Статті в журналах з теми "Fantastics universals"

El artículo analiza la herencia viquiana en el pensamiento moderno, en particular en el pensamiento moderno italiano. A partir de una periodización de esta herencia, según la cual el XIX es el siglo del Vico filósofo de la historia, el XX corresponde al Vico filósofo del lenguaje y el XXI pone en relieve al pensador del cuerpo y se reconoce en el “universale fantastico” (universal fantástico) el legado más relevante del pensamiento viquiano. Este legado actúa críticamente dentro del pensamiento de autores como Agamben, Deleuze y Esposito e influye también en escritores como Pasolini.

Mi intención en este ensayo no trata de desmentir la interpretación tradicional según la cual Cervantes parodia en su obra cumbre el ideal caballeresco, sino mostrar, por un lado, la relación intrínseca entre locura e ingenio en el hidalgo manchego e incidir, por otro, sobre el ser simbólico de don Quijote y su dimensión ingeniosa a la luz del concepto de universale fantastico acuñado por el filósofo italiano Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).

»Langt mere eventyrligt end historisk«Om Grundtvigs forhold til EnglandBy Helge GrellIn a letter to Queen Caroline Amalie, written towards the end of his Englandjoumey in 1843, Grundtvig describes his attitude to England as ’more fantastic than historical’. This expression is only comprehensible when viewed within the tension created by his expectation of finding a receptive forum for his ideas among the English and his subsequent disappointment. The English, whom Grundtvig met, proved un-receptive, not only to his view of universal history, including the central role he allocated to the English people, but also to his ecclesiastical position.The ’fantastic’ i Grundtvig’s attitude to the English is in evidence in his continued insistence on the central importance of England for his view on universal history and in the high hopes he still held for the realisation of his ecclesiastical ideas in England, despite his disappointment and his critical attitude to contemporary English life.Furthermore, Grundtvig’s attitude to England is even more ’fantastic’ when we realize that the contradiction between his expectations of the English and England and his negative experience becomes a deciding factor in his thoughts about the necessary interaction between the spiritual and the material world.

AbstractThe diversity of contemporary French narration renders the canonical definition of le fantastique useless. Writers challenge Todorov’s definition that the fantastic emerges as the reader hesitates between the supernatural and the natural explanation for the unlikely event. Léa Silhol (1967), a storyteller of mythic-poetic-fantastic style, figures among these writers. An inheritor of romantic fantastic storytelling, Silhol delves into the mental and psychic depth of legendary figures, mostly goddesses and fairies, to make them question their own identity and observe humans from their perspective. Her feminine and universal writing about the fantastic exemplifies the new-generation French fantastic. Like the mythic tisseuse in her tales, Silhol weaves stories with a new texture, with an imaginary étoffe. Just as the mythic and legendary weavers are associated with water, she makes use of it to achieve her verbal alchemy, the narrative rhetoric of which operates from three angles: mythic, structural, and stylistic. Silhol’s transtextual writing of myths from different cultures creates mythic résonance of the collective unconscious from linguistic différance. The narrative structure of the tales embodies the inversion of vision in Bachelardian alchemy of the imagination. Lastly, a scrupulous analysis of the author’s diction that corresponds with the thematic threading of tales and their narrative structure will illustrate her dominant style of harmonism.

Abstract Aesthetic theory, as reflected in both contemporary cognitive (Patrick Colm Hogan) and more traditional structuralist criticism (H.G. Widdowson), points to the dynamics between familiarity and surprise as the driving force behind the pleasure we derive from reading fiction. This paper explains how Neil Gaiman’s works, particularly his novel Neverwhere, utilize genre expectations and reinvent mythologies in order to captivate audiences in the current age of unprecedented access to information and a rather superficial intertextuality. The paper draws on Brian Attebery’s analyses of the literature of the fantastic to place Gaiman within the context of both modernist and postmodernist legacies, while proposing that his works could be best understood as representative of the current cultural paradigm, sometimes labelled as the pseudo-modern or post-postmodernism. The discussion of the shifting paradigm is used as a backdrop for the scrutiny of the devices employed in Gaiman’s writing: the pre-modern focus on storytelling, prototypicality, modernist “mythic principle”, postmodernist textual strategies, and utilization of current technologies and mass-communication media.

Non-verbal communication depends on children’s experiences and knowledge. In artistic activity the richer one’s experiences are that are related to art workshop, the greater is that per-son’s the ability to transmit information about the world, both real and notional, fantastic, which is within the scope of interest of a young creator. The aim of planned research was: to determine ways of creating graphical records by children in preschool and early school age, as universal non-verbal messages. In the research proceedings it was important to define ways of presenting particular issues and types of perspective the children used in particular tasks. Additionally, the symbols were important that were used by children to underline the power of expression. Artistic works of children at preschool age are a creation of both the presence and the future and expression of psychical state. The artistic means used in art works are significant because they reveal logic of children’s thinking, feeling and knowledge the children have.

Orthodontics is a department of dentistry that focuses on correcting misaligned enamel and jaws. Timely prevention performs a quintessential function in keeping oral fitness and accomplishing suited outcomes. By figuring out attainable problems at an early stage, orthodontists can devise fantastic remedy plans to forestall issues and decorate universal dental well-being. In this article, we discover the significance of well-timed prevention in orthodontics, highlighting a number of components and approaches

The article considers one of the views on God existing within the modern Western literary tradition and out-side of religious systems. The image of God was chosen as a cultural phenomenon relevant for interpretation, which exists both in religious and secular discourse. The research involved the creative heritage of Robert Sheck-ley – one of the most popular authors of fantastic literature in the mid-20th century. The analysis was based on fantastic tales, since they provide the opportunity to prove all strategies for social behaviour, as well as different views on life. The image of God created by Sheckley was reconstructed using intertextual analysis, which helps identify original mythological and religious narratives and individual allusions. This provides the opportunity to define the features of Sheckley's individual fantastic theology and find the reasons for using the image of God in secular literature. The analysis revealed that the used religious names, denominations and plots bear only formal similarity with the traditional ones. They are used and interpreted arbitrarily. God is interpreted as being anthro-pomorphic, pragmatic, partial and not interested in the fate of his creation. Communication with God is described as commercialised and is built on the model of the consumer society. The works of Sheckley indicate the possibil-ity and necessity of contact between the man and God with the obligatory personal participation of the individual. The American writer creates texts that are modernised in terms of the plot using traditional Christian ideas about the spiritual development of people and the need to preserve the Christian value system as a universal one. In this connection, Sheckley offers possible behavioural models for the created image of God.

The aim of this article is to present a personal conception on the structure and evolution of matter and to examine critically the one theorized by physics and quantum biology. The fundamental questions I am going to try to answer are: · What is a life? · Why is it difficult, elusive to understand its inner molecular mechanism? · Is it possible to formulate a comprehensive theory of the molecular mechanism that guides it, without resorting to abstract mathematical equations, true transcendental transpositions of the real world? · What does mysterious and powerful feeling push us in the search for its essence, despite the limited cognitive tools we have? Is love for knowledge an end in itself? The narrative I’m going to present is based on the assumption that all the elementary particles of matter and the forces with which they interact use a proper means of communication a universal molecular code, that informs them and guides them in the random evolution towards infinite possible solutions. I have also theorized that the evolution of life on earth had been possible thanks to the formation of a barrier, called the cell membrane, capable of containing within it, a set of organized and coordinated molecules, separated from the chaotic external world. To this hypothesis shared by many authors, I have associated the concept that the cell membrane has perfected the process of biological communication. Finally, I have hypothesized as the basis of life processes an incessant flow of electrons, which regulates communication and provide the energy they need. The substrate of this mechanism is formed by electromagnetic waves, the only ones capable to transport electrons and orchestrate the cosmic symphony. I may consider myself sufficiently gratified of the concepts presented here if they find some adhesion and theoretical contribution from the readers.

La figura di Cristo, cuore della fede cristiana, è esplosa in postmodernità in nuove e strane cristologie, alternative alla Chiesa e in competizione con lei. Catturato nella mistico-esoterica galassia New Age, la figura di Cristo è vista ora come quella della gnostico-cosmica Sofia , ora come il Messia che porta una nuova rivelazione, ora come il Principio interior di guarigione integrale e integrazione universale, ora come la Leggenda fantastica e populista che ritiene confusi ricorsi magici. Sulla figura religiosa e storica di Cristo stanno tutti i tipi di alegorizanti interpretazioni, come quella che lo vede come il ricercatore ed il maestro della saggezza salvatrice . L’atteggiamento della Chiesa nei confronti di tali cristologie mobili è quello di capire come espressione di una cultura disorientata e, in dialogo conloro e in ricupero di suoi punti di luce, offrirne la “diakonia della verità” circa il Cristo della grande tradizione apostolica.

This paper intends to make an important contribution to the studies of religious utopianism by considering religions as comprehensive utopian systems which have an ontological and a social utopian mode. It argues that the ontological mode/utopia is related to human finality and that its fantastical content, abstractness and ontological Othering undermine the transformative powers of left religious social utopianism, while it encourages pernicious social Othering in religious fundamentalism. The article has four sections. In Section 1, it clarifies the definition of utopia on which the paper relies and the reasons for this particular choice. Section 2 discusses the religious ontological utopia and religions as utopian systems and utopian programs. Section 3 utilises E. Bloch’s considerations about concrete and abstract utopias to explain the reasons for the incapacity of politically left orientated religious utopianism to function as a revolutionary force. Finally, the Section 4 discusses the way religious fundamentalism employs social Othering as a way of defending the universality of its ontological vision against competing religious and pseudo-religious universals.

The debate, whether literature (art) can represent reality and life well has not been concluded, coming to no universal validity, since the time of Plato. The critics and the connoisseurs of art vary in their arguments for and against, some argue that literature represents reality and life and others deny it. They value and judge literature according to their own taste and subjective impression, it is claimed not only to be realistic but also fantastic, the frenzy of human imagination. Despite all the assertions against it, most of the literary critics have accepted that literature is a representation of life, though Plato has expelled the poets from his well run republic. Modern criticism of English literature takes its major impetus from Henry James for he is the first critic who speaks about representation of reality and life in literature, in novel. He has given prominent status to novel with an argument that it represents life better and more faithfully than any other genre of literature. For the discussion of the representation of realty in literature, Henry James’ Art of Fiction has been taken into account and MLA VIII has been used for citing the works.

The review discusses a collection of articles produced by a team of scholars under the supervision of professor Igor Svetlov. The book focuses on alternative experiments in late 1800s — early 1900s French art, which, although they failed to grow into independent movements, succeeded in producing several interesting concepts. The study is especially concerned with the Paris-based salon of ‘Rose + Croix’ and its founder Josephin Peladan — a writer, philosopher, occultist, and an able organizer. The book considers his artistic interests and views on the connection between art and religion, the role of symbolism in artistic thought, and the relationship between the modernity of his day and the previous epochs, including the esoteric and magical traditions. The collection covers a broad variety of subjects, such as the fantastic and the demonic in Paris, the mystical components in landscape paintings of the late 1800s, illustrations in the era of decadent art, intellectualism and intuition of the regulars of Peladan’s salons, esotericism and symbolism as a bridge into otherness, the existential and the universal in 1900s’ Parisian architecture, M. Voloshin’s turn-of-the-century spiritual and aesthetic experiments, the Parisian ‘imprint’ in Kandinsky’s early works, and Paris photographed at nighttime.

In terms of Michel Foucault utopias afford consolation : “Although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold ; they open up cities with waste avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.” Utopias testify to our inability to dream our way out of the myths and the historical situation we live. As a matter of fact, our attitude towards history, says Dmitry Likhachev, is directed by notions “ encapsulated’’ in myths. During the 20th century, Russian utopian narrative expanded literary horizons by providing new visions of those “untroubled regions”. The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, new morality, and technology worship, generated in Russian utopianism a range of experimental fiction. This implied also a new genre of an “open-ended utopia”. Such an ambiguous utopia is indeterminate and incomplete, and often interrelated with the genre of the short fragmentary prose. Open-ended utopia involves the reader more actively in a dialectical process, giving him a more fundamental organizing role as the constructor of the text’s meaning. Velimir Khlebnikov (1885 -1922) and Elena Guro (1877-1913) - though not utopian writers in the same meaning as H.G. Wells or Alexandr Bogdanov - however, both directed their creative thought towards futurological visions of a new universal order and a new universal Man. In this paper I examine some of Khlebnikov’s and Guro’s futurological texts as fictional experiments of a spatial world-vision. Both authors domesticated and “colonized” in a very easy and concrete way the aerospace : the vault of heaven, the air, and the clouds, transforming them into their own, private heterotopias.

Embedded within the biographies of some transgender people are narratives elements more frequently found in culturally-specific legends settings and the interplay of mythological figures. Individuals who specifically identify as transsexuals (unlike other, non-binary or gender-queer transgender people) sometimes report the wish, the dream, and/or the desire to understand or alleviate their experienced gender incongruence in a surprisingly creative way: through some type of magical transformation. Calling upon recently collected interviews, this study examines those narratives and their use of such elements, noting their reliance on binary gender formations. Through philosophical and cultural-anthropological analyses, we suggest that these fields grant powerful and imaginative personal allowances, opportunities and perceptions to transsexual identifying transgender individuals – magical transformations and justified transpositions to alleviate dysphoria, a surrender of personal responsibility to unseen universal forces, and especially an inherent wisdom gifted during transitional liminality – that neither scientific nor academic evaluations of gender transition can. While these creative allowances are fictive, fantastical, and temporary, they nevertheless articulate a need if not an imperative for understanding, expression and ultimately action on behalf of the transitioning individual.

