Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Dysfunctional families – drama”

Abstract Zahlreiche naturalistische Dramen der 1890er Jahre verhandeln scheiternde Familiengründungen, in denen Töchter und Söhne in als unentrinnbar geschilderten Familienbeziehungen gefangen bleiben. Der Aufsatz zeigt, wie die frühen Dramen Gerhart Hauptmanns und Elsa Bernsteins als Verhandlungen einer sozialen Determinierung von Männlichkeit aus dem genealogischen Übergang von der Position des Sohnes zu der des Vaters begriffen werden können. Die Darstellung krisenhafter Genealogien bei Hauptmann und Bernstein speist sich aus bisher nur als formale Anleihen diskutierten Bezügen zu Sophokles’ König Ödipus.Various naturalistic dramas written in the 1890s depict failing attempts at establishing new families in which sons and daughters cannot escape their ruinous and dysfunctional family backgrounds. The article shows how naturalistic dramas highlight the social determination of masculinity through a genealogical understanding of the family structure and the transition from son to father. The theme of genealogy can be traced to evocations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in plays by Gerhart Hauptmann and Elsa Bernstein; a link that has previously only been discussed in terms of formal analogies.

Theater plays a crucial role to represent the life and manners of a particular society. It acts as an informal tool for developing consciousness and promoting empowerment through education. Contemporary theater in India is no exception to this. It has the efficacy to build critical awareness among common people in general and women in particular. It critiques the social inequality and opens up the scope for bringing consciousness about gendered violence prevalent in contemporary Indian society. From 1970s onwards, the emergence of urbanization and industrialization had offered various opportunities for people irrespective of gender differences. Yet, it could not suppress the ‘other side’ of violence in Indian society. Mahesh Dattani, a pioneer in the world of modern Indian English Theater, is highly regarded as a social critic of contemporary urban life and manners. He sincerely presents dysfunctional families, individual dilemmas and societal problems, and gender issues including forbidden issues in his plays. As a conscious dramatist, Dattani reveals childhood maltreatment in his plays which focus on physical and mental illnesses among victims. He tries to sensitize the common people by representing the impact of discrimination on health as it is seen to be fatal in women. The present paper intends to analyze the impact of gender bias on women’s health as represented by Mahesh Dattani in his plays – “Tara” and “Thirty days in September.” In doing so, it embraces the educational implication of dramas through theater.

Abstract Background and Objectives Relational caring has the capacity to reduce stigma associated with dementia by shifting the focus from dysfunction and behavior management, to attending to the interdependencies and reciprocities that underpin caring relationships, and making explicit the centrality of relationships to quality care, growth, and quality of life. Education, particularly arts-based approaches, have been identified as a key strategy to decrease stigma. Yet rarely are the arts utilized in educational initiatives, and particularly so in community care settings. With an interest in redressing this, our team evaluated the impact of a Canadian filmed research-based drama – Cracked: new light on dementia – about stigma associated with people living with dementia and their families. Research Design and Methods We conducted interviews with family carers of people living with dementia and formal care providers affiliated with community-based dementia care, and also the general public at 3 and 8 months post-screening. Results Our analysis of participants’ perceptions/experiences illustrates the effectiveness of Cracked in reducing stigma by demonstrating changes in understandings of dementia and changes in practice. Our analysis also includes attention to how the film, as a form of cultural production, deepened engagement and facilitated transformation. Discussion and Implications Our evaluation of Cracked demonstrates that it is an effective strategy for decreasing the stigma associated with dementia by promoting relational caring. It also importantly contributes to the theoretical literature that supports film-based approaches to stigma reduction.

