-1995, 2016-present), Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-present), Roseanne (1988-1977, 2018), and Charmed (1998-2006, 2018-present). The term “reboot” is often used as a catchall for different kinds of revivals and remakes. “Remakes” are derivations or reimaginings of known properties with new characters, cast, and stories (Loock; Lavigne). “Revivals” bring back an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/or setting. “Revivals” and “remakes” both seek to capitalise on nostalgia for a specific notion of the past and access the (presumed) existing audience of the earlier series (Mittell; Rebecca Williams; Johnson).Reboots operate around two key pleasures. First, there is the pleasure of revisiting and/or reimagining characters that are “known” to audiences. Whether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audience’s desire to see familiar characters. Second, there is the desire to “fix” and/or recuperate an earlier series. Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2017) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion.The Roseanne reboot is invested in both these pleasures. It reunites the original cast for a short-lived, but impactful nine-episode tenth season. There is pleasure in seeing Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), Becky (Lecy Goranson [seasons one to six, ten], Sarah Chalke [seasons six to nine]), Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and DJ (Michael Fishman) back in the Conner house with the same well-worn couch and afghan. The (attempted) recuperation is of author-star Barr, whose recent politics are in stark contrast to the working-class second-wave feminist politics of her nineties’ persona. This article is particularly interested in the second pleasure, because both the original series and the reboot situate the voice of Barr as central to the series’ narrative and politics.Despite achieving the highest ratings of any US sitcom in the past three years (O’Connell), on 29 May 2018, ABC announced that it was cancelling the Roseanne reboot. This decision came about in the wake of a racist tweet, where Barr compared a black woman (high-ranking Obama aide Valerie Jarrett) to an ape. Barr’s tweet and the cancellation of Roseanne, highlight the limits of nostalgia and Roseanne/Barr’s particular brand of white feminism. While whiteness and a lack of racial awareness are (and always have been) at the centre of Barr’s performance of feminism, the political landscape has shifted since the 1990s, with the rise of third and fourth-wave feminisms and intersectional activism. As such in the contemporary landscape, there is the expectation that white feminist figures take on and endorse anti-racist stances.This article argues that the reboot’s attempt to capitalise on nineties nostalgia exposes the limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism, as well as the limits of nostalgia. The feminist legacy of nineties-era Roseanne cannot and does not recuperate Barr’s star-persona. Also, the reboot and its subsequent cancellation highlight how the feminism of the series is embodied by Barr and her whiteness. This article will situate Roseanne and Barr within a feminist tradition on US television, before exploring how the reboot operates and circulates differently to the original series.From Roseanne (1988-1997) to Roseanne (2018)In its original form, Roseanne holds the distinction of being one of the most highly discussed and canonised feminist-leaning television series of all time, alongside The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Cagney and Lacey (1981-1988), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004). Roseanne also enabled and informed many popular feminist-leaning contemporary series, including Girls (2012-2017), Mom (2013-present), Better Things (2016-present), and Dietland (2018). Although it may seem anachronistic today, Roseanne and Barr helped define what it means to be a feminist and speak feminist politics on US television.Roseanne depicts the lives of the Conner family, headed by parents Roseanne and Dan. They live in the fictional blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois with their three children Becky, Darlene, and DJ. Both Roseanne and Dan experience precarious employment and embark on numerous (mostly failed) business ventures throughout the series’ run. The reboot catches up with the Conner family in 2018, after Roseanne has experienced a health scare and single mom Darlene has moved into her parents’ house with her two children Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara). In the new season, Roseanne and Dan’s children are experiencing similar working conditions to their parents in the 1990s. Becky works at a Mexican restaurant and is eager to act as surrogate mother to earn $50,000, Darlene is recently unemployed and looking for work, and DJ has just returned from military service.A stated objective of reviving Roseanne was to address the contentious US political landscape after the election of President Donald J. Trump (VanDerWerff). Barr is a vocal supporter of President Trump, as is her character in the reboot. The election plays a key role in the new season’s premise. The first episode of season 10 establishes that the titular Roseanne has not spoken to her sister Jackie (who is a Hillary Clinton supporter) in over a year. In both its nineties and 2018 incarnations, Roseanne makes apparent the extent to which feminist politics are indebted to and spoken through the author-star. The series is based on a character that Barr created and is grounded in her life experience. Barr and her character Roseanne are icons of nineties televisual feminism. While the other members of the Conner family are richly drawn and compelling, Roseanne is the centre of the series. It is her voice and perspective that drives the series and gives it its political resonance. Roseanne’s power in the text is authorised by Barr’s stardom. As Melissa Williams writes: “For nearly a decade, Barr was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood” (180).In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Roseanne (and Barr) represented a new kind of feminist voice on US television, which at that stage (and still today) was dominated by middle-class women. Unlike Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), or Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen), Roseanne did not have a stable job and her family’s economic situation was often precarious. Roseanne/Barr adopted and used a feminism of personality popularised on television by Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. Unlike her foremothers, though, Roseanne/Barr was not slender, feminine, or interested in being likeable to men. Roseanne did not choose to work outside of the home, which marked her as different from many of US television’s other second-wave feminists and/or mothers. As Rachael Horowitz writes: “Roseanne’s feminism was for women who have to work because bills must get paid, who assert their role as head of the house despite the degrading work they often do during the day to pay for their kids’ food and clothes” (9).According to Kathleen Rowe, Barr is part of a long line of “female grotesques” whose defining features are excess and looseness (2-3). Rowe links Barr’s fatness or physical excess with her refusal to shut up and subversive speech. The feminism of Roseanne is contained within and expressed through Barr’s unruly white body (and voice). Barr’s unruliness and her unwillingness to follow the social conventions of politeness and decorum are tied to her (perceived) feminist politics.Understandings of Barr’s stardom, however, have shifted considerably in the years since the publication of Rowe’s analysis. While Barr is still “unruly,” her unruliness is no longer located in her body (which has been transformed to meet more conventional standards of western beauty), but rather in her Twitter presence, which is pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and anti-immigration. As Roxane Gay writes of the reboot: “Whatever charm and intelligence she [Barr] brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter.”Feminist Voice and Stardom on US TVRoseanne performs what Julie D’Acci calls “explicit general feminism,” which is defined by “dialogue and scenes that straightforwardly addressed discrimination against women in both public and private spheres, stories structured around topical feminist causes, and the use of unequivocal feminist language and slogans” (147). However, the feminist politics of Roseanne and Barr are (and never were) straightforward or uncomplicated.Studies of feminism on US television have primarily focused on comedies that feature female television stars who function as advocates for feminism and women’s issues (Spigel; Rabinovitz; D’Acci). Much of the critical discussion of feminist voice in US female-led television identifies the feminist intervention as taking place at the level of performance (Dow; Spigel; Spangler). Comedic series such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Murphy Brown (1988-1998, 2018-present), and Grace Under Fire (1993-1998), and dramatic series’, such as Cagney and Lacey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, privilege the articulation of feminist ideas through performance and character.Roseanne is not a series that derives its comedy from a clash of different perspectives or a series where politics are debated and explored in a nuanced a complex way. Roseanne promotes a distinct singular perspective – that of Roseanne Barr. In seasons one to nine, the character Roseanne is rarely persuaded to think differently about an issue or situation or depicted as “wrong.” The series centres Roseanne’s pain and distress when Becky elopes with Mark (Glenn Quinn), or when Jackie is abused by her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth), or when Darlene accidently gets pregnant. Although those storylines are about other characters, Roseanne’s emotions are central. Roseanne/Barr’s perspective (as fictional character and media personality) informs the narrative, sensibility, and tone. Roseanne is not designed to contain multiple perspectives.Roseanne is acutely aware of its place in the history of feminist voice and representations of women on US television. Television is central to the series’ articulation of feminism and feminist voice. In season seven episode “All About Rosey,” the series breaks the fourth wall (as it does many times throughout its run), taking the audience behind the scenes where some of US television’s most well-known (and traditional) mothers are cleaning the Conner’s kitchen. June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) from Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), Joan Nash (Pat Crowley) from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965-1967), Ruth Martin (June Lockhart) from Lassie (1958-1964), Norma Arnold (Alley Mills) from The Wonder Years (1988-1993), and Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) at first sit in judgment of Barr and her character Roseanne, claiming she presents “wrong image” for a TV mother. However, Roseanne/Barr eventually wins over the TV mothers, declaring “the important thing is on my show, I’m the boss and father knows squat” (7.19). It