The article analyzes the features and meanings of the fantasy image of the Dragon in China and in European countries, their symbolism in historical traditions and in modern culture. In China, the Dragon is an example of the embodiment of a positive attitude of people, a symbol of goodness, well–being and universal worship, in Europe since ancient times it has been a symbol of evil and dangerous power, and the images of the legendary "dragon fighters" are recognized as heroes. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the resurgent interest in modern society in the peculiarities of the interpretation of this zoomorphic symbol in the cultures of the East and West. The concepts of the interpretations of the eastern and Western images were created in accordance with the spiritual needs that influenced their characteristics. A special contribution of the author to the study of this topic is the comprehension of the national influence of cultural traditions on the formation of artistic qualities in creating the image of a Dragon. It is concluded that the peculiarities of the evolution of images were manifested in the fact that in European art the images were oriented to realistic persuasiveness, and in Chinese art - to decorativeness. In addition, it was determined that the formation of this fantastic phenomenon occurred in accordance with the national mentality and the national picture of the world.

This research focuses on the comparative analysis of metaphorical folk names of English and Ukrainian homeopathic plants. The paper identified and interpreted the cognitive and linguocultural underpinning of the metaphors with an emphasis on the isomorphic and allomorphic features of their motivational structures in the compared languages. The study reached four major findings. Isomorphic for the metaphorization processes are input source spaces of "plant distribution area"; "mythical person or creature"; "a diseased organ or symptom"; "behaviour"; "another plant"; "body parts of the animal, bird or human", associated with the plant as a target space in shape, general appearance, location, healing properties, time of existence and way of life. Isomorphic for English and Ukrainian folk names of homeopathic plants are the compound blending models involving more than two input spaces and few blending spaces, as well as the presence in their motivational structure of a symbolic component associated with nationally specific and universal archetypal symbols. Isomorphic for metaphoric plant names is metonymic compression in blending spaces, based on holonym-partonym substitution, and involvement in the blending the possessive and comparative schemas. Allomorphic input sources of English metaphors involve the spheres of "artifact", "body fluids", "mythological characters", "fantastic creature", "particular patterns of behavior"– in contrast to the Ukrainian intercultural synonyms where such conceptual input spaces have not been identified.

The article demonstrates in detail the numerous inaccuracies allowed by Mikhail M. Bakhtin in his interpretation of Dostoevsky’s “fantastic story”. The stress on the role of the “menippea” and consequently on the ambivalence of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” makes him overlook the main import of the story. The meaning of the story might be grasped only by taking into account Dostoevsky’s artistic use of a set of Christian ideas. Striving – though rather inaccurately – to account for auto-intertextuality of “The Dream” in relation to many other previous and subsequent works of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin fails to recognize the specifically Dostoevskian formulation of the theme. And, accordingly, he skips the motives of the ruinous universal “indifference” (Russ. “ravnodushiye”), the impossibility of preserving the “integrity” (Russ. “tselostnost’”) of consciousness in the modern world and all the consequent imperfections of man. Meanwhile, a detailed tracing of the inner affinity of Zosima, Alyosha and even Ivan with the “ridiculous man” makes it possible to point out some recurring motives and, accordingly, the key stages of formation of the late Dostoevsky’s concept of the renewal of the world and the techniques of its artistic embodiment. The work also shows how the shortcomings of the Bakhtinian approach to Dostoevsky occasionally surface in modern Dostoevsky studies impacting the interpretation of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”.

Having served as the capital of Tsarist Russia for two hundred years until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the second biggest city of Russia and her gate to Europe, St Petersburg is the city full of historical buildings of fantastic architecture with its historical texture. Because of its historical and cultural significance, St. Petersburg is in UNESCO’s List of World Heritage Sites.On one side, there we have St. Petersburg, a fascinating city, the subject of Dostoyevsky’s novels, with cathedrals, churches, palaces, bridges, statues, and museums, housing rich cultural and historical heritage; on the other side, there we see jewels, reflecting the soul of women and embellishing their bodies.With this study, inspired by the authenticity and the city’s architectural pattern, innovative designs have been created via advanced 3D modeling technology. Thus, it was aimed that the beauty of the grandeur of history could be utilized as accessories, gaining a new functionality and transferring the cultural heritage values from local to universal level.Practical Research Methods have been adopted as a research methodology. The sampling of the study has been limited to the embellishments reflecting the architectural texture of St. Petersburg, as an inspirational resource for jewelry modelling. In planning the study, the stages of analysis, synthesis, selection and modelling of jewelry designs have been taken into account. Keywords: St. Petersburg, Architectural Pattern, Jewelry, Jewelry Design, 3D Digital Modelling, Innovation.

Salman Rushdie, a postmodernist immigrant, is considered as one the greatest novelist of the 20th century. His apt use of magical realism, incorporates mythology, religion, history, fantasy, and humor into the real world. He narrates his life story and relates it to the national history of India. Rushdie uses the magical realist technique to deal about the postcolonial people of India, and various postcolonial issues. His writing focuses on India’s history, politics, and identity as seen through his narrators. There is a blending of fantasy and reality with his fantastical fiction. Salman Rushdie presents women as strong characters to break free from their oppressive roles through his works. He develops strong female characters who face life with great fortitude and strength rather than meek personality. This research article critically investigates the role of women characters in selected novels by the acclaimed author, Salman Rushdie. A corpus of three major works—Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and Shame—has been selected for detailed analysis. The study aims to illuminate the varying dimensions of women’s representation, their influence, and the evolution of their roles in these narratives, serving as mirrors to the sociopolitical realities of their time. The article applies a combined theoretical framework of feminist literary criticism and postcolonial discourse to unpack the intricate characterizations and their wider implications. Findings reveal that Rushdie’s women characters are often depicted as multi-dimensional, complex individuals who actively influence the plot and resist conforming to traditional roles. They embody strength, resilience, and liberation in the face of cultural, political, and religious adversities, breaking the mold of passive feminine stereotypes. Despite being enmeshed within patriarchal societal structures, these characters often subvert normative constraints, highlighting the intersection of gender, power, and resistance in Rushdie’s novels. Through the use of magical realism, Rushdie juxtaposes reality with the fantastical, further challenging conventional expectations of women in literature. Rushdie’s depiction of women provides significant insights into the complexities of postcolonial feminist identities, societal norms, and cultural heritage. His novels, while being grounded in their specific contexts, resonate on a universal scale, enriching the discourse around the representation of women in literature.

Abstract Scholars of the European Middle Ages are well acquainted with bestiaries. These compendia of pithy stories about animal lore told in the service of catechetical instruction were especially popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Manuscripts of them survive in the dozens, many of them with lavish illustrations of the animals, plants, and fantastical beasts described therein. A recent exhibition of medieval bestiaries at Getty Museum in Los Angeles yielded a sumptuous catalogue (Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, edited by Elizabeth Morrison and published in 2019) that provides an ideal starting point for anyone interested in this fascinating genre and its stunning illuminations. Underlying the success of the bestiary in the medieval Latin tradition is a modest Greek text from late antiquity: the Physiologus. Dating from the second or third century, this collection of forty-eight short and strange animal stories with Christian messages was probably composed in Alexandria. Untitled in the manuscript tradition, it takes its name from the anonymous natural scientist – Physiologus – whose authoritative voice narrates the text. As the volume under review makes clear, the Latin tradition was by far the most successful legacy of the Physiologus, but its reach and influence were surprisingly broad owing to the universal appeal of its charming contents, which is evident in the richness of the vernacular translations derived from the original Greek text.

Background. Analyzing the origins of the school of Kharkiv Academic Theater of Musical Comedy, we cannot ignore its founders. People’s Artist of the UzSSR O. Ivashutych was a director, head of the theatre (during the 1940s), drama actor from the year of its founding (1929) to 1971. Methods and novelty of the research. The research is based on historicalchronological, biographical, typological, and comparative methods with an element of performances and roles reconstruction. Not much is known about O. G. Ivashutych. The only encyclopedic reference about him (from the “Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine”) does not shed light on the director’s method, indirectly giving an idea only of the acting range. The work of Yu. Stanishevsky (1970) on the first forty years of musical comedy theaters of Ukraine (“Colors of Ukrainian operetta”) has several useful elements of reconstructions of the roles in the early period of O. Ivashutych’s work. N. Yermakova’s (2012) monograph “The Berezil Culture…” contains facts and important assessments of O. Ivashutych’s activity as a member of the Berezil Art Association. The author of this paper has collected more than 30 articles in the funds of scientific libraries and Specialized music and theater library of Kharkiv, as well as in the archives of KhATMK, and for the first time the information about the work of O. Ivashutych is analyzed. In addition, the actresses who worked with O. Ivashutych were interviewed. Therefore, this study is the first to reveal and systematize peculiarities of the creative path of O. Ivashutych, an actor, director, head of Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy. The director made about 40 productions on the stage of Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy and in Central Asia, where he was later evacuated. As an actor, O. Ivashutych played more than 100 versatile roles. The article aims to identify and characterize the main stages of the creative path of O. Ivashutych as well as differences between his acting and directing in different aesthetic eras. Results. O. Ivashutych’s creative individuality leaned towards the tragicomedy of Charlie Chaplin and Maryan Krushelnytsky. As a student of Les Kurbas in the Berezil Art Association and a member of the director’s laboratory of this theater, Les Ivashutych mastered the method of the famous avant-garde company, Les Ivashutich mastered the stage method of the famous avant-garde company, skillfully building rhythm of a performance and a role, turning to circusize, grotesque sharpening of images. In his directing work on the stage of the Musical Comedy Theater, O. Ivashutych, as a pupil of “The Berezil”, sought to consistently develop two repertoire trends: the embodiment of the best European classics (often exclusive in the country salon repertoire) and Ukrainian works (musical comedies and operettas by M. Verykivsky, M. Lysenko, O. Riabov). In our opinion, during these years L. Ivashutych drew a dash line of the European repertoire in his theater: he presented unique in the history of Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy operettas “The Borgia’s Garter” by K. Kraus, “Jeanne Who Cries and Jean Who Laughs” by J. Offenbach, “Ball at the Savoy” by P. Abraham (1940), “The Marriage Market” by V. Jacobi (1947), “The Eagle Feathers” by F. Farkas (1957), “Fraskita” by F. Lehár (1959), “The Waltz King” by J. Strauss (1961) and the first productions of famous operettas “Rose Marie” by G. Stotgardt and L. Friml (1942), “The Circus Princess” (1947), “Zorika (Gypsy Love)” by F. Lehár (directed by O. Ivashutych in the year of the composer’s death). In addition, O. Ivashutych staged four performances based on the musical comedies of the classic of Ukrainian operetta O. Riabov. The only performance, which could directly reveal the methodology of “The Berezil” was a fantastic comedy “Viy” (1951). The director also impressed with frank theatricality in circus scenes from the Milyutin’s operetta “Circus lights the fires” – together with choreographer A. Gulesco he managed to set up the style related to “girls” from “The Berezil” revues. Conclusions. Olexandr Ivashutych’s acting naturally evolved from the avantgarde of the 1920s – early 1930s, when he created, in particular, an eccentric image of Orpheus in the production of J. Offenbach, to the realistically psychological roles of 1950–1960, performed in a soft comedic manner (Amadeus in “The Bat”, Rooster in “Akulini”, Underwud in “The Kiss of Cianita”). L. Ivashutych worked as a director only during the period of the theater of “socialist realism”, which resulted in the corresponding realistic principles of his productions. However, even in such circumstances the director appreciated and skillfully used bright elements of theatrical imagery (fantasticality in “Viy” by M. Gogol, choreography in the spirit of the revue in “Circus lights the fires”). O. Ivashutych’s activity in Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy was based on the significant personal culture of the artist and his worldview of an intelligent leader.

The paper deals with the parodic procedure in the novel "The Epic of Water" by Enes Halilović. Considering the significant share of mythical and folklore, the nature of these silts in the work was illuminated and the parodic relationship to tradition was observed. In addition to the above-mentioned elements, the share of the historical can also be seen as significant, which was observed through the prism of the postmodernist text, which results in a specific relationship with the past. The socio-historical context, the system of social and moral values and the influence of the social component, appears as a basis for parodic and satirical effects, but with the final aim of raising it to the level of the universal. Part of the historical elements appear as an inseparable creative element of the parody complex in "The Epic of Water", because it is a particular event from modern history (the emigration of the population and the submergence of fertile land due to the construction of the artificial Lake Gazivode, which Halilović clearly mentions as one of the localities in the index of terms at the end of the book) that is the undisguised inspiration for the creation of the mythological guide to the flood and after it, as the author himself defines his narrative in the subtitle. However, Halilović's historicism is seen in the work as specific, because in his critical consideration of the value of the past, he elevates the local to the level of the universal. The author's attitude that history is subordinate to fiction can be interpreted as a view of history characteristic of postmodernist art, where history figures as a kind of intertext. The postmodernist attitude towards tradition, interpreted on the basis of the material the author takes from folklore and myth, is reflected in an ambivalent attitude towards tradition, where its conventions are established only to be destabilized in a parodic way. The ending of the novel is interpreted in the key of the eschatological vision of the created world, in the form of an aquatic apocalypse. Such an unraveling of narratives is seen as an example of the myth of doom, but also as a necessary stage of purification. Halilović's Paljevo is condemned to complete disappearance. The rapid moral degeneration of Muriz's lineage begins with Zahit's marriage to a mute and weak-minded foreign woman of unknown origin. From such a marriage is born Zaim, the first Paljevac who collects coffins for his closest relatives and who marries a woman who practices black magic, which leads to the culminating degradation of all virtues. It is interesting that in the same generation, Char's lineage visibly deteriorates - Charovac, whom Aljo goes to in order to free himself from the magical effects of Zaim's wife, himself performs black magic rituals. Therefore, in the end, the multiplied sins of the hero of the novel are symbolically dissolved by the water, disappearing in the purifying flood. In addition to the mythic layer that can be read at the end, a satirical moment related to modern society that boldly and brazenly manages human destinies, assuming the role of a higher power that decides on the justification of the flood for the sake of representing apparently general, but actually its own interests, is also pointed out. The motif of the flood was also analyzed at a metanarrative level, as a punishment from the author himself as the creator of his personal cosmogony, but at the same time with the hope of a new beginning, a new order, the emergence of which, in truth, is not even announced yet, but which exists as a logical continuation cyclical understanding of the cosmos and history, according to which the world catastrophe marks the end of one period and the beginning of a new one. In the claim that maybe no one needs the story, but that the author needs it, the irony of the poststructuralist position that the author is not a person in the psychological sense and that the work continues to live after the author, thanks to the readers is made clear. However, the statement from the novel that the story is indestructible ultimately reveals the exact opposite - despite the aquatic apocalypse of the world it narrates, the narrative itself is indestructible, which is why "The Epic of Water" still essentially appears as a masterful apology of both story and telling. This is exactly how we saw the apocalypse of a world built from universal motifs, translated into a special postmodernist fantastic prose with an emphasized parodic relationship to myth and folklore heritage.