For many, the very idea of ‘history’ calls into question narratives of the past, distant and disconnected from our contemporary moment, and out of tune with the media-centred world of our post-2000 popular culture. This approach to history, however, is based on profound misconceptions, and does not take into account the fact that the present is history: we experience our historical moment via multiple and multi-faceted media practices, from using social media to watching movies, from watching television to consuming food. The past is, in turn, never far removed from our contemporary and everyday experiences, informing not only the way we live now, but the ways in which our futures are cemented. Ever cogniscant of this, history is changing and evolving. As Anthony Grafton put it in 2007, the function of history is “giving multiple methods and practices a place to meet, as antiquarianism intersected with ecclesiastical history, both collided with law, and all of them in turn experienced the shock of the new as travellers described unknown worlds to the east and, even more surprising, to the west” (122).There is a dictum invoked by historians to remind ourselves and others that History is, by its very nature, a construction: history is what we want it to be. As soon as we set to writing history, what we write is already in the thrall of distorting influences and culture. From the writer’s bias to the publisher’s constraints, History is always flawed. For the twenty-first century reader, our view on History is written, presented, read and critiqued, then revised and re-written, to be argued further in what can appear to be a continuous loop of publication. Within History, conflicts can be headlined by weighty semiotics like The History Wars, or by evolutions in historiography, from the simplistic dichotomy of Political vs Economic to ‘turns’ tracing the Sociological turn of the 1960s, the linguistic or cultural turn of the 1970s and 1980s and the material turn of the 2000s, or even the recent embracing of post-modern, indigenous, gender, and queer methodologies. But we hold that the culture of history itself is changing, partly through the immediacy of media and the embrace of online platforms, and partly through the ubiquitous presence of anonymous-but-informed readers, users and subscribers questioning, challenging and revising some of what has been held to be true for centuries. As Maria Grever and Sipe Stuurman and contend, “the citizens of the twenty-first century need a history that addresses their concerns as citizens of a particular nation, but also as world citizens” (3). In looking at ‘media and culture’ through the lens of ‘history’, it is possible to see and confront how History itself is changing before our eyes. We take history to be a lived-in subject. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to redress the critical balance by re-evaluating and re-visioning the notion of history in connection to media and culture. The intention is to see history as intersecting with all parts of life, in an open refusal of the often-reductive view that has long-surrounded history as an area of interest, both in and out of the academy. This critical stance answers the cultural shifts that we see intrinsic not only to history as a discipline, but also to the ways in which, in the cultural sense, history is shaped and adapted into the narrative of the everyday. The interaction of history, media, and culture evokes the principle that “in a globalizing world, an inward looking…canon” for the historical paradigm “will become less and less convincing. In the end, it might make history simply irrelevant” (Grever and Stuurman 3). The notion of history becoming irrelevant is something that, naturally, we fervently wish to avoid. The articles in this issue collectively aim to show the directions that research in history in taking in the 21st century. The approach to ‘history’ we take is, overall, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transnational, as we see history itself as an entity shifting boundaries and registers. The articles show distinctive ways in which history intersects with our media and cultural practices in the contemporary moment, as we simultaneously engage with critical exercises of re-discovery and re-evaluation, as well as indicative and diagnostic scholarly prerogatives. The issue draws strength from the points of intersection between articles, while maintaining a critical awareness of their different approaches to ‘history’, both as a critical entity and a disciplinary standpoint. After this editorial, this issue opens with a feature article by Adele Wessell, entitled “‘We Will Show the Country’: Bringing History to Life”. Here, Wessell provides an overview of the important concerns that historians are presented with as far as recording national chronicles is concerned, and the tendency over time to privilege written accounts. With a particular focus on the Australian context, Wessell considers the different and differing accounts of recording the past, and places food at the centre of the historical question, providing a tangible and cultural coordinate for the exploration of the national past, and its contemporary repercussions. Paul Ryder and Jonathan Foye’s article “Whose Speech Is It Anyway? Ownership, Authorship, and the Redfern Address” considers themes of ownership, authorship, and acknowledgement as they relate to the crafting, delivery, and reception of political speeches. In light of an ongoing debate over the authorship of the now well-known Redfern address, Ryder and Foye focus on the difficulty of identifying notions of creativity and colaboration as far as political speeches are concerned, and how this impacts on the historical and cultural relevance of political realities over time. The relationship between artistry, ownership, and memory is also the focus of Christina Chau in her article “Remediating Destroyed Human Bodies”. Chau investigates the connection between art and digital culture, by placing an empahsis on the relationship between the past and what she terms contemporaneity. In particular, Chau focuses on artists who ‘remediate’ news media and motifs within the broader