is in contrast to more traditional television mothers that Roseanne/Barr’s feminist voice comes into focus.In the ninth and final season of Roseanne’s initial run, the series (arguably) becomes a parody of its former self. By this point in the series, “Barr was seen as the sole cause of the show’s demise, as a woman who was ‘imploding,’ ‘losing the plot,’ or ‘out of control’” (White 234). White argues that depicting the working-class Conners’ social and economic ascension to upper-class diminishes the distinction between Barr and her character (243). White writes that in the series’ finale, the “line between performer and character is irrevocably blurred; it is unclear whether the voice we are hearing is that of Roseanne Conner or Roseanne Barr” (244). This blurring between Roseanne and Barr becomes particularly contentious in season 10.Rebooting Roseanne: Season 10Season 10 redacts and erases most of the events of season nine, which itself was a fantasy, as revealed in the season nine finale. As such, the reboot is not a simple continuation, because in the season nine finale it is revealed that Dan suffered a fatal heart attack a year earlier. The final monologue (delivered in voice-over by Barr) “reveals” that Roseanne has been writing and editing her experiences into a digestible story. The “Conners winning the lottery” storyline that dominated season nine was imagined by Roseanne as an elaborate coping strategy after Dan’s death. Yet in the season 10 reboot, Dan is revealed to be alive, as is Darlene and David’s (Johnny Galecki) daughter Harris, who was born during the events of season nine.The limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism within the contemporary political landscape come into focus around issues of race. This is partly because the incident that incited ABC to cancel the reboot of Roseanne was racially motivated, and partly because Roseanne/Barr’s feminism has always relied on whiteness. Between 1997 and 2018, Barr’s unruliness has become less associated with empowering working-class women and more with railing against minorities and immigrants. In redacting and erasing the events of season nine, the reboot attempts to step back the conflation between Roseanne and Barr with little success.In the first episode of season 10, “Twenty Years to Life”, Roseanne is positioned as the loud-mouthed victim of circumstance and systemic inequality – similar to her nineties-persona. Yet in 2018, Roseanne mocks same things that nineties’ Roseanne took seriously, including collective action, community building, and labour conditions. Roseanne claims: “It is not my fault that I just happen to be a charismatic person that’s right about everything” (10.01). Here, the series attempts to make light of a now-outdated understanding of Barr’s persona, but it comes off as tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness.Roseanne has bigoted tendencies in both the 1990s and in 2018, but the political resonance of those tendencies and their relationships to feminisms and nostalgia differs greatly from the original series to the reboot. This is best illustrated by comparing season seven episode “White Men Can’t Kiss” and season 10 episode “Go Cubs.” In the former, Roseanne is appalled that she may have raised a racist son and insists DJ must kiss his black classmate Geena (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly) in the school play. Towards the end of this episode, Geena’s father comes by the restaurant where Roseanne and Jackie are closing up. When the tall black man knocks on the locked door, Roseanne refuses to let him inside. She appears visibly afraid. Once Roseanne knows he is Geena’s father, she lets him in and he confronts her about her racist attitude. Roseanne (and the audience) is forced to sit in the discomfort of having her bigotry exposed. While there are no material consequences for Roseanne or DJ’s racism, within the context of the less intersectional 1990s, this interaction does not call into question Roseanne or Barr’s feminist credentials.In season 10, Roseanne tackles similar issues around race, ignorance, and bigotry, but it plays out very differently. In the reboot’s seventh episode, Roseanne suspects her Muslim refugee neighbours Fatima (Anne Bedian) and Samir (Alain Washnevky) are terrorists. Although Roseanne is proven wrong, she is not forced to reckon with her bigotry. Instead, she is positioned as a “hero” later in the episode, when she berates a supermarket cashier for her racist treatment of Fatima. Given what audiences know about Barr’s off-screen politics, this does not counteract the impression of racism, but compounds it. It also highlights the whiteness of the politics embodied by Roseanne/Barr both on-screen and off. Although these are two very different racial configurations (anti-blackness and Islamophobia), these episodes underline the shifting reception and resonance of the feminism Roseanne/Barr embodies.ConclusionIn June 2018, shortly after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, ABC announced that it was developing a spin-off without Barr called The Conners (2018-present). In the spin-off Roseanne is dead and her family is dealing with life after Roseanne/Roseanne (Crucchiola). Here, Roseanne suffers the same fate as Dan in season nine (she dies off-screen), but now it is Barr who is fictionally buried. While The Conners attempts to rewrite the story of the Conner family by rejecting Barr’s racist views and removing her financial and creative stake in their stories, Barr cannot be erased or redacted from Roseanne or the story of the Conner family, because it is her story.The reboot and its cancellation illuminate how Barr and Roseanne’s feminist voice has not evolved past its white second-wave roots. The feminism of Roseanne is embodied by Barr in all her unruliness and whiteness. Roseanne/Barr/Roseanne has not taken on the third and fourth-wave critiques of second-wave feminisms, which emphasise the limits of white feminisms. The failure of the Roseanne reboot reveals that the pleasure and nostalgia of seeing the Conner family back together is not enough. Ultimately, Roseanne is without intersectionality, and thus cannot (and should not) be recognised as feminist in the contemporary political landscape.ReferencesBetter Things. Cr. Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. 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IntroductionSupermarkets are functionally challenging environments for people with vision impairments. A supermarket is likely to house an average of 45,000 products in a median floor-space of 4,529 square meters and many visually impaired people are unable to shop without assistance, which greatly impedes personal independence (Nicholson et al.). The task of selecting goods in a supermarket is an “activity that is expressive of agency, identity and creativity” (Sutherland) from which many vision-impaired persons are excluded. In response to this, a number of proof of concept (demonstrating feasibility) and prototype assistive technologies are being developed which aim to use smart phones as potential sensorial aides for vision impaired persons. In this paper, I discuss two such prototypic technologies, Shop Talk and BlindShopping. I engage with this issue’s list theme by suggesting that, on the one hand, list making is a uniquely human activity that demonstrates our need for order, reliance on memory, reveals our idiosyncrasies, and provides insights into our private lives (Keaggy 12). On the other hand, lists feature in the creation of spatial inventories that represent physical environments (Perec 3-4, 9-10). The use of lists in the architecture of assistive technologies for shopping illuminates the interaction between these two modalities of list use where items contained in a list are not only textual but also cartographic elements that link the material and immaterial in space and time (Haber 63). I argue that despite the emancipatory potential of assistive shopping technologies, their efficacy in practical situations is highly dependent on the extent to which they can integrate a number of lists to produce representations of space that are meaningful for vision impaired users. I suggest that the extent to which these prototypes may translate to becoming commercially viable, widely adopted technologies is heavily reliant upon commercial and institutional infrastructures, data sources, and regulation. Thus, their design, manufacture and adoption-potential are shaped by the extent to which certain data inventories are accessible and made interoperable. To overcome such constraints, it is important to better understand the “spatial syntax” associated with the shopping task for a vision impaired person; that is, the connected ordering of real and virtual spatial elements that result in a supermarket as a knowable space within which an assisted “spatial practice” of shopping can occur (Kellerman 148, Lefebvre 16).In what follows, I use the concept of lists to discuss the production of supermarket-space in relation to the enabling and disabling potentials of assistive technologies. First, I discuss mobile digital technologies relative to disability and impairment and describe how the shopping task produces a disabling spatial practice. Second, I present a case study showing how assistive technologies function in aiding vision impaired users in completing the task of supermarket shopping. Third, I discuss various factors that may inhibit the liberating potential of technology assisted shopping by vision-impaired people. Addressing Shopping as a Disabling Spatial Practice Consider how a shopping list might inform one’s experience of supermarket space. The way shopping lists are written demonstrate the variability in the logic that governs list writing. As Bill Keaggy demonstrates in his found shopping list Web project and subsequent book, Milk, Eggs, Vodka, a shopping list may be written on a variety of materials, be arranged in a number of orientations, and the writer may use differing textual attributes, such as size or underlining to show emphasis. The writer may use longhand, abbreviate, write neatly, scribble, and use an array of alternate spelling and naming conventions. For example, items may be listed based on knowledge of the location of products, they may be arranged on a list as a result of an inventory of a pantry or fridge, or they may be copied in the order they appear in a recipe. Whilst shopping, some may follow strictly the order of their list, crossing back and forth between aisles. Some may work through their list item-by-item, perhaps forward scanning to achieve greater economies of time and space. As a person shops, their memory may be stimulated by visual cues reminding them of products they need that may not be included on their list. For the vision impaired, this task is near impossible to complete without the assistance of a relative, friend, agency volunteer, or store employee. Such forms of assistance are often unsatisfactory, as delays may be caused due to the unavailability of an assistant, or the assistant having limited literacy, knowledge, or patience to adequately meet the shopper’s needs. Home delivery services, though readily available, impede personal independence (Nicholson et al.). Katie Ellis and Mike Kent argue that “an impairment becomes a disability due to the impact of prevailing ableist social structures” (3). It can be said, then, that supermarkets function as a disability producing space for the vision impaired shopper. For the vision impaired, a supermarket is a “hegemonic modern visual infrastructure” where, for example, merchandisers may reposition items regularly to induce customers to explore areas of the shop that they wouldn’t usually, a move which adds to the difficulty faced by those customers with impaired vision who work on the assumption that items remain as they usually are (Schillmeier 161).In addressing this issue, much emphasis has been placed on the potential of mobile communications technologies in affording vision impaired users greater mobility and flexibility (Jolley 27). However, as Gerard Goggin argues, the adoption of mobile communication technologies has not necessarily “gone hand in hand with new personal and collective possibilities” given the limited access to standard features, even if the device is text-to-speech enabled (98). Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) limit the way a device accesses and reproduces information, and confusion over whether audio rights are needed to convert text-to-speech, impede the accessibility of mobile communications technologies for vision impaired users (Ellis and Kent 136). Accessibility and functionality issues like these arise out of the needs, desires, and expectations of the visually impaired as a user group being considered as an afterthought as opposed to a significant factor in the early phases of design and prototyping (Goggin 89). Thus, the development of assistive technologies for the vision impaired has been left to third parties who must adopt their solutions to fit within certain technical parameters. It is valuable to consider what is involved in the task of shopping in order to appreciate the considerations that must be made in the design of shopping intended assistive technologies. Shopping generally consists of five sub-tasks: travelling to the store; finding items in-store; paying for and bagging items at the register; exiting the store and getting home; and, the often overlooked task of putting items away once at home. In this process supermarkets exhibit a “trichotomous spatial ontology” consisting of locomotor space that a shopper moves around the store, haptic space in the immediate vicinity of the shopper, and search space where individual products are located (Nicholson et al.). In completing these tasks, a shopper will constantly be moving through and switching between all three of these spaces. In the next section I examine how assistive technologies function in producing supermarkets as both enabling and disabling spaces for the vision impaired. Assistive Technologies for Vision Impaired ShoppersJason Farman (43) and Adriana de Douza e Silva both argue that in many ways spaces have always acted as information interfaces where data of all types can reside. Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Quick Response (QR) codes all allow for practically every spatial encounter to be an encounter with information. Site-specific and location-aware technologies address the desire for meaningful representations of space for use in everyday situations by the vision impaired. Further, the possibility of an “always-on” connection to spatial information via a mobile phone with WiFi or 3G connections transforms spatial experience by “enfolding remote [and latent] contexts inside the present context” (de Souza e Silva). A range of GPS navigation systems adapted for vision-impaired users are currently on the market. Typically, these systems convert GPS information into text-to-speech instructions and are either standalone devices, such as the Trekker Breeze, or they use the compass, accelerometer, and 3G or WiFi functions found on most smart phones, such as Loadstone. Whilst both these products are adequate in guiding a vision-impaired user from their home to a supermarket, there are significant differences in their interfaces and data architectures. Trekker Breeze is a standalone hardware device that produces talking menus, maps, and GPS information. While its navigation functionality relies on a worldwide radio-navigation system that uses a constellation of 24 satellites to triangulate one’s position (May and LaPierre 263-64), its map and text-to-speech functionality relies on data on a DVD provided with the unit. Loadstone is an open source software system for Nokia devices that has been developed within the vision-impaired community. Loadstone is built on GNU General Public License (GPL) software and is developed from private and user based funding; this overcomes the issue of Trekker Breeze’s reliance on trading policies and pricing models of the few global vendors of satellite navigation data. Both products have significant shortcomings if viewed in the broader context of the five sub-tasks involved in shopping described above. Trekker Breeze and Loadstone require that additional devices be connected to it. In the case of Trekker Breeze it is a tactile keypad, and with Loadstone it is an aftermarket screen reader. To function optimally, Trekker Breeze requires that routes be pre-recorded and, according to a review conducted by the American Foundation for the Blind, it requires a 30-minute warm up time to properly orient itself. Both Trekker Breeze and Loadstone allow users to create and share Points of Interest (POI) databases showing the location of various places along a given route. Non-standard or duplicated user generated content in POI databases may, however, have a negative effect on usability (Ellis and Kent 2). Furthermore, GPS-based navigation systems are accurate to approximately ten metres, which means that users must rely on their own mobility skills when they are required to change direction or stop for traffic. This issue with GPS accuracy is more pronounced when a vision-impaired user is approaching a supermarket where they are likely to encounter environmental hazards with greater frequency and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in greater density. Here the relations between space defined and spaces poorly defined or undefined by the GPS device interact to produce the supermarket surrounds as a disabling space (Galloway). Prototype Systems for Supermarket Navigation and Product SelectionIn the discussion to follow, I look at two prototype systems using QR codes and RFID that are designed to be used in-store by vision-impaired shoppers. Shop Talk is a proof of concept system developed by researchers at Utah State University that uses synthetic verbal route directions to assist vision impaired shoppers with supermarket navigation, product search, and selection (Nicholson et al.). Its hardware consists of a portable computational unit, a numeric keypad, a wireless barcode scanner and base station, headphones for the user to receive the synthetic speech instructions, a USB hub to connect all the components, and a backpack to carry them (with the exception of the barcode scanner) which has been slightly modified with a plastic stabiliser to assist in correct positioning. Shop Talk represents the supermarket environment using two data structures. The first is comprised of two elements: a topological map of locomotor space that allows for directional labels of “left,” “right,” and “forward,” to be added to the supermarket floor plan; and, for navigation of haptic space, the supermarket inventory management system, which is used to create verbal descriptions of product information. The second data structure is a Barcode Connectivity Matrix (BCM), which associates each shelf barcode with several pieces of information such as aisle, aisle side, section, shelf, position, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, product description, and price. Nicholson et al. suggest that one of their “most immediate objectives for future work is to migrate the system to a more conventional mobile platform” such as a smart phone (see Mobile Shopping). The Personalisable Interactions with Resources on AMI-Enabled Mobile Dynamic Environments (PRIAmIDE) research group at the University of Deusto is also approaching Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) by exploring the smart phone’s sensing, communication, computing, and storage potential. As part of their work, the prototype system, BlindShopping, was developed to address the issue of assisted shopping using entirely off-the-shelf technology with minimal environmental adjustments to navigate the store and search, browse and select products (López-de-Ipiña et al. 34). Blind Shopping’s architecture is based on three components. Firstly, a navigation system provides the user with synthetic verbal instructions to users via headphones connected to the smart phone device being used in order to guide them around the store. This requires a RFID reader to be attached to the tip of the user’s white cane and road-marking-like RFID tag lines to be distributed throughout the aisles. A smartphone application processes the RFID data that is received by the smart phone via Bluetooth generating the verbal navigation commands as a result. Products are recognised by pointing a QR code reader enabled smart phone at an embossed code located on a shelf. The system is managed by a Rich Internet Application (RIA) interface, which operates by Web browser, and is used to register the RFID tags situated in the aisles and the QR codes located on shelves (López-de-Ipiña and 37-38). A typical use-scenario for Blind Shopping involves a user activating the system by tracing an “L” on the screen or issuing the “Location” voice command, which activates the supermarket navigation system which then asks the user to either touch an RFID floor marking with their cane or scan a QR code on a nearby shelf to orient the system. The application then asks the user to dictate the product or category of product that they wish to locate. The smart phone maintains a continuous Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader to keep track of user location at all times. By drawing a “P” or issuing the “Product” voice command, a user can switch the device into product recognition mode where the smart phone camera is pointed at an embossed QR code on a shelf to retrieve information about a product such as manufacturer, name, weight, and price, via synthetic speech (López-de-Ipiña et al. 38-39). Despite both systems aiming to operate with as little environmental adjustment as possible, as well as minimise the extent to which a supermarket would need to allocate infrastructural, administrative, and human resources to implementing assistive technologies for vision impaired shoppers, there will undoubtedly be significant establishment and maintenance costs associated with the adoption of production versions of systems resembling either prototype described in this paper. As both systems rely on data obtained from a server by invoking Web services, supermarkets would need to provide in-store WiFi. Further, both systems’ dependence on store inventory data would mean that commercial versions of either of these systems are likely to be supermarket specific or exclusive given that there will be policies in place that forbid access