Bibliotekarstvo kao nauka i vještina organizacije znanja i njegovih produkata evoluira te je, kao i sve ostale naučne ili praktične discipline, prisiljeno prilagođavati se vremenu. Na tom svom evolucijskom putu, općeprihvaćene teorije i poimanje biblioteke i bibliotekarstva kao struke se mijenjaju te se sve više udaljavaju od tradicionalnih predstava – gotovo do granice naučne fantastike. Pa ipak, do juče fikcijske, književnoumjetničke predstave, danas se posmatraju na krajnje konstruktivan i racionalan način. Jedan od najzanimljivijih primjera je doživljaj i vizija biblioteke u fikcijskom svijetu Jorgea Luisa Borgesa. Na tragu njegovih profetskih zapažanja utkanih u njegov književni univerzum, mnogi naučnici današnjice iz različitih oblasti kroz multidisciplinarni pristup pokušavaju rekonstruirati i kreirati sliku biblioteke budućnosti preoblikovane na način da može odgovoriti zahtjevima novog vremena. Ponajviše zahvaljujući enormnom tehnološkom razvoju i izazovima koje on sobom nosi, vizije sveopšte ili univerzalne biblioteke, biblioteke bez zidova, čine se izvodive i vode ka preispitivanju postojećih i stvaranju novih teorija o budućoj ulozi biblioteke i suštini bibliotečke prakse. Interesantno je i izazovno iz današnje perspektive struke promišljati na koji način će se poimati biblioteka u bližoj ili daljoj budućnosti, kako će izgledati i koja će od postojećih vizija, naučna ili literarna, biti bliže realizaciji u stvarnosti. = Librarianship as a science and skill of the organization of knowledge and its products is evolving and, like all other scientific or practical disciplines, it is forced to keep up with the times. In this evolutionary path, traditional theories and notions of libraries and librarianship as professions are changing and reaching far beyond the traditional ones – almost to the limits of science fictions. Nevertheless, theories which were until recently considered fictional literary and artistic performances are today already seen from an extremely constructive and rational perspective. One of the most interesting examples is the experience and vision of the library in the fictional world of Jorge Luis Borges. Following his prophetic observations woven into his literary universe, many scholars from various fields, are trying through a multidisciplinary approach to reconstruct and create an image of the library of the future reshaped in a way that can respond to demands of modern times. Mostly thanks to the enormous technological development and challenges it brings, visions of a Universal Library seem feasible and lead to rethinking of existing and creating new theories about the future role of the library and the essence of library practice. It is interesting and challenging from today’s professional perspective to think about the way that library will be understood in the near or distant future, what it will look like and which of the existing visions – scientific or literary – will be closer to realization in reality.

TOTALITARIAN REGIME AS A SYSTEM OF STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM IN THE LITERATURE OF JANUSZ A. ZAJDELIn the Polish literature of the last two decades of the Polish People’s Republic PRL, science fiction, especially sociological science fiction, served as a substitute for political literature, which was impossible to publish under state censorship. The majority of this genre was anti-utopian or critical of the totalitarian reality. This attitude was hidden under fantastical make-up and was very strongly related to the here-and-now of the period in which the books originated. Janusz A. Zajdel is the most important representative of this genre, however, at the same time he manages to avoid limiting his work to the thinly veiled politics of the time. While the topics of his work very often repeated themselves the stories go beyond the drama of the individuals or groups confronted with the totalitarian regime and focus on certain repeatable mechanisms within the system itself. Due to the above characteristics, his literary work transcends from being just a criticism of the internal workings of PRL into the area of structural functionalism of a universal social system. Social structures that play a central role in Zajdel’s work, are always built from the same, very clearly outlined building blocks. It may seem that the characters and the plot of the novels are only an addition to the views on the structure and the shape of society expressed by the author. Common elements that build that world remain at the core of all the novels and the pretextual story lines of Zajdel make it easier to present those elements in the internal functioning of the sometimes very complicated social systems that Zajdel describes. Dysfunctional elements that prevent the exercise of totalitarian control inside the system, for Zajdel seem to be of far greater importance than his story lines. These relations, so characteristic of the late PRL, referred to in the literature as “dirty togetherness”, are phenomena of exercising control over specific measures and social resources available in the framework of the social system for the implementation of not the objectives, which were designated by those socio-political systems, but by social groups or entities that use them for their own purposes. The main theme of Zajdel’s novels are dysfunctions that occur as part of the totalitarian system, but his social systems never meet the defining criteria of totalitarianism in the classic sense. Totalitarianism is not the main intrest of the novels but is only used instrumentally as the make-up for the description of the mechanism of the internal workings of these dysfunctions. Zajdel sees dirty togetherness as a structural element of the system, without which the continuous functioning of the system would be impossible.

The article is devoted to the analysis of allusion as an element of intertextuality, which plays an important role in the text - making of Russian and Ukrainian fantasy texts. Scientific investigations are analyzed, in which there are definitions of allusion as a stylistic figure and stylistic reception, hint and indirect reference. The origin of allusion as borrowing of a pretext, and also its semantic-compositional role in expression of constructive intertextuality (according to N. Fateeva) is characterized. It is determined that allusions, according to A. Tyutenko, work to increase the content. The own definition of the concept of allusion as a dual (verbal-non-verbal) means of actualizing the cultural and historical memory of the reader is proposed. The duality of allusion is that it can be intertextual or intermedia, with reference to the fine and audiovisual arts (including cinema, opera, ballet), music, and so on. The cognitive-suggestive function of allusion is important. In addition, the question of distinguishing between the concepts of "precedent phenomenon" and "allusion" arises. In our study, allusions may contain precedent phenomena - names, names, situations, etc .; but allusion is a broader concept because it is a hint, and a hint does not necessarily contain specific onyms. On the other hand, the precedent phenomenon is not always an allusion in the literal sense of the word, it can be a quotation or just a reference to a well-known fact, such as dictionary definitions. Allusion as an intertextual element appears on the verge of combining two contexts - the source, from which the author chooses the element he needs, and the new, newly created. Very often allusive vocations work as analogies, comparisons of the new and the well-known. However, the vast majority of allusions used in fantasy are built on the use of precedent phenomena - universal-precedent or national-precedent. Culturological (religious, mythological, fairy-tale) allusions were analyzed on the basis of a total of 570 fragments (17% of the total number of intertextual elements selected from the source base (3341.)). in the table, exceeds 570 due to the fact that certain varieties overlap: artionyms can be a variety of fairy tales and a variety of literary, intermedia, as well as anthroponyms, poetonyms, etc. We did not distinguish between attributed and non-attributed allusions, the reason is small the number of attributed allusions in fantasy works. Examples from the works of Volodymyr Arenev, Darya Korniy, Niki Kallen, Max Frei and other Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking writers are given. We came to the conclusion that mythological references are convenient to divide by cultural source: Aztec, East (Tibet), Greek culture, Egypt, China, Scandinavian mythology and Slavic. It should be noted that references to Slavic mythology are the most common in Ukrainian fantasy, while in Russian they are almost non-existent. Religious allusions are more part of the recipient's permanent intertextual field, which allows for the creation of intertextual connections with the religious context (sacred texts, material artifacts), as well as to enrich the arsenal of magical elements in fantasy discourse. Folklore allusions are part of a group of ideological allusions - folklore vocations to folk art reflect the people's ideas about the world around them, so they contain mythonyms, theonyms, etc., and are closely related to magical discourse through the involvement of mythonyms, theonyms, names to denote chimerical creatures and other signs of the fantastic.

Сравнительное изучение близкородственных литератур представляется актуальным направлением современной гуманитаристики. Такой ракурс исследования позволяет выявить творческую уникальность произведения, национальную основу и способы литературной рецепции посредством раскрытия литературных и социокультурных связей, формирует открытость сознания к восприятию инонациональных культурных кодов и смыслов. Творческая индивидуальность Виктора Козько сформировалась в белорусском литературном процессе последней трети ХХ в., когда происходит усиление экзистенциальной направленности прозы. Мифопоэтизм белорусской прозы обладает национальной спецификой. Основные стилевые изменения происходят на стыке художественных систем «реализм – модернизм», «реализм – постмодернизм». Возникновение диффузных явлений обусловлено как индивидуально-авторским творческим экспериментом, так и общими стилевыми тенденциями эпохи. Модернистские интенции в белорусской литературе имеют ярко выраженную фольклорно-мифологическую основу, которая обусловила преобладание аутентичных элементов, помогла вербализировать бессознательные категории, сделать их предметом авторской и читательской рефлексии. Мариам Петросян осуществляла работу над романом «Дом, в котором…» на протяжении почти двух десятилетий (1991–2009). Литературный процесс рубежа ХХ–XXI вв., с одной стороны, демонстрирует завершение определенного социокультурного этапа, с другой – свидетельствует о начале нового исторического и культурного цикла. Не случайно аллегорическая природа романа удовлетворяет эстетические и когнитивные потребности времени – создать метонимическое изображение современного социума. Оба прозаика активно используют различные типы вторичной художественной условности. В зависимости от ее доминирующего типа и доминирующего художественного приема можно выделить следующие пути обогащения реалистической эстетики средствами неклассической художественности: актуализация сюрреалистической эстетики; синтез реалистического и фантастического; обращение к фольклорно-мифологическим мотивам, мифологическим способам познания мира. Мифологическая цитация, использованная в романах Мариам Петросян «Дом, в котором…» и Виктора Козько «Хроніка дзетдомаўскага саду» при воплощении образов учителей и воспитанников, топосов дома и сада, неомифологические приемы моделирования реальности позволили писателям создать уникальную пространственно-временную организацию произведений, эксплицировать национальные культурные коды. The comparative study of closely related literatures seems to be a relevant direction in modern humanities. This perspective of the study allows us to identify the creative uniqueness of the work, the national basis and methods of literary reception through the disclosure of literary and sociocultural connections, and forms the openness of consciousness to the perception of foreign cultural codes and meanings. The creative individuality of Viktor Kozko was formed in the Belarusian literary process of the last third of the twentieth century, when there was an increase in the existential orientation of prose. Mythopoeticism is characterized by its rootedness in the universal humanistic constants of national specificity. The main stylistic changes occur at the junction of the artistic systems of realism – modernism, realism – postmodernism. The emergence of diffuse phenomena is due to both the individual author’s creative experiment and the general stylistic trends of the era. Modernist intentions in Belarusian literature have a pronounced folklore and mythological basis, which determined the predominance of authentic elements, helped to verbalize unconscious categories, making them the subject of author and reader reflection. Mariam Petrosyan worked on the novel “The Gray House” for almost two decades (1991–2009). The literary process at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, on the one hand, demonstrates the completion of a certain sociocultural stage, on the other, it indicates the beginning of a new historical and cultural cycle. It is no coincidence that the allegorical nature of the novel satisfies the aesthetic and cognitive needs of the time – to create a metonymic image of modern society. Both prose writers actively use various types of secondary artistic conventions. Depending on the dominant type of convention and the dominant artistic technique, the following ways of enriching realistic aesthetics with means of non-classical artistry can be distinguished: actualization of surreal aesthetics; synthesis of realistic and fantastic; appeal to folklore and mythological motifs, mythological ways of understanding the world. The methods of mythological quotation used in the novels by Mariam Petrosyan “The Gray House” and Viktor Kozko’s “Chronicle of an orphanage garden” when embodying the images of teachers and students, topoi of the house and garden, neomythological methods of modeling reality allowed the writers to create a unique spatiotemporal organization of works, explicate national cultural codes.

Archetypes, according to Jung are inborn personal unconscious, and this part of the psyche is truly not individual but ‘universal’ and in contrast to the personal psyche, it upholds specific contents and modes of behavior that are somewhat same for all individuals living or dead in different space and time zones. Literature is an essential tool for tracing human archetypes, the collective unconscious, and Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept as a unique psychological study of fictional and well known historical figures provides the same. The paper investigates the strata of the character’s unconscious feelings of toned complexes of their psyche. However, the article also traces the contents of the collective unconscious as the inherent universal part of psychic life known as Archetypes present in the novel. Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept as a fantastic tale of historical figures colliding into each other gives a chance to verify how certain archetypes are universal and even intellectuals and layperson without exception are beholders of such patterns.