popular culture scope, with an intent to monumentalise and historicise contemporary digital culture. The impact of digitisation of historical research is the focus of Rob Allen’s article, entitled “Lost and Found: The SEARCH for the Hidden and Forgotten”. Allen’s argument is foregrounded by the contention that much of the 19th century ‘disappeared’ from view in the 20th century. Considering the change in archival practices in the 21st century, Allen argues that digitisation has revolution the ways in which historical traces are accessed and re-evaluated, allowing for the re-discovery of previously (potentially) forgotten historical figures. Using the Victorian figure of John De Morgan as a primary example, this article considers the uses of digital sources to recover and reclaim the past. In “Blood on Boylston: Digital Memory and the Dramatisation of Recent History in Patriots Day”, Melanie Piper examines the movie phenomenon whereby historic events are offered as movie recreations within months of the event which they purport to re-present, asking questions like ‘when is too soon?’ when it comes to on-screen death and disaster sanitised for public viewing. Constructing the re-creation through the merging of social media representations and media files, actual footage and dramatised recreation in Patriots Day forces us to question the place of ‘crowd-sourced’ investigations, of online sense-making of events, and what Landsberg termed ‘prosthetic memory’ for mass culture. Patriots Day sits at what Piper calls “a somewhat uncomfortable intersection of fact and fiction, of docudrama and popcorn action movie”, requiring that we consider the history/media/culture nexus in such mediated dramatisations, concluding that our digital memories of the present will help make the prosthetic memories of the future. “‘The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends’: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City” is authored by the issue’s own editor, Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Here, the discussion provides an analysis of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’ as put forward in The Originals, a contemporary television series where vampires are the protagonists. Piatti-Farnell contends that, alongside New Orleans’ well-cemented reputation as tourism centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures, the historical folds of the city’s urban mythology also hold a distinctive narrative populated by vampire sightings. With this in mind, the article explores how, in The Originals, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with – and are, at times, almost inseparable from – the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms.The historical and cultural connections to urban spaces, specially in relation to specific landmark venues, continues to be the focus of attention in Ailsa Brackley du Bois’s article “Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal”. In her analysis, du Bois explores the history of the Ballarat’s Theatre Royal, and aims to take some initial critical steps towards retrieving lost knowledge from fragmented archival records and what she terms cultural silence. Taking a look at the evolving history of the Theatre itself, form its construction to its later renovations, this article specifically suggests that many forces converged to affect the venue’s own historical popularity. Ultimately, du Bois offers the beginning of an investigation into the prospects for telling of the ‘real story’ behind the rise and fall of the Ballarat’s Theatre Royal as a cultural entity.Music can stimulate, placate and induce nostalgia; it can construct what some people call a ‘soundtrack for their lives’ or it can soothe hurts and create inter-personal connections. Kris Vavasour, in “Pop Songs and Solastalgia in a Broken City” examines how explicitly local pop songs and their ability to evoke memory meets Glenn Albrecht’s ‘solastalgia’, the disaster-created homesickness in people still at home, to restore hope for post-earthquake Christchurch people. For those who lived through the seismic upheavals of 2010 and 2011, memories of culture and media which provided a level inter-personal ‘glue’ are key to understanding how they endured such trying times. Music is revealed to be more than an historic soundtrack to this process; it is one of the key components to the re-emergence of the people and city. Music is also the focus of Jack Ellis’s article, “Material History: Record Collecting in the Digital Age”, which examines the improbable death-then-rise track of vinyl records in the twenty-first century. Once consigned to music history, vinyl records and vinyl record collections have recently emerged to become cultural icons, measures of taste and the semiotic of musical engagement and even counter[digital]-culture in an oppositional narrative to the convenience and usefulness of download files. Music collectors reveal their reasons for accumulating shelves of records instead of computer files of digital downloads in a series of interviews emphasising materiality, the embedding of legacy and a gradual redefinition of media history through vinyl record ownership. The intersections between gender studies, film studies, and history are the focus of Jay Daniel Thompson and Erin Reardon’s article, entitled “‘Mommy Killed Him’: Gender, Family and History in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)”. Here, Thompson and Reardon evaluate the nuanced representations of gender in Craven's well-known film, in order to situate it within the context of the historical period in which it was produced. Taking a particular look at the impact of 1980s Reaganite politics on the narrative, Thompson and Reardon contend that the families in Craven’s film are purposefully presented as dysfunctional. Ultimately, this article argues that the kind of patriarchal family structure endorsed by Reagan is thoroughly ridiculed in Nightmare. In the final article of the issue, Kate Warner plunges into the infamous decades-long ‘History Wars’ debate between revisionists and post-revisionists examining Australia’s Indigenous narrative, to discuss four recent seminal television drama shows. The