to inventory systems, which contain pricing information to third parties. Secondly, an assumption in the design of both prototypes is that the shopping task ends with the user arriving at home; this overlooks the important task of being able to recognise products in order to put them away or to use at a later time.The BCM and QR product recognition components of both respective prototypic systems associates information to products in order to assist users in the product search and selection sub-tasks. However, information such as use-by dates, discount offers, country of manufacture, country of manufacturer’s origin, nutritional information, and the labelling of products as Halal, Kosher, containing alcohol, nuts, gluten, lactose, phenylalanine, and so on, create further challenges in how different data sources are managed within the devices’ software architecture. The reliance of both systems on existing smartphone technology is also problematic. Changes in the production and uptake of mobile communication devices, and the software that they operate on, occurs rapidly. Once the fit-out of a retail space with the necessary instrumentation in order to accommodate a particular system has occurred, this system is unlikely to be able to cater to the requirement for frequent upgrades, as built environments are less flexible in the upgrading of their technological infrastructure (Kellerman 148). This sets up a scenario where the supermarket may persist as a disabling space due to a gap between the functional capacities of applications designed for mobile communication devices and the environments in which they are to be used. Lists and Disabling Spatial PracticeThe development and provision of access to assistive technologies and the data they rely upon is a commercial issue (Ellis and Kent 7). The use of assistive technologies in supermarket-spaces that rely on the inter-functional coordination of multiple inventories may have the unintended effect of excluding people with disabilities from access to legitimate content (Ellis and Kent 7). With de Certeau, we can ask of supermarket-space “What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?" (96).In designing assistive technologies, such as those discussed in this paper, developers must strive to achieve integration across multiple data inventories. Software architectures must be optimised to overcome issues relating to intellectual property, cross platform access, standardisation, fidelity, potential duplication, and mass-storage. This need for “cross sectioning,” however, “merely adds to the muddle” (Lefebvre 8). This is a predicament that only intensifies as space and objects in space become increasingly “representable” (Galloway), and as the impetus for the project of spatial politics for the vision impaired moves beyond representation to centre on access and meaning-making.ConclusionSupermarkets act as sites of hegemony, resistance, difference, and transformation, where the vision impaired and their allies resist the “repressive socialization of impaired bodies” through their own social movements relating to environmental accessibility and the technology assisted spatial practice of shopping (Gleeson 129). It is undeniable that the prototype technologies described in this paper, and those like it, indeed do have a great deal of emancipatory potential. However, it should be understood that these devices produce representations of supermarket-space as a simulation within a framework that attempts to mimic the real, and these representations are pre-determined by the industrial, technological, and regulatory forces that govern their production (Lefebvre 8). Thus, the potential of assistive technologies is dependent upon a range of constraints relating to data accessibility, and the interaction of various kinds of lists across the geographic area that surrounds the supermarket, locomotor, haptic, and search spaces of the supermarket, the home-space, and the internal spaces of a shopper’s imaginary. These interactions are important in contributing to the reproduction of disability in supermarkets through the use of assistive shopping technologies. The ways by which people make and read shopping lists complicate the relations between supermarket-space as location data and product inventories versus that which is intuited and experienced by a shopper (Sutherland). Not only should we be creating inventories of supermarket locomotor, haptic, and search spaces, the attention of developers working in this area of assistive technologies should look beyond the challenges of spatial representation and move towards a focus on issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data within and beyond supermarket-space.ReferencesDe Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.De Souza e Silva, A. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies As Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9.3 (2006): 261-78.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Farman, Jason. 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For Socrates the act of communication is grounded in the world of original forms, archetypes, or abstract ideas. These ideas exist independently of the human mind and reflect a reality that is truer than the world of everyday experience. The task of the speaker is to draw the listener closer to the truth of these ideas, and this requires an intimate coupling of the form of speech to the character of the listener. In Phaedrus, Socrates explains, ". . . a would-be speaker must know how many types of soul there are. The number is finite, and they account for a variety of individual characters. When these are determined one must enumerate the various types of speech, a finite number also." The types of soul must then be carefully paired with the types of speech. This theoretical knowledge by itself, however, is not sufficient. A speaker must also know when ". . . he has actually before him a specific example of a type which he has heard described, and that this is what he must say and this is how he must say it if he wants to influence his hearer in this particular way" (Plato 91-92). Thus, the aspiring speaker must sharpen his powers of observation. Exactly how a speaker goes about discerning the various types of souls in his audience is not discussed in Phaedrus, but one assumes it is by mastering the art of face reading, or physiognomy. The science of physiognomy was of particular importance to the ancient Greeks. Nearly all the well-known Greek writers had something to say about the subject. Pythagoras is claimed to be the first Greek to formalize it systematically as a science. Hippocrates wrote voluminously on the subject, as did Aristotle. Socrates not only recommended physiognomy to his students (Tytler) but he is also reported to have demonstrated his facility with the science at least twice: once in predicting the promotion of Alcibiades and once upon first meeting Plato, whom he immediately recognized as a man of considerable philosophical talent (Encyclopedia Britannica). Writing is inferior to speech, Socrates tells Phaedrus, precisely because it cannot see and adapt the message to the reader. Like a painting of an object, writing is merely the image of dissociated speech. What is missing in writing-and what writing seems ever intent on reconstructing-is the human face. Pressing Faces Behind the Typeface Although physiognomy was banned by the Church, as it was associated with paganism and devil worship (practitioners of the science were burnt at the stake), it was revived in the Renaissance and became an obsession with the advent of the printing press. The printing press heralds democracy. But as human rights grew, urban centers developed, and new professions and classes emerged, people were no longer able to divine their own destiny or to predict the behavior and destiny of others. It became imperative to find other more reliable means of identifying the good and the bad, the talented and the unremarkable. Two books were considered indispensable: the Bible and Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (Juengel). Physiognomy was the science that helped people decipher class and profession. It became the spelling book of character, one that people diligently studied so that they could learn to read not only the marks of character in others but also the signs of talent and potential in their own faces and in the faces of their children. Face reading was egalitarian and leveling (Juengel). The heads of state could be read and debunked in the flourishing art of caricature, and people delighted in decoding the physiognomy of the ordinary faces that crowded the pages of the popular press. The populace applauded the artists that succeeded in revealing the whole spectrum of a character-class, intentions, profession-in the masterly strokes of the pen (Wechsler). Unfortunately, so intense was the interest in face reading that many people were forced to cover their faces when out in public (Zebrowitz). Inside the religious, medical, educational, and criminal justice institutions, authorities scanned faces to identify the virtuous and the vile. People were hanged because of the shape of their jaws ("A physiognomic auto-da-fé,") and sometimes convicted of crimes because of an unfortunate physiognomy, even before any crimes were committed (Lichtenberg. 93). Mass Consumption of the Face Open a magazine. What do you see? I counted over 200 faces in the September 15, 2003 issue of Newsweek, 120 faces in the September 29, 2003 issue of Forbes, 124 faces in the September 15, 2003 issue of Time, and 37 faces in the November, 2003 issue of Handgunner (I included the masked faces). Whereas, in the 19th century, face reading was used by the religious, medical, and criminal justice authorities to identify a person's character, in the modern world face reading becomes face righting. Early in the century, people came to be viewed less as individuals than as masses that were dynamically statistical with fluctuations of opinions and tastes that could be sampled and manipulated. It quickly became apparent to the behemoth advertising industry that was erected with the advent of mass media that product designs and packages could be collated with viewer reactions. The audience is scrutinized, labeled, and targeted. What people are fed are fleshless images of themselves. Horkheimer and Adorno have observed that the media have reduced the individual to the stereotype. Stereotypes package people, typically in unflattering boxes. Mediated faces are used to mirror, to prime, and to manipulate the audience (Kress and van Leeuwen). On television and in print, images of canned faces proliferate. Not all stereotypes are unsavory. Nothing recommends itself nor sells like a beautiful face, but even beautiful faces must be retouched, even recomposed from features extracted from databases of perfect facial features. So important is the image of the face that media icons routinely visit the plastic surgeon. Michael Jackson is the most extreme example of what has been derogatorily termed a "scalpel slave." Plastic surgery is not exclusive to celebrities; countless millions of ordinary Americans feel compelled to undergo various cosmetic surgeries. The 20th-century consumption of the face has ended by consuming