THE GOTHICIZATION OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES: THE PROGRESSIVE TRANSPOSITION OF THE GOTHIC INTO THE FILMS Abstract In this paper I shall argue that the Harry Potter cinematographic adaptations of J. K. Rowling's novels gradually enacts a transgeneric crossing of the Gothic into the genre of the fantastic. Specifically, by utilizing Robert Mighall's argument that the "Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols", I shall argue that such a transposition is progressively achieved by means of the representation of an imagery clearly recalling Gothic settings, figures and atmospheres, and through the use of a series of thematic preoccupations that are usually present in Gothic texts. According to the critic Robert Mighall, "The Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols; an attitude to the past and the present, not a free floating...

The development of chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy, a specific type of immunotherapy, in recent decades was a fantastic breakthrough for the treatment of hematological malignancies. However, difficulties in collecting normal T cells from patients and the time cost of manufacturing CAR-T cells have limited the application of CAR-T-cell therapy. In addition, the termination of related clinical trials on universal CAR-T cell therapy has made further research more difficult. Natural killer (NK) cells have drawn great attention in recent years. Chimeric antigen receptor-NK (CAR-NK) cell therapy is a promising strategy in the treatment of malignant tumors because of its lack of potential for causing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). In this review, we will address the advances in and achievements of CAR-NK cell therapy.

The investigation of psyche problems in terms of artistic analysis of the study of psychology, artistic understanding of the complexity, contradictions, invisible mysteries of heroes’ state of mind, has always been attractive to study in the world literature. It is essential to reveal and solve problems associated with the confusion and boundless breadth of the subconscious, literary and poetic peculiarities, the specific features of the initial stage of fantastic literature development, the perfection of the directions of social, philosophical, fiction, the emergence of dystopia, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, steampunk or pro-punk, turbo-realism, post-cyberpunk, alternative directions of fiction, which are the basis of the psychoanalytic teachings of the twentieth century. In the field of research of the phenomenon of psychologism as a scientific and theoretical problem in world literature, it should be noted that, since the image of a person is in the center of fiction, the conducted research is aimed at revealing his/her spiritual world, describing uncontrolled evolutions in his/her inner world, studying the capabilities of the individual. In particular, special attention is paid to the development of scientifically based ideas about the problems associated with the appearance of psychologisms in fantastic works, their artistic tasks to reveal the character of the hero, the spiritual world of the writer in an artistic image, his spiritual worldview, his philosophical views on the world and a person. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the concept of artistic psychologism in the works of Ray Bradbury and Khodjiakbar Shaikhov, to reveal the creative skills of writers in presenting the heroes’ psychology in their fantastic works in the context of a comparative typological study. The object of the research deals with the study of such problems disclosure heroes’ spiritual world, the direct or indirect depiction of the psychology of characters in the context of the artistic interpretation of universal values in works of Ray Bradbury and Khodjiakbar Shaikhov’s using the method of comparative typological analysis. The subject of this research is the concept of artistic psychologism in Ray Bradbury and Khodjiakbar Shaikhov’s works. The methods of structural analysis, comparative-historical, comparative-typological, psychological and biographical methods have been used for the research.

Ten Nights’ Dreams (夢十夜, Yume Jūya) is a classic written work from the Japanese master Natsume Soseki. Originally published in 1908, it announced the emergence in Japanese literature of a modernist and impressionistic mode. Short ­vignettes with fantastic, tragic, or magical events convey an exquisite sensibility compounded with stark realism. Love, honor, duty, artistry, desire, despair, and regret all shape events in the dream-world. The stories themselves suggest echoes of meanings beyond the failures of rational sense-making. Ten dreams—each unique and arresting—form a panorama of life and feeling, at once universal and intensely present. “Our Cat’s Grave” is a brief but heartfelt monody for a feline companion. Encompassing both the affection and the neglect, it becomes a meditation on empathy and helplessness, and on the transience of life and the persistence of memory. Translated By Sankichi Hata and Dofu Shirai. Frontispiece by Shigejiro Sano. Cover illustration by Takehisa Yumeji.

Having served as the capital of Tsarist Russia for two hundred years until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the second biggest city of Russia and her gate to Europe, St Petersburg is the city full of historical buildings of fantastic architecture with its historical texture. Because of its historical and cultural significance, St. Petersburg is in UNESCO’s List of World Heritage Sites.On one side, there we have St. Petersburg, a fascinating city, the subject of Dostoyevsky’s novels, with cathedrals, churches, palaces, bridges, statues, and museums, housing rich cultural and historical heritage; on the other side, there we see jewels, reflecting the soul of women and embellishing their bodies.With this study, inspired by the authenticity and the city’s architectural pattern, innovative designs have been created via advanced 3D modeling technology. Thus, it was aimed that the beauty of the grandeur of history could be utilized as accessories, gaining a new functionality and transferring the cultural heritage values from local to universal level.Practical Research Methods have been adopted as a research methodology. The sampling of the study has been limited to the embellishments reflecting the architectural texture of St. Petersburg, as an inspirational resource for jewelry modelling. In planning the study, the stages of analysis, synthesis, selection and modelling of jewelry designs have been taken into account. Keywords: St. Petersburg, Architectural Pattern, Jewelry, Jewelry Design, 3D Digital Modelling, Innovation.

The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, who is one of the well-known writers of the Balkans, Albanian and world literature, has been subjected to many interpretations, particularly determined by non-literary categories. This novel, whose literary aspects are generally disregarded, bears obvious resemblances with the works of some writers, who are both universal and classical. The Palace of Dreams can be analyzed not only in terms of the thematic perspectives such as totalitarianism, ethnic identity/nationalism, the relationship between the individual and bureaucracy and authority, but also in terms of literary genres such as allegory, dystopia, fantastic, and uncanny. Additionally, structural categories of the novel such as time-space poetics, parallel texts (intertextuality) should not be ignored. In this article, after briefly mentioning Kadare’s literary personality, The Palace of Dreams and the historical context in which he produced his works, the aforesaid thematic perspectives will be evaluated in a critical way. In addition to this, the novel will be analyzed on the basis of its relationship with genres and structural categories in question and the textual diversity beyond it will be unveiled. The issue of whether Kadare’s text is a social and political allusion, a formula for salvation, a criticism of repressive regimes or a quest for “the production of normal literature in an abnormal country” will be raised. After clarifying the understandings of generalized interpretation strategies on the text, an opinion on how the text should be evaluated or not, will be presented.

The 20th century witnessed cultural and social changes of immense proportions. Magical realism appeared in literature at the beginning of the century, which is pivotal in world history. This art movement swiftly extended beyond a regional phenomenon and developed into a significant symbol of global artistic expression. The fusion of the banal facets of daily life with fictional elements engenders a world that is simultaneously recognizable and foreign, leading the reader on a voyage. This element is considered crucial to facilitate progress towards universality. Russian literature uses magical realism and integrates its distinct cultural codes and historical context to produce a unique interpretation within the field. The groundwork of Russian magical realism rests upon the intricate psychological studies of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the fantastical realism of Mikhail Bulgakov, and the absurdist storytelling of Nikolai Gogol. Magical realism has a history spanning over a century and has influenced various fields, including literature, cinema, painting, and philosophy. The contributions of Russian literature enhance the universality and profundity of this genre. Moreover, this wide reach facilitates a variety of viewpoints and understandings of magical realism to surface. This study examines the manifestation of magical realism in Russian literature along with its differing viewpoints. It also aims to explain the place of Russian magical realism in universal culture, which has yet to be clearly established in a historical context. This will be achieved by examining the origins of 19th century magical realism and its subsequent associations with various genres.