depiction of, or engagement with, Aboriginal stories and story-telling emerges as critical to the nature of who owns the narrative, who holds the power and therefore, who owns the histories. Contrasting the fantastic fictions of Glitch and Cleverman is the realist The Secret River and Redfern Now, but also pared back is the nature of Aboriginal ownership and television show direction versus the traditional colonial hegemonies, each taking on aspects of the ‘History Wars’ debate to raise new questions and to create a new view on the past. In a journal of media and culture, history transcends both aspects. Yet, as our contributors have shown, both in their breadth and depth of engagement with, and definitions of history, easy ‘pigeonholing’ or typing of history falls apart as soon as analysis begins. As several writers have noted, issues of hegemony, colonialism and post-colonialism, indigenous voices and ways of looking at our own chronicles, all combine to determine how we see the past, how we view the future, and how we live in the present. The power of the media in the digital age has changed how we engage with history; the traditional culture of history residing with academic experts who produce weighty tomes surveying the past is revealed by these media-savvy cultural historians to show the past in an entirely new light.ReferencesGrafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Grever, Maria, and Siep Stuurman. Beyond the Canon: History for the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Let’s begin with the paradox of disavowal. On the one hand, we all “know” that television is hypnotic. On the other hand, we tend to imagine that we each – perhaps alone – remain impervious to the blandishments it murmurs as we watch it, often without being fully aware we are doing so. One of the many things contributing to the invention of television, according to Stefan Andriopoulos, was “spiritualist research into the psychic television of somnambulist mediums” (618). His archaeology of the technological medium of television uncovers a reciprocal relation (or “circular causality”) between the new technology and contemporary cultural discourses such that “while spiritualism serves as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the invention of electrical television, the emerging technology simultaneously fulfils the very same function for spiritualist research on psychic telesight” (618). Television and the occult seem to be inextricably linked from the outset, so that perhaps the claims of some schizophrenics: that television addresses them personally and importunes them with suggestions, are not so outlandish as one might at first think. Nor, perhaps, are they merely a delusion able to be safely located in the pathology of the other. In fact it could be argued, as Laurent Gerbereau does, that television, as distinct from film with its historical imbrication of crowds with the image, aims to create the illusion of intimacy, as if the viewer were the only person watching and were being addressed directly by the medium. With two exceptions, the illusion of direct contact is sustained by the exclusion of crowds from the image. The first is major sporting events, which people gather to watch on large screens or in bars (which Gerbereau notes) and where, I think, the experience of the crowd requires amplification of itself, or parts of itself, by the large screen images. The second is the more recent advent of reality TV in which contestants’ fates are arbitrated by a public of voting viewers. This illusion of direct contact is facilitated by the fact that viewing actually does take place more and more in individual isolation as the number of TV sets in households multiplies. And it is true in spite of the growth in what Anna McCarthy has called “ambient television”, the television of waiting rooms, airport terminals and bars, which enables us to be alone with the illusion of company, without the demands that being in company might potentially make. Television can be understood as a form of refuge from the crowd. Like the crowd, it offers anonymity and the voyeuristic pleasures of seeing without being seen. But it requires no special skill (for example, of negotiating movement in a crowd) and it seems, on the face of things, to obviate the risk that individuals will themselves become objects of observation. (This, however, is an illusion, given the array of practices, like data-mining, that aim to make new segments of the market visible.) It also enables avoidance of physical contact with others – the risks of being bumped and jostled that so preoccupied many of the early commentators on modernity. New mobile technologies extend the televisual illusion of direct address. You can receive confidences from a friend on the mobile phone, but you can also receive a lot of spam which addresses “you” in an equally intimate mode. You are, of course, not yourself under these conditions, but potentially a member of a consuming public, as the availability of many visual subscription services for 3G phones, including televisually-derived ones like one-minute soap episodes, makes clear. Television cathects (in Virginia Nightingale’s suggestive psychoanalytically-inflected usage) aspects of the human in order to function, and I have argued elsewhere that what it primarily cathects is human affect (Gibbs). We could think of this investment of media in the human body in a number of different ways: in the terms suggested by Mark Seltzer when he writes of the “miscegenation” of bodies and machines, of nature and culture; or we could adapt Eugene Hacker’s term “biomediation”; or again Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation”, which have the advantage of moving beyond earlier models of the cyborg (such as Donna Haraway’s), in the way they describe how media repurposes the human (Angel and Gibbs). Here I want to focus on the media’s capture of human attention. This returns me to the question of television as a hypnotic medium. But on the way there we need to take one short detour. This involves Julian Jaynes’s remarkable book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind published in 1976 and only since the late