the face. Facing the Face Interface Text has made a comeback in hypertext. Empowered by the hyperlink, readers have become writers as they assemble texts with the clicks of a mouse (Landow). Electronic texts are pushed as well as pulled. Businesses have learned to track and to query users, building individual profiles that are then used to assemble personalized pages and email messages. Socrates' objection that writing is unable to perceive the reader no longer holds. The virtual text is watching you. And it is watching you with virtual eyes. There is a growing interest in developing face interfaces that are capable of perceiving and talking. The technical requirements are enormous. Face interfaces must learn to make eye contact, follow speaking faces with their eyes, mirror emotion, lip synch, and periodically nod, raise eyebrows, and tilt the head (Massaro). Face interfaces are also learning to write faces, to map rhetorical forms to the character of their interlocutors in ways Socrates could not have imagined. Socrates did not teach his students to consider the rhetorical effects of their faces: the speaker's face was thought to be fixed, a true reflection of the inner soul. Virtual faces are not so constrained. Smart faces are being developed that are capable of rendering their own appearances from within a statistical model of the users' impressions of faces. The goal is for these virtual faces to learn to design, through their interactions with users, facial appearances that are calibrated to elicit very specific impressions and reactions in others (Brahnam). Some people will disapprove of virtual faces. Just as the media use faces to manipulate the viewer and perpetuate facial stereotypes, smart faces run the risk of doing the same. Some may also worry that virtual faces will be attributed more intelligence and social capacity then they actually possess. Do we really want our children growing up talking to virtual faces? Can they satisfy our need for human contact? What does it mean to converse with a virtual face? What kind of conversation is that? For the present at least, virtual faces are more like the orators and bards of old. They merely repeat the speeches of others. Their own speech is nearly incomprehensible, and their grammatical hiccups annoyingly disrupt the suspension of disbelief. On their own, without the human in the loop, no one believes them. Thus, the virtual face appears on the screen, silently nodding and smiling. Not yet a proper student of classical rhetoric, it is much like the virtual guide at artificial-life.com that recently greeted her visitors wearing the following placard: A virtual guide that greeted visitors at artificial-life.com. Access date: October 2003. Works Cited Brahnam, Sheryl. "Agents as Artists: Automating Socially Intelligent Embodiment," Proceedings of the First International Workshop on the Philosophy & Design of Socially Adept Technologies, in conjunction with CHI 2002. Minneapolis, MN, 2002: 15-18. Encyclopedia Britannica. "Physiognomy." LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia, 1911. Available: http://21.1911encyclopedia.org Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury, 1944. Juengel, Scott Jordan. "About Face: Physiognomics, Revolution, and the Radical Act of Looking." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Iowa, 1997. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 1996. Landow, P. George. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, 1997. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy: For the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: printed by C. Whittingham for H. D. Symonds, 1804. Lichtenberg. Quoted in Frey, Siegfried. "Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face." The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater. Ed. Ellis Shookman. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993. 64-103. Massaro, D. M. Perceiving Talking Faces: From Speech Perception to a Behavioral Principle. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997. Plato. Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans. Walter Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973. Tytler, Graeme. Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U P, 1982. Wechsler, Judith. A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris. London: U of Chicago P, 1982. Zebrowitz, Leslie A. Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1998. Web Links http://vhost.oddcast.com/vhost_minisite/ http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/facedemo/ http://www.faceinterfaces.com http://www.artificial-life.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brahnam, Sheryl. "Type/Face" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/04-brahnam.php>. APA Style Brahnam, S. (2004, Jan 12). Type/Face. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/04-brahnam.php>

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

Introduction Films with deaf characters often do not focus on the condition of deafness at all. Rather, the characters seem to satisfy a role in the story that either furthers the plot or the audience’s understanding of other hearing characters. The deaf characters can be symbolic, for example as a metaphor for isolation representative of ‘those without a voice’ in a society. The deaf characters’ misunderstanding of auditory cues can lead to comic circumstances, and their knowledge can save them in the case of perilous ones. Sign language, because of its unique linguistic properties and its lack of comprehension by hearing people, can save the day in a story line. Deaf characters are shown in different eras and in different countries, providing a fictional window into their possible experiences. Films shape and reflect cultural attitudes and can serve as a potent force in influencing the attitudes and assumptions of those members of the hearing world who have had few, if any, encounters with deaf people. This article explores categories of literary function as identified by the author, providing examples and suggestions of other films for readers to explore. Searching for Deaf Characters in Film I am a sign language interpreter. Several years ago, I started noticing how deaf characters are used in films. I made a concerted effort to find as many as I could. I referred to John Shuchman’s exhaustive book about deaf actors and subject matter, Hollywood Speaks; I scouted video rental guides (key words were ‘deaf’ or ‘disabled’); and I also plugged in the key words ‘deaf in film’ on Google’s search engine. I decided to ignore the issue of whether or not the actors were actually deaf—a political hot potato in the Deaf community which has been discussed extensively. Similarly, the linguistic or cultural accuracy of the type of sign language used or super-human lip-reading talent did not concern me. What was I looking for? I noticed that few story lines involving deaf characters provide any discussion or plot information related to that character’s deafness. I was puzzled. Why is there signing in the elevator in Jerry Maguire? Why does the guy in Grand Canyon have a deaf daughter? Why would the psychosomatic response to a trauma—as in Psych Out—be deafness rather than blindness? I concluded that not being able to hear carried some special meaning or fulfilled a particular need intrinsic to the plot of the story. I also observed that the functions of deaf characters seem to fall into several categories. Some deaf characters fit into more than one category, serving two or more symbolic purposes at the same time. By viewing and analysing the representations of deafness and deaf characters in forty-six films, I have come up with the following classifications: Deafness as a plot device Deaf characters as protagonist informants Deaf characters as a parallel to the protagonist Sign language as ‘hero’ Stories about deaf/hearing relationships A-normal-guy-or-gal-who-just-happens-to-be-deaf Deafness as a psychosomatic response to trauma Deafness as metaphor Deafness as a symbolic commentary on society Let your fingers do the ‘talking’ Deafness as Plot Device Every element of a film is a device, but when the plot hinges on one character being deaf, the story succeeds because of that particular character having that particular condition. The limitations or advantages of a deaf person functioning within the hearing world establish the tension, the comedy, or the events which create the story. In Hear No Evil (1993), Jillian learns from her hearing boyfriend which mechanical devices cause ear-splitting noises (he has insomnia and every morning she accidentally wakes him in very loud ways, eg., she burns the toast, thus setting off the smoke detector; she drops a metal spoon down the garbage disposal unit). When she is pursued by a murderer she uses a fire alarm, an alarm/sprinkler system, and a stereo turned on full blast to mask the sounds of her movements as she attempts to hide. Jillian and her boyfriend survive, she learns about sound, her boyfriend learns about deafness, and she teaches him the sign for orgasm. Life is good! The potential comic aspects of deafness may seem in this day and age to be shockingly politically incorrect. While the slapstick aspect is often innocent and means no overt harm or insult to the Deaf as a population, deafness functions as the visual banana peel over which the characters figuratively stumble in the plot. The film, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), pairing Gene Wilder with Richard Pryor as deaf and blind respectively, is a constant sight gag of lip-reading miscues and lack-of-sight gags. Wilder can speak, and is able to speech read almost perfectly, almost all of the time (a stereotype often perpetuated in films). It is mind-boggling to imagine the detail of the choreography required for the two actors to convince the audience of their authenticity. Other films in this category include: Suspect It’s a Wonderful Life Murder by Death Huck Finn One Flew over the Cuckoo’s NestThe Shop on Main StreetRead My Lips The Quiet Deaf Characters as Protagonist Informants Often a deaf character’s primary function to the story is to give the audience more information about, or form more of an affinity with, the hearing protagonist. The deaf character may be fascinating in his or her own right, but generally the deafness is a marginal point of interest. Audience attitudes about the hearing characters are affected because of their previous or present involvement with deaf individuals. This representation of deafness seems to provide a window into audience understanding and appreciation of the protagonist. More inferences can be made about the hearing person and provides one possible explanation for what ensues. It is a subtle, almost subliminal trick. There are several effective examples of this approach. In Gas, Food, Lodging (1992), Shade discovers that tough-guy Javier’s mother is deaf. He introduces Shade to his mother by simple signs and finger-spelling. They all proceed to visit and dance together (mom feels the vibrations on the floor). The audience is drawn to feel ‘Wow! Javier is a sensitive kid who has grown up with a beautiful, exotic, deaf mother!’ The 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar presents film-goers with Theresa, a confused young woman living a double life. By day, she is a teacher of deaf children. Her professor in the Teacher of the Deaf program even likens their vocation to ‘touching God’. But by night she cruises bars and engages in promiscuous sexual activity. The film shows how her fledgling use of signs begins to express her innermost desires, as well as her ability to communicate and reach out to her students. Other films in this category include: Miracle on 34th Street (1994 version)Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman)The Family StoneGrand CanyonThere Will Be Blood Deaf Characters as a Parallel to the Protagonist I Don’t Want to Talk about It (1993) from Argentina, uses a deaf character to establish an implied parallel story line to the main hearing character. Charlotte, a dwarf, is friends with Reanalde, who is deaf. The audience sees them in the first moments of the film when they are little girls together. Reanalde’s mother attempts to commiserate with Charlotte’s mother, establishing a simultaneous but unseen story line somewhere else in town over the course of the story. The setting is Argentina during the 1930s, and the viewer can assume that disability awareness is fairly minimal at the time. Without having seen Charlotte’s deaf counterpart, the audience still knows that her story has contained similar struggles for ‘normalcy’ and acceptance. Near the conclusion of the film, there is one more glimpse of Reanalde, when she catches the bridal bouquet at Charlotte’s wedding. While having been privy to Charlotte’s experiences all along, we can only conjecture as to what Reanalde’s life has been. Sign Language as ‘Hero’ The power of language, and one’s calculated use of language as a means of escape from a potentially deadly situation, is shown in The River Wild (1996). The reason that any of the hearing characters knows sign language is that Gail, the protagonist, has a deaf father. Victor appears primarily to allow the audience to see his daughter and grandson sign with him. The mother, father, and son are able to communicate surreptitiously and get themselves out of a dangerous predicament. Signing takes an iconic form when the signs BOAT, LEFT, I-LOVE-YOU are drawn on a log suspended over the river as a message to Gail so that she knows where to steer the boat, and that her husband is still alive. The unique nature of sign language saves the day– silently and subtly produced, right under the bad guys’ noses! Stories about Deaf/Hearing Relationships Because of increased awareness and acceptance of deafness, it may be tempting to assume that growing up deaf or having any kind of relationship with a deaf individual may not pose too much of a challenge. Captioning and subtitling are ubiquitous in the USA now, as is the inclusion of interpreters on stages at public events. Since the inception of USA Public Law 94-142 and section 504 in 1974, more deaf children are ‘mainstreamed’ into public schools than ever before. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1993, opening the doors in the US for more access, more job opportunities, more inclusion. These are the external manifestations of acceptance that most viewers with no personal exposure to deafness may see in the public domain. The nuts and bolts of growing up deaf, navigating through opposing philosophical theories regarding deaf education, and dealing with parents, siblings, and peers who can’t communicate, all serve to form foundational experiences which an audience rarely witnesses. Children of a Lesser God (1986), uses the character of James Leeds to provide simultaneous voiced translations of the deaf student Sarah’s comments. The audience is ushered into the world of disparate philosophies of deaf education, a controversy of which general audiences may not have been previously unaware. At the core of James and Sarah’s struggle is his inability to accept that she is complete as she is, as a signing not speaking deaf person. Whether a full reconciliation is possible remains to be seen. The esteemed teacher of the deaf must allow himself to be taught by the deaf. Other films in this category include: Johnny Belinda (1949, 1982)Mr. Holland’s OpusBeyond SilenceThe Good ShepherdCompensation A Normal Guy-or-Gal-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Deaf The greatest measure of equality is to be accepted on one's own merits, with no special attention to differences or deviations from whatever is deemed ‘the norm.’ In this category, the audience sees the seemingly incidental inclusion of a deaf or hearing-impaired person in the casting. A sleeper movie titled Crazy Moon (1986) is an effective example. Brooks is a shy, eccentric young hearing man who needs who needs to change his life. Vanessa is deaf and works as a clerk in a shop while takes speech lessons. She possesses a joie de vivre that Brooks admires and wishes to emulate. When comparing the way they interact with the world, it is apparent that Brooks is the one who is handicapped. Other films in this category include: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (South Korea, 1992)Liar, LiarRequiem for a DreamKung Fu HustleBangkok DangerousThe Family StoneDeafness as a Psychosomatic Response to Trauma Literature about psychosomatic illnesses enumerates many disconcerting and disruptive physiological responses. However, rarely is there a PTSD response as profound as complete blockage of one of the five senses, ie; becoming deaf as a result of a traumatic incident. But it makes great copy, and provides a convenient explanation as to why an actor needn't learn sign language! The rock group The Who recorded Tommy in 1968, inaugurating an exciting and groundbreaking new musical genre – the rock opera. The film adaptation, directed by Ken Russell, was released in 1975. In an ironic twist for a rock extravaganza, the hero of the story is a ‘deaf, dumb, and blind kid.’ Tommy Johnson becomes deaf when he witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of his step-father and complicit mother. From that moment on, he is deaf and blind. When he grows up, he establishes a cult religion of inner vision and self-discovery. Another film in this category is Psych Out. Deafness as a Metaphor Hearing loss does not necessarily mean complete deafness and/or lack of vocalization. Yet, the general public tends to assume that there is utter silence, complete muteness, and the inability to verbalize anything at all. These assumptions provide a rich breeding ground for a deaf character to personify isolation, disenfranchisement, and/or avoidance of the harsher side of life. The deafness of a character can also serve as a hearing character’s nemesis. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) chronicles much of the adult life of a beleaguered man named Glenn Holland whose fondest dream is to compose a grand piece of orchestral music. To make ends meet he must teach band and orchestra to apparently disinterested and often untalented students in a public school. His golden son (named Cole, in honor of the jazz great John Coltrane) is discovered to be deaf. Glenn’s music can’t be born, and now his son is born without music. He will never be able to share his passion with his child. He learns just a little bit of sign, is dismissive of the boy’s dreams, and drifts further away from his family to settle into a puddle of bitterness, regrets, and unfulfilled desires. John Lennon’s death provides the catalyst for Cole’s confrontation with Glenn, forcing the father to understand that the gulf between them is an artificial one, perpetuated by the unwillingness to try. Any other disability could not have had the same effect in this story. Other films in this category include: Ramblin’ RoseBabelThe Heart Is a Lonely HunterA Code Unkown Deafness as a Symbolic Commentary on Society Sometimes films show deafness in a different country, during another era, and audiences receive a fictionalized representation of what life might have been like before these more enlightened times. The inability to hear and/or speak can also represent the more generalized powerlessness that a culture or a society’s disenfranchised experience. The Chinese masterpiece To Live (1994) provides historical and political reasons for Fenxi’s deafness—her father was a political prisoner whose prolonged absence brought hardship and untended illness. Later, the chaotic political situation which resulted in a lack of qualified doctors led to her death. In between these scenes the audience sees how her parents arrange a marriage with another ‘handicapped’ comrade of the town. Those citizens deemed to be crippled or outcast have different overt rights and treatment. The 1996 film Illtown presents the character of a very young teenage boy to represent the powerlessness of youth in America. David has absolutely no say in where he can live, with whom he can live, and the decisions made all around him. When he is apprehended after a stolen car chase, his frustration at his and all of his generation’s predicament in the face of a crumbling world is pounded out on the steering wheel as the police cars circle him. He is caged, and without the ability to communicate. Were he to have a voice, the overall sense of the film and his situation is that he would be misunderstood anyway. Other films in this category include: Stille Liebe (Germany)RidiculeIn the Company of Men Let Your Fingers Do the ‘Talking’ I use this heading to describe films where sign language is used by a deaf character to express something that a main hearing character can’t (or won’t) self-generate. It is a clever device which employs a silent language to create a communication symbiosis: Someone asks a hearing person who knows sign what that deaf person just said, and the hearing person must voice what he or she truly feels, and yet is unable to express voluntarily. The deaf person is capable of expressing the feeling, but must rely upon the hearing person to disseminate the message. And so, the words do emanate from the mouth of the person who means them, albeit self-consciously, unwillingly. Jerry Maguire (1996) provides a signed foreshadowing of character metamorphosis and development, which is then voiced for the hearing audience. Jerry and Dorothy have just met, resigned from their jobs in solidarity and rebellion, and then step into an elevator to begin a new phase of their lives. Their body language identifies them as separate, disconnected, and heavily emotionally fortified. An amorous deaf couple enters the elevator and Dorothy translates the deaf man’s signs as, ‘You complete me.’ The sentiment is strong and a glaring contrast to Jerry and Dorothy’s present dynamic. In the end, Jerry repeats this exact phrase to her, and means it with all his heart. We are all made aware of just how far they have traveled emotionally. They have become the couple in the elevator. Other films in this category include: Four Weddings and a FuneralKnowing Conclusion This has been a cursory glance at examining the narrative raison d’etre for the presence of a deaf character in story lines where no discussion of deafness is articulated. A film’s plot may necessitate hearing-impairment or deafness to successfully execute certain gimmickry, provide a sense of danger, or relational tension. The underlying themes and motifs may revolve around loneliness, alienation, or outwardly imposed solitude. The character may have a subconscious desire to literally shut out the world of sound. The properties of sign language itself can be exploited for subtle, undetectable conversations to assure the safety of hearing characters. Deaf people have lived during all times, in all places, and historical films can portray a slice of what their lives may have been like. I hope readers will become more aware of deaf characters on the screen, and formulate more theories as to where they fit in the literary/narrative schema. ReferencesMaltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 2009 Movie Guide. Penguin Group, 2008.Shuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Filmography Babel. Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Central Films, 2006. DVD. Bangkok Dangerous. Dir. Pang Brothers. Film Bangkok, 1999. VHS. Beyond Silence. Dir. Caroline Link. Miramax Films, 1998. DVD. Children of a Lesser God. Dir. Randa Haines. Paramount Pictures, 1985. DVD. A Code Unknown. Dir. Michael Heneke. MK2 Editions, 2000. DVD. Compensation. Dir. Zeinabu Irene Davis. Wimmin with a Mission Productions, 1999. VHS. Crazy Moon. Dir. Allan Eastman. Allegro Films, 1987. VHS. The Family Stone. Dir. Mike Bezucha. 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Dir. Mike Newell. Polygram Film Entertainment, 1994. DVD. Gas, Food, Lodging. Dir. Allison Anders. IRS Media, 1992. DVD. The Good Shepherd. Dir. Robert De Niro. Morgan Creek, TriBeCa Productions, American Zoetrope, 2006. DVD. Grand Canyon. Dir. Lawrence Kasdan, Meg Kasdan. 20th Century Fox, 1991. DVD. Hear No Evil. Dir. Robert Greenwald. 20th Century Fox, 1993. DVD. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Dir. Robert Ellis Miller. Warner Brothers, 1968. DVD. Huck Finn. Stephen Sommers. Walt Disney Pictures, 1993. VHS. I Don’t Want to Talk about It. Dir. Maria Luisa Bemberg. Mojame Productions, 1994. DVD. Knowing. Dir. Alex Proyas. Escape Artists, 2009. DVD. Illtown. Dir. Nick Gomez. 1998. VHS. In the Company of Men. Dir. Neil LaBute. Alliance Atlantis Communications,1997. DVD. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. RKO Pictures, 1947. DVD. Jerry Maguire. Dir. Cameron Crowe. TriSTar Pictures, 1996. DVD. Johnny Belinda. Dir. Jean Nagalesco. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1948. DVD. Kung Fu Hustle. Dir. Stephen Chow. Film Production Asia, 2004. DVD. Liar, Liar. Dir. Tom Shadyac. Universal Pictures, 1997. DVD. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Dir. Richard Brooks. Paramount Miracle on 34th Street. Dir. Les Mayfield. 20th Century Fox, 1994. DVD. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Dir. Stephen Hereck. Hollywood Pictures, 1996. DVD Murder by Death. Dir. Robert Moore. Columbia Pictures, 1976. VHS. Nashville. Dir. Robert Altman. Paramount Pictures, 1975. DVD. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dir. Milos Forman. United Artists, 1975. DVD. The Perfect Circle. Dir. Ademir Kenovic. 1997. DVD. Psych Out. Dir. Richard Rush. American International Pictures, 1968. DVD. The Quiet. Dir. Jamie Babbit. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. DVD. Ramblin’ Rose. Dir. Martha Coolidge. Carolco Pictures, 1991. DVD. Read My Lips. Dir. Jacques Audiard. Panthe Films, 2001. DVD. Requiem for a Dream. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Artisan Entertainment, 2000. DVD. Ridicule. Dir. Patrice Laconte. Miramax Films, 1996. DVD. The River Wild. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Universal Pictures, 1995. DVD. See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Dir. Arthur Hiller. TriSTar Pictures,1989. DVD. The Shop on Main Street. Dir. Jan Kadar, Elmar Klos. Barrandov Film Studio, 1965. VHS. Stille Liebe. Dir. Christoph Schaub. T and C Film AG, 2001. DVD. Suspect. Dir. Peter Yates. Tri-Star Pictures, 1987. DVD. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Dir. Park Chan-wook. CJ Entertainments, Tartan Films, 2002. DVD. There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films, 2007. DVD. To Live. Dir. Zhang Yimou. Shanghai Film Studio and ERA International, 1994. DVD. What the Bleep Do We Know?. Dir. Willam Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente. Roadside Attractions, 2004. DVD.

Background: Canadian residency programs have adopted competency-based medical education, where time-based learning systems are replaced with core competency “milestones” that must be achieved before a student progresses. Assessment tools must be developed to predict performance prior to high-stakes milestones, so interventions can be targeted to improve performance.Objectives: 1. To characterize how well each of three practice written exams predicts passing the Canadian Internal Medicine Royal College (RC) exam. 2. To determine if writing practice exams is perceived to improve performance on the RC exam.Methods: Three 105-question multiple choice question exams were created from a range of internal medicine topics, and offered one month apart to 35 residents. Percentile ranks on each practice exam were compared to the result (pass/fail) on the RC exam. Surveys were completed within 1 month after the RC exam.Results: There were 35 residents invited to participate. Practice exams (PE) 1, 2, and 3 were taken by 33, 26, and 22 residents, for an exam participation rate of 94.3, 74.3, and 62.9%, respectively. Failure on the RC exam could be predicted by percentile ranking <15% on PE1 (OR 19.5, p=0.017) or PE2 (OR 63.0, p=0.006), and by percentile ranking <30% on PE1 (OR 28.8, p=0.003), PE2 (OR 24.0, p=0.010) or PE3 (OR 15.0, p=0.046). The survey was sent out to the 33 participants. Of those, the total number of respondents was 25, with a response rate of 75.5%. Survey takers agreed that practice written exams improved performance on the RC exam (18/25, 88%).Conclusions: Performance in the Canadian Internal Medicine RC Exam can be predicted by performance on any of three practice written exams. This tool can therefore identify trainees for whom additional resources should be invested, to prevent failure of a high-stakes milestone within the competency based medical education framework.RÉSUMÉContexte : Les programmes canadiens de résidence ont choisi de diffuser un enseignement médical axé sur les compétences dans lequel les systèmes d’apprentissage structurés en fonction du temps sont remplacés par des « jalons » liés aux compétences fondamentales que l’étudiant doit atteindre pour aller de l’avant. Il faut élaborer des outils d’évaluation pour prédire la probabilité de résultats escomptés par un étudiant avant que celui-ci ne se présente à certains événements dont les enjeux sont élevés. Ainsi, il devient possible d’intervenir de manière à améliorer les résultats escomptés.Objectifs : 1. Déterminer dans quelle mesure chacun des trois examens de pratique écrits prédit la réussite à l’examen du Collège royal des médecins et chirurgiens du Canada (CRMCC) en médecine interne; 2. Évaluer si le fait de se soumettre à des examens de pratique écrits est perçu comme un élément qui améliore les résultats à l’examen du CRMCC.Méthodologie : Trois examens écrits comportant chacun 105 questions à choix de réponses portant sur un éventail de sujets relatifs à la médecine interne ont été préparés et proposés à 35 résidents à intervalle d’un mois. Les rangs-centiles de chaque examen de pratique ont été comparés avec le résultat obtenu à l’examen du CRMCC (succès/échec). Les sondages ont été effectués dans le mois suivant l’examen du CRMCC.Résultats : Trente-cinq résidents ont été invités aux examens de pratique écrits (EP) 1, 2 et 3. La participation a été respectivement de 33, 26 et 22 résidents, soit de 94,3 %, 74,3 % et 62,9 %. L’échec à l’examen du CRMCC pouvait être prédit par un rang-centile < 15 % à l’EP1 (OR 19,5 et p = 0,017) ou à l’EP2 (OR 63,0 et p = 0,006) et un rang-centile < 30 % à l’EP1 (OR 28,8 et p = 0,003), à l’EP2 (OR 24,0 et p = 0,010) ou à l’EP3 (OR 15,0, et p = 0,046). Le sondage a été envoyé aux 33 participants. Le nombre total de répondants a été de 25, pour un taux de réponse de 75,5 %. La majorité des répondants (18/25, 88 %) sont d’avis que les examens de pratique écrits leur ont permis d’obtenir de meilleurs résultats à l’examen du CRMCC.Conclusions : Les résultats à l’examen du Collège royal des médecins et chirurgiens du Canada (CRMCC) en médecine interne peuvent être prédits par les résultats obtenus à l’un des examens de pratique écrits. Par conséquent, cet outil peut être utilisé dans le cadre de l’enseignement de la médecine axé sur les compétences pour identifier sur qui l’on devrait investir des ressources additionnelles en vue d’éviter un échec à cet événement aux enjeux élevés.Competency-based medical education (CBME) has generated increased attention over the last decade,1–3 and become entrenched within several national medical education frameworks including Canada.4 Proponents of CBME suggest that older medical education models focus on medical knowledge rather than skills, or higher order aspects of practice. 5 Focus on time spent in training can take away from the abilities acquired during that time frame.6 Furthermore, flexible time periods may be more efficient and focused, compared to time-based curriculum.3,6,7 In light of these advantages, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) has committed to transform medical education to a CBME model for all residency programs by 2017.4While residency programs reorganize toward the CBME model, residents will still be required to perform oral and written exams. It is thus essential that CBME-based programs incorporate assessment tools to predict performance on high-stakes milestones, such as RC exams.We created three written PEs, and evaluated how well each predicted performance on a high-stakes milestone, the RCPSC Internal Medicine exam (RC exam). We also evaluated how well PE were perceived to improve performance on the same high-stakes milestone RC exam.METHODSSetting and ParticipantsThe RC exam contains both written and oral components. All residents sitting both components of the RC exam, within 12 months, who were post-graduate medical residents at Western University (London, Ontario, Canada), were invited to participate. The study was conducted in 2013-2014.Western University Health Sciences Research Ethics Board provided an ethics waiver for this study, since the study was performed as part of the standard operations of an educational program.Intervention: ExamsTwo authors (HS, BT) separately created multiple choice questions (MCQ) reflecting all areas of internal medicine, based on the Objectives of Training of the RC Internal Medicine exam. RC exam questions are not available for purchase, and examinees are forbidden to share RC exam questions. Therefore, PE content and question style was informed by questions purchased for American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) course reviews.8,9 MCQ creators had each completed the RC exam within 3 years, and were thus familiar with MCQ and exam format.All authors independently reviewed each PE question to assure quality of content, grammar, spelling, and syntax. Each PE covered all subspecialty areas within internal medicine, including allergy and immunology ( n=4), cardiology (n=13), dermatology (n=2), endocrinology (n=8), gastroenterology (n=10), hematology (n=10), infectious diseases (n=15), nephrology ( n=9), neurology (n=6), oncology (n=4), respiratory and critical care medicine (n=7), rheumatology ( n=14) and statistics (n=3). This topic allocation included 7 questions for JAMA Rational Clinical Exam, and 5 for interpretation of medical images (e. g., chest X-ray, electrocardiogram). PE size (105 questions) and length (3 hours) were chosen to reflect the RC exam.Each PE was offered at two separate times, to assure flexibility within ongoing clinical responsibilities. PE1, PE2, and PE3 were offered approximately 7, 6, and 5 months prior to RC exam, respectively. This timing was chosen so that trainees had sufficient time to improve their performance before the RC exam if a poor PE result was found.Examinees were provided a personalized report for each exam, within 7 days of completing the PE. The personalized report included the examinee’s overall mark, average within each subspecialty, and percentile rank within the entire cohort of examinees. Two separate 1-hour periods were available to review each PE results, with the questions and key, supervised by BT.Intervention: SurveyAll study participants were invited to participate in a survey. The survey assessed how well PE simulated the RC exam, whether the PE were recommended to the next year’s cohort of examinees, and whether the PE improved performance on the RC exam.Outcomes: ExamsEach study participant agreed to provide the RC exam result (“pass” or “fail”) once he or she had received it. Each candidates verbally communicated RC exam result was confirmed online 3 months after the RC exam results were reported (cpso.on.ca).Odds ratios were calculated. The adverse outcome was failure on the RC exam. Exposures evaluated included percentile rank < 15% and <30%. Odds ratios of infinity were prevented by adding 1 adverse outcome to any exposure group without any adverse outcomes; this was performed for 3 exposure groups, but did not impact whether statistical significance was attained. Results are detailed in Table 1.Outcome: SurveySurvey results were on a Likert Scale. The proportion of those respondents who agreed or disagreed were calculated.All data was analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21.0.RESULTSSetting and ParticipantsThere were 35 residents invited to participate, the total number of possible participants. PE1, PE2, and PE3 were taken by 33, 26, and 22 residents, for an exam participation rate of 94.3, 74.3, and 62.9%, respectively. The majority of invitees took 3 (n=17) or 2 ( n=14), while a minority took 1 (n=2) or 0 (n=2) practice exams.ExamsOf all examinees of the RC exam (n=35), 7 failed. RC exam pass rates were lower when PE1 percentile rank was lower than 15% (40.0 vs. 92.9%, p<0.001) or 30% (44.4 vs. 100%, p<0.004), when PE2 percentile rank was lower than 15% (0.0 vs. 100.0%, p <0.001) or 30% (42.9 vs. 100.0%, p=0.038), and when PE3 percentile rank was lower than 30% (50 vs. 93.75%, p=0.046) (Figure 1). Figure 1. License exam practice pass rate versus percentile rate (PR) on practice exams. Examinees were more likely to fail the RC exam if percentile rank was less than 15% (OR 19.5, p=0.017) or 30% (OR 28.8, p=0.003) in PE1, less than 15% (OR 63.0, p=0.006) or 30% (OR 24.0, p =0.010) in PE2, or less than 30% (OR 15.0, p=0.046) in PE3.SurveyOnly residents who had taken at least 1 practice exam were invited to participate. The survey was sent out to the 33 participants, the total number of possible participants. Of those, the total number of respondents was 25, with a response rate of 75.5%. Most survey respondents agreed that the PEs were an accurate simulation of the written component of the RC examination (20/25, 80%) (Figure 2A). Most survey respondents agreed that the PEs improved performance on the RC written examinations (18/25, 72%) (Figure 2B). Most survey respondents recommended future residents to take the PEs (22/25, 88%) (Figure 2C).DISCUSSIONWe describe the creation of a tool to assess performance on a high-stakes milestone examination, the RC exam. This tool is easy to create, affordable, and is administered on a voluntary basis with high uptake amongst candidates writing the RC exam. The assessment tool has been shown to predict performance well so that resources can be invested in those at risk for failing.There is a possibility that mere participation in the assessment tool itself improves performance on this high-stakes exam. There were insufficient numbers of study participants to determine a correlation between number of exams taken and pass rates. Even still, unwillingness to participate in the study may reflect a general unwillingness to prepare, which means the results would be confounded and correlative rather than causative. One way to look into this is to perform a randomized trial in which half of residents take the assessment tool and the other half doesn’t. Unfortunately, almost all invited residents were anxious to participate, rendering such a possible study impossible. On the other hand, exam takers were able to communicate usefulness of the exam and to provide feedback on how it might be improved for future years.As CBME develops and becomes entrenched, there will continue to be a need to prepare for knowledge based written exams. This exam will continue to be considered a core competency between the stages to transition to practice. Thus, tools are needed to assess exam competence. This study confirms that such tools can and should be developed to assure that trainees are prepared.Ideally, residents with low performance would be identified early enough to intervene to change the outcome. It is uncertain what the ideal time frame is or what the intervention should be. It is reasonable to assume that taking the examination earlier in their training may allow candidates to become aware of their performance and implications thereof and implement earlier changes in learning strategies. For example, in past years, candidates contacted their program directors to ease the clinical workload to allow more study time. Others sought counselling and mentorship from staff, while others were self-directed in their learning and became more motivated to study. On the other hand, poor performance on this formative examination could potentially discourage some residents from studying if they felt their studying was futile. Future research efforts should focus on identifying which intervention is optimal to modify exam performance.The failure rate of 20% on the RC exam the year the study was conducted was unusually high for the program; however, this allowed for a correlation to be established between the PEs and the RC exam. The PEs were able to identify all those who failed the RC exam. However, there were those who scored below the 30th percentile on the PEs and still passed the RC exam. It must be kept in mind that the purpose of these formative exams is to identify those at high risk of failure so they can receive remedial support and improve their chances of passing. Thus, it is possible that through increased remedial support, those candidates who did poorly on the in-training exam managed to pass the RC exam.Only 2 trainees chose to write none of the PEs. While both of these trainees ultimately failed the RC exam, statistical significance could not be established due to the small sample size. It thus remains uncertain whether the act of writing PEs predicts passing the RC exam. However, the study objective was to identify candidates at high risk of failing the RC exam; the next step will be to determine which interventions can improve RC exam result. However, it must be acknowledged that PEs could not only identify candidates at risk of failing RC exam, but also improve their performance. This requires future study before any firm conclusions can be found.This study confirms that formative exams’ results can predict failure on the RC exam. The questions were written by authors who had recently written the RC exam, familiar with its format, and knowledgeable of the current Canadian guidelines, which are a focus of the actual RC exam. Because of confidentiality agreements with the RCPSC, actual RC exam questions can’t be shared, and thus can’t be used as part of the practice exams. However, we attempted to overcome this limitation by having all PE questions reviewed by at least 3 physicians who’d recently successfully completed the RC exam, to assure syntax and format was as similar as possible between PE and RC exam. Furthermore, this limitation does not impact the PEs statistically significant prediction of candidates at risk of failing the RC exam. The study objective was to identify candidates at risk of failing the RC exam, and the PEs are indeed a valid predictor of RC exam performance. There are limitations to this study. Firstly, this was a single centre study. However, Western University has a wide range of subspecialty programs available, and the trainees’ demographics resemble that at other Canadian centers. Secondly, new questions need to be created annually to reflect updated literature and guidelines; this requires ongoing commitment and dedication from staff. These “updated” exams could become more difficult to validate if candidates no longer fail the RC exam. However, if the act of taking the PE predicts passing RC, future research could focus on comparing RC pass rates at programs with and without the PEs. Thirdly, it's entirely possible that the use of questions from old RC exam would be more predictive, but these questions cannot be shared or used for PE due to the confidentiality agreement with the RCPSC. Therefore, creation of independent questions is still required. This is the first study of an assessment tool to predict performance on the Canadian internal medicine examination within the CBME framework. This strategy can easily be replicated and feedback is rapidly provided in a time sensitive manner. This could help trainees direct their preparation and identify knowledge gaps more easily.CONCLUSIONWe report an assessment tool to predict performance on the RC exam that can be a valid and useful form of feedback. This strategy can easily be replicated for other subspecialties or internal medicine programs. Future efforts need to focus on how the results can determine which interventions or learning strategies improve the results of candidates identified to be at risk for failing.DisclaimersThe authors declare they have no competing interest.The authors report no external funding source for this study.The authors declare no previous abstract or poster or research presentation or any online presentation of this study.REFERENCES 1. Caccia N, Nakajima A, Kent N. Competency-based medical education: the wave of the future. J Obstet Gynaecol Can 2015;37:349–53. 2. Carraccio C, Englander R, Gilhooly J, et al. Building a framework of entrustable professional activities, supported by competencies and milestones, to bridge the educational continuum. Acad Med 2016 ;92(3):324–30. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000001141. 3. Carraccio C, Wolfsthal SD, Englander R, Ferentz K, Martin C. Shifting paradigms: from Flexner to competencies. Acad Med 2002;77:361–67. 4. Johnston C. 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