In November 2015 the progressive rock band, Coheed and Cambria, released their latest album and art-book, both titled The Color before the Sun (Color) (2015). This album deviates from their previous six releases by explicitly using a biographical frame for the art-book, the album, and their paratexts. This is a divergence from the band’s concept album approach, a transmedia storyworld, The Amory Wars (TAW) (2002-17), which fictionalised the life experiences of Claudio Sanchez, the band’s lead singer. When scholars discuss transmedia they often refer to fantastic and speculative fictions, such as the Star Wars (1977-2018), Star Trek (1966-2018), Doctor Who (1963-2018) and Marvel Universe (1961-2018) franchises, and TAW fits this framework. However, there is increasing consideration of the impact transmedia reading and writing practices have on storytelling that straddles representations of the “real” world. By making collaborative life-writing explicit, Color encourages readers to resist colonising ontologies. Framing the life-writing within the band’s earlier auto-fiction(s) (TAW), Color destabilises genre divides between fiction and life-writing, and positions readers to critique Sanchez’s narration of his subjectivity. This enables readers to abstract their critique to ontological narratives that have a material impact on their own subjectivities: law, medicine, religion, and economics.The terms subject and identity are often used interchangeably in the study of life-writing. By “subjectivity” I mean the individual’s understanding of their status and role in relation to their community, culture, socio-political context, and the operations of power dynamics therein. In contrast “identity” speaks to the sense of self. While TAW and Color share differing literary conceits—one is a space opera, the other is more explicitly biographical—they both explore Sanchez’s subjectivity and can be imagined as a web of connections between recordings (both audio and video), social media, books (comics, art books, novels and scripts), and performances that contribute to a form of transmedia life-writing. Life-writing is generic term that covers “protean forms of contemporary personal narrative” (Eakin 1). These narratives can be articulated across expressive practices, including interviews, profiles, diaries, social media, prose, poetry and so on. Zachary Leader notes in his introduction to On Life-Writing that “theoreticians and historians of life-writing commonly fuse or meld sub-genres [… and this] blurring of distinctions may help to account for life-writing’s growing acceptance as a field of academic study” (1-2). The growing relationship between life-writing and transmedia is therefore unsurprising.This article ties my research considering the construction of subjectivity through transmedia life-writing, with Emma Hill and Máiréad Nic Craith’s consideration of transmedia storytelling’s political potential (87-109). My intention is to determine how readers might construct their own subjectivity to resist oppressive interpellations. Hill and Nic Craith argue that the “lack of closure” in transmedia storyworlds creates “a greater breadth and depth of interpretation … than a single telling could achieve” (104). They conclude that “this expansive quality has allowed the campaigners to continue their activism in a number of different arenas” (104). I contest their assertion that transmedia lacks closure, and instead contend that closure, or the recognition of meaning, inheres with the reader (McCloud 33) rather than in a universalised meaning attributed to the text: transmedia storytelling therefore arouses political potential in reading communities. It is precisely this feature that enables the “expansive quality” valued in political activism. I therefore focus my discussion on the readers of transmedia life-writing, rather than on its writer(s). I argue that in reading a life or lives across multiple media the reader is exposed to the texts’ self-referential citations, its extra-diegetic reiterations, and its contradictions. The reader is invited to make meaning from these citations, reiterations and contradictions; they are positioned to confront the ways in which space and time shape life-writing and subjectivity. Transmedia life-writing can therefore empower readers to invoke critical reading practices.The reader’s agency offers the potential for resistance and revolution. This agency is invited in Color where readers are asked to straddle the fictional world of TAW and the “real” world. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn (2015) is the literary narrative that parallels this album. The book is written by Chondra Echert, Sanchez’s collaborator and wife, and is an amalgam of personal essay and photo-book. It opens by invoking the space opera that informs The Amory Wars: “Sector.12, Paris, Earth. A man and a woman sit in a café debating their fate” (n.p.). This situates the reader in the fictional world of TAW, but also brings the reader into the mundanity and familiarity of a discussion between two people. The reader is witness to a discussion between intimates that focusses on the question of “where to from here.” The idea of “fate” is either misunderstood or misapplied: fate is predetermined, and undebatable. The reader is therefore positioned to remember the band’s previous “concept,” and juxtapose it against a new “realistic” trajectory: fictional characters might have a fate that is determined by their writer, but does that fate extend to the writer themselves? To what extent is Sanchez and Echert’s auto/biography crafted by writers other than themselves?The opening passage provides a skin for the protagonists of the essay, enabling a fantastical space within which Echert and Sanchez might cloak themselves, as they have done throughout TAW. However, this conceit is peeled away on the second page:This might have been the story you find yourself holding. A Sci-fi tale, shrouded in fiction. The real life details modified. All names changed. Threads neatly tied up at the end and altered for the sake of ego and feelings.But the truth is rarely so well planned. The story isn’t filled with epic action scenes or glossed-over romance. Reality is gritty and mucky and thrown together in the last seconds. It’s painful. It is not beautiful … and so it is. The events that inspired this record are acutely personal. (n.p.)In this passage Echert makes reference to the method of storytelling employed throughout the texts that make up TAW. She lays bare the shroud of fiction that covers the lived realities of her and her husband’s lives. She goes on to note that their lives have been interpreted “to fit the bounds of the concept” (n.p.), that is TAW as a space opera, and that the current album was an opportunity to “pull back the curtain” (n.p.) on this conceit. This narrative is echoed by Sanchez in the documentary component of the project, The Physics of Color (2015). Like Echert, Sanchez locates the narrative’s genesis in Paris, but in the Paris of our own world, where he and Echert finalised the literary component of the band’s previous project, The Afterman (2012). Color, like the previous works, is written as a collaboration, not just between Sanchez and Echert, but also by the other members of the band who contributed to the composition of each track. This collaborative writing is an example of relationality that facilitates a critical space for readers and invites them to consider the ways in which their own subjectivity is constructed.Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill provide a means of critically engaging with relational reading practices. They position narrative as a tool that can be used to engage in critical self, and social, reflection. Their theory of critical narrative as a form of pedagogy enables readers to shift away from reading Color as auto-fiction and towards reading it as an act of collaborative auto/biography. This transition reflects a shifting imperative from the personal, particularly questions of identity, to the political, to engaging with the web of human relations, in order to explore subjectivity. Given transmedia is generally employed by writers of fantasy and speculative literatures, it can be difficult for readers to negotiate their expectations: transmedia is not just a tool for franchises, but can also be a tool for political resistance.Henry Jenkins initiated the conversation about transmedia reading practices and reality television in his chapters about early seasons of Survivor and American Idol in his book Convergence Culture. He identifies the relationship between viewers and these shows as one that shifts from “real-time interaction toward asynchronous participation” (59): viewers continue their engagement with the shows even when they are not watching a broadcast. Hill and Nic Craith provide a departure from literary and media studies approaches to transmedia by utilising an anthropological approach to understanding storyworlds. They maintain that both media studies and anthropological methodologies “recognize that storytelling is a continually contested act between different communities (whether media communities or social communities), and that the final result is indicative of the collective rather than the individual” (88–89). They argue that this collectivity results from “negotiated meaning” between the text and members of the reading community. This is a recognition of the significance held by readers of life-writing regarding the “biographical contract” (Lejeune 22) resulting from the “rationally motivated inter subjective recognition of norms” (Habermas n.p.). Collectivity is analogous to relationality: the way in which the readers’ subjectivity is impacted upon by their engagement with the storyworld, helixed with the writer(s) of transmedia life-writing having their subjectivity impacted upon by their engagement with reader responses to their developing texts. However, the term “relationality” is used to slightly different effect in both transmedia and life-writing studies. Colin Harvey’s definition of transmedia storytelling as relational emphasises the relationships between different media “with the wider storyworld in question, and by extension the wider culture” (2). This can be juxtaposed with Paul John Eakin’s assertion that life-writing as a genre that requires interaction between the author and their audience: “autobiography of the self but the biography and autobiography of the other” (58). It seems to me that the differing articulations of “relationality” arising from both life-writing and transmedia scholarship rely on, but elide, the relationship between the reader and the storyworld. In both instances it is left to the reader to make meaning from the text, both in terms of understanding the subject(s) represented in relation to their own, and also as the nexus between the transmedia text, the storyworld, and the broader culture. The readers’ own experiences, their memories, are central to this relationality.The song “Colors” (2015), which Echert notes in her essay was the first song to be written for the album, chronicles the anxieties that arose after Sanchez and Echert discovered that their home (which they had been leasing out) had been significantly damaged by their tenants. In the documentary The Physics of Color, both Echert and Sanchez speak about this song as a means for Sanchez to reassert his identity as a musician after an extended period where he struggled with the song-writing process. The song is pared back, the staccato guitar in the introduction echoing a similar theme in the introduction to the song “The Afterman” (2012) which was released on the band’s previous album. This tonal similarity, the plucked electric guitar and the shared rhythm, provides a sense of thoroughness between the songs, inviting the listener to remember the ways in which the music on Color is in conversation with the previous albums. This conversation is significant: it relies on the reader’s experience of their own memory. In his book Fantastic Transmedia, Colin Harvey argues that memories are “the mechanisms by which the ‘storyworld’ was effectively sewn together, helping create a common diegetic space for me—and countless others—to explore” (viii). Both readers’ and creators’ experiences of personal and political time and space in relation to the storyworld challenge traditional understandings of readers’ agency in relation to the storyworld, and this challenge can be abstracted to frame the reader’s agency in relation to other economic, political, and social manifestations of power.In “The Audience” Sanchez sings:This is my audience, forever oneTogether burning starsCut from the same diseaseEver longing what and who we areIn the documentary, Sanchez states that this song is an acknowledgement that he, the band and their audience are “one and the same in [their] oddity, and it’s like … family.” Echert echoes this, referring to the intimate relationships built with fans over the years at conventions, shows and through social media: “they’ve superseded fandom and become a part of this extended family.” Readers come to this song with the memory of TAW: the memory of “burning Star IV,” a line that is included in the titles of two of Coheed’s albums (Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV Vols. 1 (2005) and 2 (2007), and to the Monstar disease that is referenced throughout Second Stage Turbine Blade, both the album (2002) and the comic books (2010). As a depiction of his destabilised identity however, the lyrics can also be read as a poetic commentary on Sanchez’s experiences with renegotiating his subjectivity: his status as an identity that gains its truth through consensus with others, an audience who is “ever longing what and who we are.” In the documentary Sanchez states “I could do the concept thing again with this album, you know, take it and manipulate it and make it this other sort of dimension … but this one … it means so much more to be … I really wanted this to be exposed, I really want this to be my story.” Sanchez imagines that his story, its truth, its sacredness, is contingent on its exposure on being shared with an audience. For Sanchez his subjectivity arises from on his relationality with his audience. This puts the reader at the centre of the storyworld. The assertion of subjectivity arises as a result of community.However, there is an uncertainty that floats in the lacunae between the texts contributing to the Color storyworld. As noted, in the documentary, both Echert and Sanchez speak lovingly of their relationships with Coheed audiences, but Sanchez goes on to acknowledge that “there’s a little bit of darkness in there too, that I don’t know if I want to bring up… I’ll keep that a mystery,” and some of the “The Audience” lyrics hint at a more sinister relationship between the audience and the band:Thieves of our timeWatch as they rape your integrityMarch as the beat suggests.One reader, Hecatonchair, discusses these lyrics in a Reddit post responding to “The Audience”. They write:The lyrics are pretty aggressive, and could easily be read as an attack against either the music industry or the fans. Considering the title and chorus, I think the latter is who it was intended to reach, but both interpretations are valid.This acknowledgement by the poster that there the lyrics are polyvalent speaks to the decisions that readers are positioned to make in responding to the storyworld.This phrase makes explicit the inconsistency between what Sanchez says about the band’s fans, and what he feels. It is left to the reader to account for this inconsistency between the song lyrics and the writers’ assertions. Hecatonchair and the five readers who respond to their post all write that they enjoy the song, regardless of what they read as its aggressive position on the band’s relationship with them as audience members. In identifying as both audience members and readers with different interpretations, the Reddit commentators recognise their identities in intersecting communities, and demonstrate their agency as subjects. Goodson and Gill invoke Charles Taylor’s assertion that one of the defining elements of “identity” is a “defining community,” that is “identity is lived in social and historical particulars, such as the literature, philosophy, religious teaching and great conversations taking place along one’s life’s journeys” (Goodson and Gill 27).Harvey identified readers as central to transmedia practices. In reading a life across multiple media readers assert agency within the storyworld: they choose which texts to engage with, and how and when to engage with them. They must remember, or more specifically re-member, the life or lives with which they are engaging. This re-membering is an evocative metaphor: it could be described as Frankensteinian, the bringing together of texts and media through a reading that is stretched across the narrative, like the creature’s yellow skin. It also invokes older stories of death (the author’s) and resurrection (of the author, by the reader): the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Set, and Isis, Osiris's wife, who rejoins the fragmented pieces of Osiris, and briefly brings him back.Coheed and Cambria regularly cite musical themes or motifs across their albums, while song lyrics are quoted in the text of comic books and the novel. The readers recognise and weave together these citations with the more explicitly autobiographical writing in Color. Readers are positioned to critique the function of a canonical truth underpinning the storyworld: whose life is being told? Sanchez invokes memory throughout the album by incorporating soundscapes, such as the sounds of a train-line on the song “Island.” Sanchez notes he and his wife would hear these sounds as they took the train from their home in Brooklyn to the island of Manhattan. Sanchez brings his day-to-day experiences to his readers as overlapping but not identical accounts of perspectives. They enable a plurality of truths and destabilise the Western focus on a singular or universal truth of lived experience.When life-writing is constructed transmedially the author must—of necessity—relinquish control over their story’s temporality. This includes both the story’s internal and external temporalities. By internal temporality I am referring to the manner in which time plays out within the story: given that the reader can enter into and engage with the story through a number of media, the responsibility for constructing the story’s timeline lies with the reader; they may therefore choose, or only be able, to engage with the story’s timeline in a haphazard, rather than a chronological, manner. For example, in Sanchez’ previous work, TAW, comic book components of the storyworld were often released years after the albums with which they were paired. Readers can only engage with the timelines as they are published, as they loop back through and between the storyworld’s temporality.The different media—CD, comic, novel, or art-book—often represent different perspectives or experiences within the same or at least within overlapping internal temporalities: significant incidences are narrated between the media. This results in an unstable external temporality, over which the author, again, has no control. The reader may listen to the music before reading the book, or the other way around, but reading the book and listening to the music simultaneously may not be feasible, and may detract from the experience of engaging with each aspect of the storyworld. This brings us back to the importance of memory to readers of transmedia narratives: they must remember in order to, as Harvey says, stitch together a common “diegetic space.” Although the author often relinquishes control to the external temporality of the text, placing the reader in control of the internal temporality of their life-writing destabilises the authority that is often attributed to an auto/biographer. It also makes explicit that transmedia life-writing is an ongoing project. This allows the author(s) to account for “a reflexive process where individuals take the opportunity to evaluate their actions in connection with their intentions and thus ‘write a further part’ of their histories” (Goodson and Gill 33).Goodson and Gill note that “life’s events are never linear and any intention for life to be coherent and progressive in accordance with a ‘plan’ will constantly be interrupted” (30). This is why transmedia offers writers and readers a more authentic means of engaging with life-writing. Its weblike structure enables readers to view subjectivity through a number of lenses: transmedia life-writing narrates a relational subjectivity that resists attempts at delineation. There is still a “continuity” that arises when Sanchez invokes the storyworld’s self-referential citations, reiterations, and contradictions in order to “[define] narratives within a temporal, social and cultural framework” (Goodson and Gill 29), however transmedia life-writing refuses to limit itself, or its readers, to the narratives of space and time that regulate mono-medial life-writing. Instead it positions readers to “unmask the world and then change it” (43).ReferencesArendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.Coheed and Cambria. Second Stage Turbine Blade. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2002.———. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2003.———. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness. New York: Columbia, 2005.———. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World for Tomorrow. New York: Columbia, 2007.———. The Year of the Black Rainbow. New York: Columbia, 2010.———. The Afterman: Ascension. Los Angeles: Hundred Handed/Everything Evil, 2012.———. The Afterman: Descension. Los Angeles: Hundred Handed/Everything Evil, 2013.———. The Colour before the Sun. Brooklyn: the bag.on-line.adventures and Everything Evil Records, 2015.———. “The Physics of Color” Documentary DVD. Brooklyn: Everything Evil Records, 2015. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. ———. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.Echert, Chondra. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn. Brooklyn: the bag.on-line.adventures and Everything Evil Records, 2015.Goodson, Ivor, and Scherto Gill. Critical Narrative as Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.Harvey, Colin. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science-Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Hecatonchair. “r/TheFence's Song of the Day Database Update Day 9: The Audience”. 11 Feb. 2018 <https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFence/comments/4eno9o/rthefences_song_of_the_day_database_update_day_9/>.Hill, Emma, and Máiréad Nic Craith. “Medium and Narrative Change: The Effects of Multiple Media on the ‘Glasgow Girls’ Story and Their Real-Life Campaign.” Narrative Culture 3.1 (2016). 9 Dec. 2017 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/narrcult.3.1.0087>.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.Leader, Zachary, ed. On Life-Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.Lejeune, Philippe, and Paul John Eakin, eds. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.Sanchez, Claudio, and Gus Vasquez. The Amory Wars Sketchbook. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics, 2006.———, Gus Vasquez, et al. The Amory Wars: The Second Stage Turbine Blade Ultimate Edition. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2010.———, Peter David, Chris Burnham, et al. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 Ultimate Edition. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2010.———, and Christopher Shy. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics, 2005.———, and Peter David. Year of the Black Rainbow. Nashville: Evil Ink Books, 2010.———, and Nathan Spoor, The Afterman. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics/Hundred Handed Inc., 2012.