nineties beginning to be rescued by its uptake by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio from its early reception as an intriguing but highly eccentric text. The book proposes taking literally the fact that in The Iliad the gods speak directly to the characters, admonishing them to perform certain acts. In this way, the voices of the gods seem to replace the kind of psychic interiority with which we are familiar. Jaynes argues that people once did actually hallucinate these voices and visions. Consciousness comes into being relatively recently in human history as these voices are internalised and recognised as the formation of the intentions of an “analogue I” – a process Jaynes suggests may have happened quite suddenly, and which involves the forging of closer relations between the two hemispheres of the brain. What drives this is the need for the more diffuse kinds of control enabled by relative individual autonomy, as social organisations become larger and their purposes more complex. Jaynes views some forms of consciousness (those which, like hypnosis, the creation of imaginary friends in childhood, religious ecstasy, or, arguably, creative states, involve a degree of dissociation) as atavistic vestiges of the bicameral state. While he insists that the hypnotic state is quite distinct from everyday experiences, such as being so lost in television that you don’t hear someone talking to you, other writers on hypnosis take the contrary view. So does Dennett, who wants to argue that the voices of the gods needn’t have been actually hallucinated in quite the way Jaynes suggests. He proposes that advertising jingles that get “on the brain”, and any admonitions that have a superegoic force, may also be contemporary forms of the voices of the gods. So we arrive, again, from a quite different avenue of approach, at the idea of television as a hypnotic medium, one that conscripts a human capacity for dissociation. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that, while we tend to associate dissociation with dysfunction, with splitting (in the psychoanalytic sense) and trauma, Jaynes sees it in far more positive terms – at least when it is accompanied by certain kinds of voices. He characterises hypnosis, for example, as a “supererogatory enabler” (379) militated against by consciousness which, to save us from our impulses, creates around us “a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores”, so that “we know too much to command ourselves very far” [into the kinds of superhuman feats made possible with the assistance of the gods] (402). Most writers on hypnosis speak of the necessity for inducing the hypnotic state, and I want to suggest that televisual “flow” performs this function continuously, even though, as Jane Feuer and Margaret Morse respectively have suggested, television is designed for intermittent spectatorship and is often actually watched in states of distraction. While the interactivity of the internet and the mobile phone militate against this, they do not altogether vitiate it, especially as video and animation are increasingly appearing on these media. The screen has ways of getting your attention by activating the orienting reflexes with sudden noises, changes of scene, cuts, edits, zooms and pans. These reflexes form the basis of what Silvan Tomkins calls the surprise-startle affect which alerts us to a new state of affairs, and technologies of the screen constantly reactivate them (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi). No wonder, given the need for surprise, that sensationalism is such a well-used technique. While some writers (like S. Elizabeth Bird) link this to the production of “human interest” which creates a focus for everyday talk about news and current affairs that might otherwise be unengaging, I want to focus on the less rational aspects of sensationalism. Televisual sensationalism, which has its origins in the gothic, includes the supernatural, though this may appear as frequently in the guise of laughter as in horror, even if this laughter is sometimes uneasy or ambivalent. Hypnotism as entertainment might also qualify as sensationalism in this sense. A quick survey of Websites about hypnosis on television reveals that stage hypnosis appeared on American television as least as early as 1949, when, for 10 minutes after the CBS evening news on Friday nights, Dr Franz Polgar would demonstrate his hypnotic technique on members of the audience. It has featured as a frequent trope in mystery and suspense genres from at least as early as 1959, and in sitcoms, drama series, comedy sketches and documentaries since at least 1953. If on one level we might interpret this as television simply making use of what has been – and to some extent continues to be – popular as live entertainment, at another we might view it as television’s mise-en-abyme: the presentation of its own communicational models and anti-models for the reception of commands by voices. It’s ironic, then, that the BBC Editorial Guidelines treat hypnotism as a special kind of program rather than a feature of the medium and – in conformity with the Hypnotism Act 1952 – require that demonstrations of public hypnotism be licensed and authorised by a “senior editorial figure”. And the guideline on “Images of Very Brief Duration” (which follows the wording of the Agreement associated with the BBC’s Charter) states that programs should not “include any technical device which, by using images of very brief duration or by any other means, exploits the possibility of conveying a message to, or otherwise influencing the minds of, persons watching or listening to the programmes without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred”. Finally, though, if psychoanalysis is, as Borch-Jacobsen suggests, one more chapter in the history of trance (in spite of its apparent rejection of techniques of suggestion as it attempts to establish its scientific and therapeutic credentials), then perhaps screen-based technologies should be taken seriously as another. What this might suggest about the constitution of belief requires further investigation – especially under conditions in which the pervasiveness of media