When deaf people work in professional environments and participate in public events, we are often accompanied by sign language interpreters. This usually means wonderfully enhanced access – we can learn, participate and network in ways which are difficult if not impossible on our own. But while we often try to insist that our interpreters are ‘invisible’, that we are the ones learning, engaging in dialogue and consuming services, we are regularly bemused by the public fascination and focus on our interpreters – sometimes at the expense of their attention to us. When interpreters are in our midst, it seems it is not always clear whose interests they are representing. After years of experience and observation, certain attitudes and responses no longer surprise us. We become familiar with the strange behaviour of hearing people. After an interpreter has worked at a public event, perhaps standing on a stage and interpreting a presentation or performance, there is bound to be a wild-eyed member of the public rushing up to say, “That was fantastic!” Or if they are particularly suggestive, they might gush, “That was beautiful!”. How would they know if it was good interpreting, we wonder. And why don’t they come up to us and say, “Your interpreter looks good, where did you find him/her?” Other people ask the interpreter questions about themselves and their use of sign language – “How long did it take you to learn that?”, “I’ve always wanted to learn sign language, where can I find a class?” Experienced interpreters joke wryly about carrying a tape or printout of answers to these predictable questions. But the most predictable thing of all is that people will ask the interpreter, not us. But of course most people aren’t comfortable talking to deaf people, at least when they first encounter them. We perceive that the interpreter is used as a kind of shield by some people, as a way of keeping the unfamiliar and possibly confronting reality of deafness at arm’s length. Indeed we often do the same thing ourselves, keeping tiresome hearing people at bay by making conversation with our interpreter. The interpreter represents facility not only with two languages, but also with two cultures. In a situation of potential cultural conflict, we each displace our awkwardness and discomfort with the other onto the interpreter. As a repository of bilingual and bicultural knowledge, they will simultaneously understand us and render us less strange to the other. Another dimension of people’s fascination with interpreters is that they can potentially represent us in new ways, or know things about us that they’re not telling. Just as we are fascinated by a photograph of ourselves that shows how we appear to others, we are drawn to the idea that what we have said may be presented to others in a different form, that we might appear or sound different from the way we projected ourselves. And conversely, we are aware of the interpreter’s power to misrepresent, edit or obfuscate, even though we know they are ethically bound not to do so. For some people these possibilities are intriguing, for others they arouse unease or suspicion. Indeed, for some people, interpreters appear as custodians of obscure and mysterious knowledge, with the potential—almost never realised but alarming nonetheless—to use or withhold this knowledge in unpredictable ways. Interpreters are, for the most part, highly trained professionals working with a Code of Ethics which requires them to ‘render faithfully’ a message from one language to another. There is an academic discipline, Interpreting and Translation Studies, with an extensive literature about their practice and the social contexts of their work. Interpreters work in all kinds of situations, from boardrooms to doctors’ offices, from international conferences to workplace staff meetings. The common denominator to almost all of these settings is people’s misconceptions about their role and skills. Where do these misconceptions spring from? I suspect that representations of interpreting in our popular culture help to feed some of the confusion. It seems that the world is most interested in interpreters when they are working in fraught situations, confronting ethical dilemmas, and especially when they are breaking the rules. This seems to apply to interpreters in any language, not only sign language interpreters. Many of us remember the news story in 2005 about the Ukrainian sign language interpreter, Natalia Dmytruk. A TV news interpreter in Ukrainian Sign Language, she broke with protocol and informed viewers that the election results were fraudulent. It grabbed international headlines and Dmytruk became a hero, with her “courageous action” winning awards and earning her speaking engagements around the world. It was hard not to join in the acclaim, but it was also hard to reconcile this with the way we expect interpreters to behave and to be perceived by the public. One of Nicole Kidman’s films a few years ago was “The Interpreter”, about a woman working for the United Nations as an interpreter in an obscure African language. She inadvertently eavesdrops on a plot to assassinate an African leader, feels obliged to reveal this, and immediately becomes an object of intense interest for rival politicians and minders. This film highlighted the way interpreters can be perceived as repositories of great and often mysterious knowledge, and objects of ambivalence because they have choices about what to do with that knowledge. What happens when their ethical obligations conflict with international security and diplomatic relations? And how is this different from interpreters who face ethical dilemmas every day, but whose situations don’t threaten to start World War III or warrant the attentions of Sean Penn – are their ethical dilemmas any less important and perplexing? John Le Carré, the wonderful novelist who specialises in stories of spying and intrigue, used a similar dilemma in his 2006 novel The Mission Song, about an interpreter of mixed Irish/Congolese descent, Bruno Salvador (known as Salvo). Salvo is brought in to interpret some delicate political negotiations between warring clans from his own country, and international agents who have an interest in the country. Before long, he is caught between his professional obligations and his own loyalties, and becomes entangled in a dangerous web of intrigue and corruption. Le Carré, the master of the spy genre, presents the interpreter as a “double-agent” by default. At the beginning of the meeting, one of the negotiators summons Salvo to the top of the table and demands of him, “So which are you, my boy? Are you one of us or one of them?” He replies, “Mwangaza, I am one of both of you!” But as modern interpreters might agree, it isn’t always so easy to resolve divided loyalties or to stay impartial. As Salvo remarks elsewhere, “top interpreters must always be prepared to act as diplomats when called upon.” While working on a recent research project with a colleague (who is also, coincidentally, an interpreter) we were intrigued by the tale of a 17th-century Native American man known as Squanto, who served as an interpreter between the first English settlers in New England – the Pilgrims – and the Native Americans of the area. Squanto’s story is fascinating not only as an example of how interpreters have been present throughout history, but also because he took advantage of his access to both groups in order to seek political power for himself and his relatives. The only person who was able to expose his machinations was, of course, another interpreter. But Squanto had developed such close relationships with the Pilgrims that the English Governor could not bear to hand him over to be punished even when confronted with evidence of his duplicity. And when Squanto was dying (probably poisoned by his fellow tribesmen), he asked the Governor to “pray … that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in Heaven.” The story is an intriguing historical example of an interpreter exploiting his access to two languages, and it also illustrates the bi-cultural affiliations and even the co-dependency that can arise from the interpreting relationship. Squanto has remained well-known for hundreds of years. Had he operated just as a disinterested translator, without his extra-curricular activities, his story would probably not have endured as long as it has. These are just a few examples of the fascination and ambivalence with which popular culture can view interpreters. But in each case, what brings the interpreter into the foreground is that they are confronting the possibilities of crossing the line of confidentiality, though it is rarely given that name in these stories. And – in all of these examples – they do cross it. The conflicted, flawed interpreter is becoming a handy plot device… just as the isolated, silent deaf person has been for centuries. Where are the news stories, movies, novels and historical sagas about the interpreters who do their job with care and attention, who work to make their ethical obligations clear and manageable, who successfully stay in the background and let their clients emerge as agents? There aren’t any of course, because people like that don’t make good copy or memorable fictional characters. And because these thousands of professional interpreters don’t get celebrated in popular culture, the average person doesn’t know how they work, and they still need to keep explaining their role to people. Sometimes we speculate about futuristic interpreters. It’s already possible to have a ‘remote’ interpreter working via video-conference. This can result in strangely stilted interactions, since we don’t have that live human buffer in the room to deflect – or absorb – deaf and hearing people’s uncertainty with each other. Will holograms or avatars be part of the interpreting scene in the future, as some have suggested? I hope not – the complex interplay of uneasiness, curiosity and communication in live interpreting experiences is just too interesting. Note An earlier version of this article was published as "Interpreters Behaving Badly" in Across the Board, the magazine of ASLIA (Vic.). Used with permission of the editor. References Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association. "Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Professional Conduct. 2007. 3 May 2010 < http://aslia.com.au/images/stories/ASLIA_Documents/ASLIA_Code_of_Ethics.pdf >. The Interpreter. Motion picture. Prod. G.M. Brown, A. Minghella, and S. Pollack. Dir. S. Pollack. Universal Pictures, 2005. Le Carré, J. The Mission Song. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Napier, J., R. McKee, and D. Goswell. Sign Language Interpreting: Theory and Practice in Australia and New Zealand. 2nd ed. Sydney: Federation Press, 2010. Philbrick, N. Mayflower: A Voyage to War. London: HarperPress, 2006. Washington Post. “As Ukraine Watched the Party Line, She Took the Truth into Her Hands.” 29 Apr. 2005. 25 Nov. 2008 < http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/28/AR2005042801696.html >.

Since the late 1990s, W. G. Sebald’s innovative contribution to the genre of prose fiction has been the source of much academic scrutiny. His books Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and Austerlitz have provoked interest from diverse fields of inquiry: visual communication (Kilbourn; Patt; Zadokerski), trauma studies (Denham and McCulloh; Schmitz), and travel writing (Blackler; Zisselsberger). His work is also claimed to be a bastion for both modernist and postmodernist approaches to literature and history writing (Bere; Fuchs and Long; Long). This is in addition to numerous “guide to” type books, such as Mark McCulloh’s Understanding Sebald, Long and Whitehead’s W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, and the comprehensive Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Here I have only mentioned works available in English. I should point out that Sebald wrote in German, the country of his birth, and as one would expect much scholarship dealing with his work is confined to this language. In this article I focus on what is perhaps Sebald’s prototypical work, The Rings of Saturn. Of all Sebald’s prose fictional works The Rings of Saturn seems the example that best exhibits his innovative literary forms, including the use of lists. This book is the work of an author who is purposefully and imaginatively concerned with the nature of his vocation: what is it to be a writer? Crucially, he addresses this question not only from the perspective of a subject facing an existential crisis, but from the perspective of the documents created by writers. His works demonstrate a concern with the enabling role documents play in the thinking and writing process; how, for example, pen and paper are looped in with our capacity to reason in certain ways. Despite taking the form of fictional narratives, his books are as much motivated by a historical interest in how ideas and forms of organisation are transmitted, and how they evolve as part of an ecology; how humans become articulate within their surrounds, according to the contingencies of specific epochs and places. The Sebald critic J. J. Long accounts for this in some part in his description “archival consciousness,” which recommends that conscious experience is not simply located in the mind of a knowing, human subject, but is rather distributed between the subject and different technologies (among which writing and archives are exemplary).The most notable peculiarity of Sebald’s books lies in their abundant use of “non-syntactical” kinds of writing or inscription. My use of the term “non-syntactical” has its origins in the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who emphasises the importance of list making and tabulation in pre-literate or barely literate cultures. In Sebald’s texts, kinds of non-syntactical writing include lists, photographic images, tables, signatures, diagrams, maps, stamps, dockets and sketches. As I stress throughout this article, Sebald’s shifts between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing allows him to build up highly complex schemes of internal reference. Massimo Leone identifies something similar, when he notes that Sebald “orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and text-types in order to produce his own coherent discourse” (91). The play between multiplicity and coherence is at once a thematic and poetic concern for Sebald. This is to say, his texts are formal experiments with these contrasting tendencies, in addition to discussing specific historical situations in which they feature. The list is perhaps Sebald’s most widely used and variable form of non-syntactical writing, a key part of his formal and stylistic peculiarity. His lengthy sentences frequently spill over into catalogues and inventories, and the entire structure of his narratives is list-like. Discrete episodes accumulate alongside each other, rather than following a narrative arc where episodes of suspenseful gravity overshadow the significance of minor events. The Rings of Saturn details the travels of Sebald’s trademark, nameless, first person narrator, who recounts his trek along the Suffolk coastline, from Lowestoft to Ditchingham, about two years after the event. From the beginning, the narrative is framed as an effort to organise a period of time that lacks a coherent and durable form, a period of time that is in pieces, fading from the narrator’s memory. However, the movement from the chaos of forgetting to the comparatively distinct and stable details of the remembered present does not follow a continuum. Rather, the past and present are both constituted by the force of memory, which is continually crystallising and dissolving. Each event operates according to its own specific arrangement of emphasis and forgetting. Our experience of memory in the present, or recollective memory, is only one kind of memory. Sebald is concerned with a more pervasive kind of remembering, which includes the vectorial existence of non-conscious, non-human perceptual events; memory as expressed by crystals, tree roots, glaciers, and the nested relationship of fuel, fire, smoke, and ash. The Rings of Saturn is composed of ten chapters, each of which is outlined in table form at the book’s beginning. The first chapter appears as: “In hospital—Obituary—Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull—Anatomy lecture—Levitation—Quincunx—Fabled creatures—Urn burial.” The Rings of Saturn is of course hardly exceptional in its use of this device. Rather, it is exemplary concerning the repeated emphasis on the tension between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing, among which this chapter breakdown is included. Sebald continually uses the conventions of bookmaking in subtle though innovative ways. Each of these horizontally linked and divided indices might put the reader in mind of Thomas Browne’s urns, time capsules from the past, the unearthing of which is discussed in the book’s first chapter (25). The chapter outlines (and the urns) are containers that preserve a fragmentary and suggestive history. Each is a perspective on the narrator’s travels that abstracts, arranges, and uniquely refers to the narrative elaborations to come.As I have already stressed, Sebald is a writer concerned with forms of organisation. His works account for a diverse range of organisational forms, some of which instance an overt, chronological, geometric, or metrical manipulation of space and time, such as grids, star shapes, and Greenwich Mean Time. This contrasts with comparatively suggestive, insubstantial, mutable forms, including various meteorological phenomena such as cloudbanks and fog, dust and sand, and as exemplified in narrative form by the haphazard, distracted assemblage of events featured in dreams or dream logic. The relationship between these supposedly opposing tendencies is, however, more complex and paradoxical than might at first glance appear. As Sebald warily reminds us in his essay “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” despite our wishes to inhabit periods of complete freedom, where we follow our distractions to the fullest possible extent, we nonetheless “must all have some more or less significant design in view” (Sebald, Campo 4). It is not so much that we must choose, absolutely, between form and formlessness. Rather, the point is to understand that some seemingly inevitable forms are in fact subject to contingencies, which certain uses deliberately or ignorantly mask, and that simplicity and intricacy are often co-dependent. Richard T. Gray is a Sebald critic who has picked up on the element in Sebald’s work that suggests a tension between different forms of organisation. In his article “Writing at the Roche Limit,” Gray notes that Sebald’s tendency to emphasise the decadent aspects of human and natural history “is continually counterbalanced by an insistence on order and by often extremely subtle forms of organization” (40). Rather than advancing the thesis that Sebald is exclusively against the idea of systematisation or order, Gray argues that The Rings of Saturn models in its own textual make-up an alternative approach to the cognitive order(ing) of things, one that seeks to counter the natural tendency toward entropic decline and a fall into chaos by introducing constructive forces that inject a modicum of balance and equilibrium into the system as a whole. (Gray 41)Sebald’s concern with the contrasting energies exemplified by different forms extends to his play with syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing. He uses lists to add contrast to his flowing, syntactically intricate sentences. The achievement of his work is not the exclusive privileging of either the list form or the well-composed sentence, but in providing contexts whereby the reader can appreciate subtle modulations between the two, thus experiencing a more dynamic and complex kind of narrative time. His works exhibit an astute awareness of the fact that different textual devices command different experiences of temporality, and our experience of temporality in good part determines our metaphysics. Here I consider two lists featured in The Rings of Saturn, one from the first chapter, and one from the last. Each shows contrasting tendencies concerning systems of organisation. Both are attributable to the work of Thomas Browne, “who practiced as a doctor in Norwich in the seventeenth century and had left a number of writings that defy all comparison” (Sebald, Rings 9). The Rings of Saturn is in part a dialogue across epochs with the sentiments expressed in Browne’s works, which, according to Bianca Theisen, preserve a kind of reasoning that is lost in “the rationalist and scientific embrace of a devalued world of facts” (Theisen 563).The first list names the varied “animate and inanimate matter” in which Browne identifies the quincuncial structure, a lattice like arrangement of five points and intersecting lines. The following phenomena are enumerated in the text:certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horse tail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies. (Sebald, Rings 20-21)Ostensibly quoting from Browne, Sebald begins the next sentence, “Examples might be multiplied without end” (21). The compulsion to list, or the compulsiveness expressed by listing, is expressed here in a relationship of dual utility with another, dominant or overt, kind of organisational form: the quincunx. It is not the utility or expressiveness of the list itself that is at issue—at least in the version of Browne’s work preserved here by Sebald. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, Long notes the historical correspondences and divergences between Sebald and Michel Foucault (2007). Long interprets Browne’s quincunx as exemplifying a “hermeneutics of resemblance,” whereby similarities among diverse phenomena are seen as providing proof of “the universal oneness of all things” (33). This contrasts with the idea of a “pathological nature, autonomous from God,” which, according to Long, informs Sebald’s transformation of Browne into “an avatar of distinctly modern epistemology” (38). Long follows Foucault in noting the distinction between Renaissance and modern epistemology, a distinction in good part due to the experimental, inductive method, the availability of statistical data, and probabilistic reasoning championed in the latter epoch (Whitehead; Hacking). In the book’s final chapter, Sebald includes a list from Browne’s imaginary library, the “Musæum Clausium.” In contrast to the above list, here Sebald seems to deliberately problematise any efforts to suggest an abstract uniting principle. There is no evident reason for the togetherness of the discrete things, beyond the mere fact that they happen to be gathered, hypothetically, in the text (Sebald, Rings 271-273). Among the library’s supposed contents are:an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs […] a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coat of Provence […] and a glass of spirits made of æthereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure by daylight, and therefore shown only in winter or by the light of a carbuncle or Bononian stone. (Sebald, Rings 272-73)Unlike the previous example attributed to Browne, here the list coheres according to the tensions of its own coincidences. Sebald uses the list to create spontaneous organisations in which history is exhibited as a complex mix of fact and fantasy. More important than the distinction between the imaginary and the real is the effort to account for the way things uniquely incorporate aspects of the world in order to be what they are. Human knowledge is a perspective that is implicated in, rather than excluded from, this process.Lists move us to puzzle over the criteria that their togetherness implies. They might be used inthe service of a specific paradigm, or they might suggest an imaginable but as yet unknown kind of systematisation; a specific kind of relationship, or simply the possibility of a relationship. Take, for example, the list-like accumulation of architectural details in the following description of the decadent Sommerleyton Hall, featured in chapter II: There were drawing rooms and winter gardens, spacious halls and verandas. A corridor might end in a ferny grotto where fountains ceaselessly plashed, and bowered passages criss-crossed beneath the dome of a fantastic mosque. Windows could be lowered to open the interior onto the outside, and inside the landscape was replicated on the mirror walls. Palm houses and orangeries, the lawn like green velvet, the baize on the billiard tables, the bouquets of flowers in the morning and retiring rooms and in the majolica vases on the terrace, the birds of paradise and the golden peasants on the silken tapestries, the goldfinches in the aviaries and the nightingales in the garden, the arabesques in the carpets and the box-edged flower beds—all of it interacted in such a way that one had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured. (Sebald, Rings 33-34)This list shifts emphasis away from preconceived distinctions between the natural and the manufactured through the creation of its own unlikely harmony. It tells us something important about the way perception and knowledge is ordered in Sebald’s prose. Each encounter, or historically specific situation, is considered as though it were its own microworld, its own discrete, synecdochic realisation of history. Rather than starting from the universal or the meta-level and scaling down to the local, Sebald arranges historically peculiar examples that suggest a variable, contrasting and dynamic metaphysics, a motley arrangement of ordering systems that each aspire to but do not command universal applicability. In a comparable sense, Browne’s sepulchral urns of his 1658 work Urn Burial, which feature in chapter I, are time capsules that seem to create their own internally specific kind of organisation:The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog’s grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament or utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass Jews harp that last sounded on the crossing over black water. (Sebald, Rings 25-26)Regardless of our beliefs concerning the afterlife, these items, preserved across epochs, solicit a sense of wonder as we consider what we might choose for company on our “last journey” (25). In death, the human body is reduced to a condition of an object or thing, while the objects that accompany the corpse seem to acquire a degree of potency as remnants that transcend living time. Life is no longer the paradigm through which to understand purpose. In their very difference from living things these objects command our fascination. Eric Santner coins the term “undeadness” to name the significance of this non-living agency in Sebald’s prose (Santner xx). Santner’s study places Sebald in a linage of German-Jewish writers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, whose understanding of “the human” depends crucially on the concept of “the creature” or “creatureliness” (Santner 38-41). Like the list of items contained within Sommerleyton Hall, the above list accounts for a context in which ornament and utensil, nature and culture, are read according to their differentiated togetherness, rather than opposition. Death, it seems, is a universal leveller, or at least a different dimension in which symbol and function appear to coincide. Perhaps it is the unassuming and convenient nature of lists that make them enduring objects of historical interest. Lists are a form of writing to which we appeal for immediate mnemonic assistance. They lack the artifice of a sentence. While perhaps not as interesting in the present that is contemporary with their usefulness (a trip to the supermarket), with time lists acquire credibility due to the intimacy they share with mundane, diurnal concerns—due to the fact that they were, once upon a time, so useful. The significance of lists arrives anachronistically, when we look back and wonder what people were really up to, or what our own concerns were, relatively free from fanciful, stylistic adornment. Sebald’s democratic approach to different forms of writing means that lists sit alongside the esteemed poetic and literary efforts of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, and François René de Chateaubriand, all of whom feature in The Rings of Saturn. His books make the exclusive differences between literary and non-literary kinds of writing less important than the sense of dynamism that is elicited through a play of contrasting kinds of syntactical and non-syntactical writing. The book’s closing chapter includes a revealing example that expresses these sentiments. After tracing over a natural history of silk, with a particular focus on human greed and naivety, the narrative arrives at a “pattern book” that features strips of colourful silk kept in “the small museum of Strangers Hall” (Sebald, Rings 283). The narrator notes that the silks arranged in this book “were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds” (283). This effervescent declamation continues after a double page photograph of the pattern book, which is described as a “catalogue of samples” and “leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival” (286). Here we witness Sebald’s inclusive and variable understanding as to the kinds of thing a book, and writing, can be. The fraying strips of silk featured in the photograph are arranged one below the other, in the form of a list. They are surrounded by ornate handwriting that, like the strips of silk, seems to fray at the edges, suggesting the specific gestural event that occasioned the moment of their inscription—something which tends to be excluded in printed prose. Sebald’s remarks here are not without a characteristic irony (“the only true book”). However, in the greatercontext of the narrative, this comment suggests an important inclination. Namely, that there is much scope yet for innovative literary forms that capture the nuances and complexity of collective and individual histories. And that writing always includes, though to varying degrees obscures, contrasting tensions shared among syntactical and non-syntactical elements, including material and gestural contingencies. Sebald’s works remind us of what potentials might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.ReferencesBere, Carol. “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review, 46.1 (2002): 184-92.Blackler, Deane. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2007. Catling Jo, and Richard Hibbitt, eds. Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Oxford: Legenda, 2011.Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh, eds. W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Fuchs, Anne and J. J. Long, eds. W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Gray, Richard T. “Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” The German Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 38-57. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London: Cambridge UP, 1977.Kilbourn, Russell J. A. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Leone, Massimo. “Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and A. Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.Long, J. J., and Anne Whitehead, eds. W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2004. McCulloh, Mark. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia, S. C.: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Patt, Lise, ed. Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Critical Inquiry and ICI Press, 2007. Sadokierski, Zoe. “Visual Writing: A Critique of Graphic Devices in Hybrid Novels from a Visual Communication Design Perspective.” Diss. University of Technology Sydney, 2010. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Schmitz, Helmut. “Catastrophic History, Trauma and Mourning in W. G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich.” The German Monitor 72 (2010): 27-50.Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1998.---. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.---. Campo Santo. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print. Theisen, Bianca. “A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” MLN, 121. The John Hopkins U P (2006): 563-81.Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and The Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932.Zisselsberger, Markus. The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.