and its potentially addictive qualities efface the boundary that usually demarcates the time and place of trance as ritual. Such an investigation may just possibly have some bearing on paradoxes such as the one Lyn Spigel identifies in relation to her observation that while the scripting of the “grand narratives of national unity that sprang up after 9/11 were for many people more performative than sincere”, Americans were nevertheless compelled to perform belief in these myths (or be qualified somehow as a bad American) and, further, may have ended by believing their own performances. References Andriopoulis, Stefan. “Psychic Television.” Critical Inquiry 31.3 (2005): 618-38. Angel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “Media, Affect and the Face: Biomediation and the Political Scene.” Forthcoming in Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture Special Issue 38.3 (2005). Bird, S. Elizabeth. “News We Can Use: An Audience Perspective on the Tabloidisation of News in the United States.” In Virginia Nightingale and Karen Ross, eds., Critical Readings: Media and Audiences. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2003. 65-86. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge Mass., MIT P, 1999. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Emotional Tie. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Feuer, Jane. “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” In Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology. 1983. Gerbereau, Laurent. “Samples or Symbols? The Role of Crowds and the Public on Television.” L’image 1 (1995): 97-123. Gibbs, Anna. “Disaffected.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.3 (2002): 335-41. Jaynes, Julian. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Kubey, Richard, and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. “Television Addiction.” http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/drugs/television_addiction.htm>. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Morse, Margaret. “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, The Mall and Television.” In Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990. 193-221. Nightingale, Virginia. “Are Media Cyborgs?” In Angel Gordo-Lopez and Ian Parker, eds., Cyberpsychology. London: Macmillan, 1999. Selzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. New York: Springer, 1962. Spigel, Lyn. “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 235-70. Thacker, Eugene. “What Is Biomedia.” Configurations 11 (2003): 47-79. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gibbs, Anna. "In Thrall: Affect Contagion and the Bio-Energetics of Media." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/10-gibbs.php>. APA Style Gibbs, A. (Dec. 2005) "In Thrall: Affect Contagion and the Bio-Energetics of Media," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/10-gibbs.php>.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

Unpublished until 2020, The Biography of Julie von Bartmann (1924) was Djuna Barnes’s first attempt to reshape events from her early life growing up on a dysfunctional farmstead in rural New York state into a literary work. Like Barnes’s better-known work, it is a text in which animal life, and human proximity to animal life, is central. Although unpublished, Barnes recycled sections of the drama when writing Ryder (1928), her autobiographical novel. Many years later, Barnes’s play The Antiphon (1958)would complete what was left unfinished in Julie von Bartmann, a family drama where family members intend to ‘beast’ each other, exacting revenge for earlier transgressions. Adapting its title from a quotation in The Antiphon where “Woman is most beast familiar”, this chapter will show how a beastly idiom can be traced through Barnes’s autobiographical writings. Charting the development of this idiom, this chapter will argue that the “beast familiar” becomes central to Barnes’s reimagining of the family drama, with animality emerging as a vector through which to scrutinise familial transgression. Presenting a new aspect to what Julie Taylor describes as the ‘non-dichotomous relationship’ between ‘auto/biography and fiction’ in Barnes’s writing and building on existing research on her interest in the grotesque and the animal, this chapter will argue that in Barnes’s writing we find a modernism in which beastly figurations contaminate the fiction of the family unit.

This present research paper throws light on thematic analysis of Eugene O’ Neill’s plays. O’ Neill is considered as one of the most controversial figures in modern drama. Eugene O' Neill is known as one of the greatest American playwrights in the history. His themes have made his plays highly recognized work and it is only because of strong themes of his plays just like dysfunctional family life, hiding behind a mask and Greek Mythology. His plays also throw light on social themes, religious themes, psychological themes, pessimism, family life and Greek mythology. His use of melodramatic elements in his early dramas may be the subject of study. In his plays, there is a touch of free play of realism and melodrama. Sometimes the characters of O’ Neill become like puppets without having their own life. His plays have been written by focusing on personal point of view having effect of his family’s tragic relationship. Hence, Eugene O’ Neill has become popular in American Literature because of themes of his play

Familial traumas, especially grief about a lost parent or child, form one of the most prominent ways that post-horror encroaches on the generic territory of serious arthouse dramas, generating lingering discomfort in viewers. With the affective shape of trauma at their disposal, many of these films depict mothers and their offspring turned monstrous through unsuccessful processes of mourning. Examining the narrative strategies and depictions of trauma in Goodnight Mommy, The Babadook, and Hereditary, this chapter argues that themes of generationally inherited dysfunction serve as a larger metaphor for post-horror’s own relationship to both the horror genre and art cinema, including its atavistic influences from earlier generations of art-horror films.