Taishū engeki—Entertainment for the Masses? What do a highway robber, a samurai, and a geisha have in common? They are all played by the same actor, often at the same time, in an incredible flurry of costume change, in a contemporary form of Japanese theatre called taishū engeki. Taishū engeki, translated as vaudeville, literally, “theatre for the masses”, would be better described as a parallel world of fantasy, glitter, and manga-esque beautiful men wearing elaborate wigs and even more elaborate kimonos, who dance and gracefully sway their hips to portray women, and simultaneously do their best to seduce the overwhelmingly female audience. Taishū engeki represents an escape into a world of romances enacted through dance, of tragic love stories that somehow end well when the main character reappears in the second act as a brilliant dragon-slaying god, and of literal dances with dragons. One performance by dance troupe Gekidan Kokoro included onna-gata buyō (traditional Japanese dance performed by a man playing the part of a woman), a play about brotherly love and devotion where the glamorous actor from the first part was a not too bright young boy (depicted with snot running down his nose), more crossdressing and dancing, a few shamisen songs, a totally unexpected breakdancing piece, and a collaboration with Iwami Kagura—a famous group from Shimane who performs sacred dances in association with various Shinto rituals. Despite being able to combine theatrical skills with dance and acrobatic feats, taishū engeki is seen as a minor theatrical genre, often included in the category of folk arts (Kurata 42), or “low art” intended merely for fun and entertainment” (Endo 151). Although the name would indicate that is addresses a wider audience (which may have been the case decades ago, when cheap entertainment was not so readily available as it is today), taishū engeki caters to a specific category of people. The performers are organised in small itinerant troupes who spend about one month in a specific location, putting on two shows daily—one starting at noon, and one in the evening. In most cases, the show has two parts: one is a play, followed by a free program of dancing, acrobatic features, and even playing instruments such as drums or shamisen. The audience itself consists of two categories: the local people, living in the vicinity of the small theatres where performances are held, and who might attend each new show two or three times, and the fans, who follow their favourite actor from place to place to the limit of their time and financial resources. When it comes to performing arts, Japan’s most famous form of theatre is definitely kabuki: a performative genre highly appreciated by the Japanese and whose extravagant costumes and make-up, as well as exaggerated gestures eliminate some of the language barriers and make it (at least to a certain degree) comprehensible to non-Japanese speakers. Besides kabuki, noh (a highly ritualised form of theatre characterised by its use of masks) and bunraku (puppet theatre) are most often mentioned together, popular both within and outside the borders of Japan as entertainment and objects of scholarly research. As a scholar of Japanese studies, I had learned about these three categories in my first year as an undergraduate student, but it took me over ten years in Japan to discover taishū engeki, something that Robert Schneider and Nathan Schneider (256) ironically call “a weed in Japan’s exquisite garden of classical theatre and a living fossil in the detritus of Asian modernity”. Is taishū engeki really a fossil or a weed accidentally left on the stage of classical theatre? Its faithful fans would beg to differ, and so would the accomplishments of some troupes, who are entirely self-sufficient, renting the venues where they perform and travelling with their own light and sound systems, as well as hundreds of exquisite costumes and wigs. To give just an example, Aotsuki Shinya, the leader of Gekidan Kokoro, told me that he possesses more than two hundred wigs, and mid-September this year will attempt to perform 120 different dances, with different costumes, during the three days that will celebrate his birthday. In contrast with noh or kabuki, where each gesture is highly stylised and must be performed in a pre-defined order, in a set context, taishū engeki is flexible: plays are based on known stories, but the plot is overly simplified, so that the audience can focus on the main characters and the way they perform more than on the storyline, and the second act is actually the main attraction of the show, when the actors can showcase their special skills to the delight of the audience. Kabuki developed in the seventeenth century, and it was aimed at the “common people”, while “the true professionals, the performers of the [noh] and the kyōgen [comedy], began to retreat behind the curtain of refinement” (Tsubaki 4). In the twenty-first century, noh has become more of a mixture of performance and ritual, appreciated by a small number of specialists, and often staged to accompany religious manifestations. Kabuki, on the other hand, has taken its place as the most valued theatrical art, with fans and aficionados vying for the best seats (whose prices can go up to 30,000 Japanese yen, and yet are hard to procure), but taishū engeki shows no signs that it might ever reach that level of popularity. In 1995 Marilyn Ivy saw it as a “discourse of the vanishing”, an art that might disappear as, while “it appears to carry on an unarguably Japanese knowledge” (239), it has failed to create a “boom” or a vast audience. While novelty is part of the performance, it seems to somehow be not new enough, not entrancing enough. The actors are talented, creative, and versatile, but they do not attain the fame level of their kabuki counterparts. Despite all these, as an anthropologist, I could not help but wonder why taishū engeki has not attracted more scholarly interest. The studies on this topic, both in Japanese and English, are far less numerous than those on butoh, for example, “a post-modern dance genre” which has been the focus of both practical and theoretical interest on the part of Japanese studies specialists. To give just an example, in his book on Japanese theatre, Benito Ortolani has a subchapter on butoh, but does not even mention taishū engeki. Prince(ss) Charming My first encounters with taishū engeki were due to a class project—I had started teaching a class on theatre as ritual performance, and wanted my students to have a first-hand experience. The project was a success: students who had shown no enthusiasm at all when reading the syllabus were mesmerised once the performance had begun, to the level that they had attended shows by themselves, and even started following the actors on various social networks. Taishū engeki surpasses all expectations of a first-time viewer. It follows a canon, just like kabuki, but that canon is audience-oriented, so without having ever been part of that audience, it is difficult to imagine what will happen on stage. As mentioned above, each performance has two parts: the first one is a play, whose content changes during the one-month performance, usually based on historical events familiar to the audience, but not restricted to that, an intermission during which the leader of the troupe greets the audience, talks about the schedule for the remainder of the month, and promotes the merchandise available for sale (T-shirts, fans, boxes of sweets), followed by a free-style show where the performers are free to display their best skills. Photography is not allowed during the first part—and this may be due to the fact that most troupe leaders create their own plays using the vast available materials, and are reluctant to share that with other troupes—but is encouraged during the second part. Video taking is forbidden at all times. Crossdressing is a significant part of the performance, with men playing the part of women who are attractive to other women, and women playing the part of men who also attract women. The actresses, however, never become the star of the troupe. Just like in the case of Takarazuka Theatre, where the otoko yaku (women playing the male roles) receive significantly more appreciation than the female counterparts, the heavily made-up male actors of taishū engeki represent the dreamy ideal of their dedicated fans. Each performing group is centered around one male actor who is representative of the troupe—usually the leader or the leader’s son, and who gathers a dedicated fan base composed of women (most of whom are middle-aged or older). These women try to attend as many shows as they can, literally showering their favourite actor with money. The few available studies on taishū engeki tended to focus on two major aspects: crossdressing (mostly of the onnagata—men playing women—type) and on the money the actors receive while on stage. Fig. 1: An actor on the Gofukuza Stage (Osaka) displaying money gifts, 13 June 2018. Schneider and Schneider, for example, looked into how gender is performed, and what rules are applied when performing gender. Their conclusion? There are no clear rules, as “taishū engeki plays with gender, but it also quite simply plays gender” (262). My own interest was not in the actual gender performed, but in the most pervasive and permanent element of all taishū engeki performances: seduction. Those who go to see these shows may do so for mere amusement—and their expectations are never disappointed, as the costumes are complex and flamboyant, and the performers are skilled dancers, but those who go faithfully do so due to their admiration for a certain actor. The first act (the historical play) is a convention where the star appears slightly more human—less make-up, sometimes performing the role of a man—always strong and masculine, which is quite an artistic feat seeing that even in the role of a man, the actors will wear specific make-up and false eyelashes. The Takarazuka Revue, an all-female group founded in 1914, has a large and consistent fan base made-up almost entirely of women who fall in love with the actress playing the main male roles—a phenomenon explained by the desire to temporarily live in a fantasy world. The difference between the Takarazuka actresses and the taishū engeki actors is that the former do not aim to seduce, but to invite the audience into a dream world, while the latter’s goal is to fully entrance. Regardless of the gender they play, the taishū engeki stars create erotic characters, just like their kabuki precursors, where, as Samuel L. Leiter (212) puts it, “eros remained primary”. Dressed in kimonos of intricate patterns that go far outside the lines of tradition, and are representative of the creative spirit of the performer, using make-up which completely transforms their physiognomies through the heavy use of eyeliner, glitter, false eyelashes, and wearing exquisite wigs, the actors invite the audience into a dream world where the Fairy Godmother gave the best dress to the prince, not the princess. For hundreds if not thousands of years, the folktales focussed around the image of a beautiful prince, the kalos kagathos hero (beautiful and virtuous, the ancient Greek ideal) who takes the maiden from distress and into a happily ever after. Taishū engeki heroes switch perspectives: it is not Prince Charming, but Princess Charming, an utterly beautiful creature who enchants the female audience by being the impossible. Princess Charming represents an embodiment of the best possible features—beauty, glamour, grace, sex appeal, elegance—and none of the negative ones—lack of manners, roughness, insensitivity. Moreover, Princess Charming is accessible. For a mere 2,000 yen, anybody can spend three hours in her company, and shaking her hand starts at a similarly low price—2,000 or 3,000 yen for a trinket bought during the intermission, to hand over as a gift during the performance. Fig. 2: Aotsuki Shinya as a romantic lady in a flowing kimono, Gofukuza, 9 July 2022. Dressed as females, the actors move their bodies with the grace of a geisha, bat their eyelashes, smile coquettishly, and even wink at the audience. As males, they are either abandoned lovers who drown their sorrows in drink, or fierce warriors dancing with masks and swords. In all circumstances, they present exaggerated feminine or masculine ideals, with the difference that femininity is emphasised through the overuse of garments and accessories, while masculinity will almost always involve a certain degree of nakedness: chest, arms, legs. The reasons are both practical (showing various naked body parts would destroy the dreamy feminine beauty wrapped up in layers of cloth and glitter), and symbolic: femininity is mysterious and fragile, and thus cannot easily be revealed, while masculinity must re-assert its strength and vitality. The body presented on stage is more of an artistic act than the performance itself, because it is there that most of the actor’s talent is poured. Creating a persona means borrowing from the “traditional” Japanese culture which includes geisha, courtesans, heavy wigs, and heavily embroidered kimonos, as well as the contemporary manga and cosplay culture. With exaggerated eyes and hairstyles as the central features of the head, the characters moving in front of the audience seem to have directly descended from (or drawn the viewers into, “Take On Me” style) the pages of a fantasy manga. An interview with Aotsuki Shinya (stage name), leader and star of the Kokoro (“Heart”) troupe conducted on 15 June 2022, did not offer any insightful glimpses into the metamorphosis process. While acknowledging that he cannot present his true self on stage, thus using make-up to become Aotsuki Shinya, the actor did not admit to any conscious attempt of becoming attractive. In his own words, all their efforts are for the benefit of the audience, directed towards helping them have fun. “Tanoshii”, “fun” seemed to be a key concept when staging a new performance, and the reasoning behind that is easy to follow. Unlike the more elevated kabuki, a taishū engeki theatre is a small cosy place where the audience can interact quite freely with the performers, who do not shy away from showing momentarily glimpses of the face behind the mask: forgetting a line and admitting to it, laughing at a joke said by another actor, kneeling prettily to receive gifts from their fans. Rather than gender fluid, the bodies in taishū engeki are genderless because they are not, nor do they claim to be, real. An actor on the traditional stage is a photography, or, if the setting includes fantastic elements, a painting of an imaginable universe. An actor on the taishū engeki stage turns their body into a manga drawing: something that does not exist in real life, but it is highly desirable. Kabuki actors staged eroticism by impersonating women; taishū engeki actors play with desire becoming in turns both Cinderella and the Prince. Figs. 3 & 4: Aotsuki Shinya as a fantastic character (fig. 3) and as the god Susano-wo slaying the dragon (fig. 4). “Fantasy, Sweet Fantasy” Analysing the loyalty that Takarazuka actresses inspire into their fans, Makiko Yamanashi interprets it as something that goes beyond (dreams of) physical love or mere escapism, and sees it as the desire to belong to an ideal community of women—friends, sisters, mothers. While not wrong, this approach seems to gloss over the real erotic feelings and the longing for something not of this world which are most definitely present among performative arts (be they kabuki, revue, vaudeville, butoh, modern theatre) aficionados. The men performed by the Takarazuka actresses do not exist in real life, and just as in the case of taishū engeki actors, make-up plays a crucial role. Lorie Brau even mentions an incident where an American director hired to stage a production of “West Side Story” required the actresses playing male roles to give up their false eyelashes—a change that did not last after the director left (86). The taishū engeki actors are warriors who bring back to life the god Izanagi, the creator of Japan, who fought an army of underworld monsters, while wearing eyeliner, eyelashes, and sparkling make-up. They are completely unrecognisable without make-up, and yet changing their appearance takes approximately ten minutes, much less than it would take a drag queen to turn from ordinary man into glamorous woman (at least forty minutes). I am not mentioning here the drag queens by chance—the two types of performances are similar enough that they lead to collaborations. On 10 June 2022, the troupe Kokoro performed at the Gofukuza Theatre in Umeda in the company of five drag queens well known on the Osaka stage: Feminina, Rulu Daisy, Madame Cocco, Ozu, and Il Rosa. One characteristic of drag performances is that they are actor-centred: they are not about the storyline, but about the performer’s creation—“channeling your inner femininity, fusing it with the male, and creating something otherworldly” (Hastings). The noticeable difference between drag and taishū engeki is that drag is actor-oriented, while taishū engeki is audience-oriented. Drag queens interact with the audiences and entertain, but the focus is internal, towards freeing something that had been developing within. Taishū engeki actors do choose their characters, of course, and have individual preferences, but this is secondary to their goal of captivating the audiences. Both categories of performers learn to re-invent their bodies, to re-create them on stage; however, in one case we witness an individual metamorphosis from real life to theatrical persona, and in the other we have one individual who can shapeshift into whatever character might work better magic on the people in front of him. Drag is about freedom while taishū engeki is about seduction. Fig. 5: Il Rosa and two actors of the Shin troupe, Gofukuza, 10 June 2022 Taishū engeki may not be kabuki: it is not celebrated by the media or the researchers, and many people in contemporary Japanese society see it as an inferior form of entertainment. Considering the low price of the tickets and the fact that shows are seldom sold out, one might worry about its future. Nevertheless, a visit to the backstage of Gofukuza during the month when Shin was performing revealed a large room full of costumes, and another one full of wig boxes—more than two hundred, according to Aotsuki Shinya. The Shin troupe was founded five years ago, so everything was still new and shiny—a sign that the genre will not disappear any time in the near future. The same visit, when I could interact with the actors in their day-to-day attires, using their regular voices, and standing near the costumes and wigs like exhibits in a museum, made one more thing acutely clear: the fact that their performances are a fantasy world. More of a fantasy world than a kabuki performance (to remain consistent with the comparison), where the setting is clearly a setting, separate from the audience. The blurred lines between stage and audience, between performance and flirting of the taishū engeki create a tangible fantasy, where one can not only fall in love with the Prince(ss) Charming, but maybe even take them to a ball. References Brau, Lorie. “The Women’s Theater of Takarazuka”. TDR 34.4 (Winter 1990): 79-95. Endo, Yukihide. “Reconsidering the Traveling Theater of Today’s Japan: An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Stigmatized Form of Japanese Theater.” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts 2.3. Hastings, Magnus. Why Drag? Hong Kong: Chronicle Books, 2016. Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing. Modernity Phantasm Japan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Kurata, Ryosuke. “Taishū Engeki as a Show Business: Exploring the Segmentation of Customers.” Mathesis Universalis 17.2. Leiter, Samuel L. “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki’s Female Characters.” In A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, ed. Samuel L. Leitner. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. 211-229. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre. From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1995. Schneider, Robert, and Nathan Schneider. “A Dive and a Dance with Kabuki Vaudeville: Taishū Engeki Comes Back!” New Theater Quarterly 36.3 (2020). 29 July 2020 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-theatre-quarterly/article/abs/dive-and-a-dance-with-kabuki-vaudeville-taishu-engeki-comes-back/BB72486E86C79B70730B6F2DB5EC0FF8>. Yamanashi, Makiko. A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop. Leiden: Global Oriental, 2012.

The Walt Disney Company has been creating magical fairy tales since the early 1900s and is a trusted brand synonymous with wholesome, family entertainment (Wasko). Over time, this reputation has resulted in the Disney brand’s huge financial growth and influence on audiences worldwide. (Wohlwend). As the largest global media powerhouse in the Western world (Beattie), Disney uses its power and influence to shape the perceptions and ideologies of its audience. In the twenty-first century there has been a proliferation of retellings of Disney fairy tales, and Kilmer suggests that although the mainstream perception is that these new iterations promote gender equity, new cultural awareness around gender stereotypes, and cultural insensitivity, this is illusory. Tangled, for example, was a popular film selling over 10 million DVD copies and positioned as a bold new female fairy tale character; however, academics took issue with this position, writing articles entitled “Race, Gender and the Politics of Hair: Disney’s Tangled Feminist Messages”, “Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity”, and “Disney’s Tangled: Fun, But Not Feminist”, berating the film for its lack of any true feminist examples or progressiveness (Kilmer). One way to assess the impact of Disney is to look at the use of shape shifting and transformation in the narratives – particularly those that include women and young girls. Research shows that girls and women are often stereotyped and sexualised in the mass media (Smith et al.; Collins), and Disney regularly utilises body modification and metamorphosis within its narratives to emphasise what good and evil ‘look’ like. These magical transformations evoke what Marina Warner refers to as part of the necessary surprise element of the fairy tale, while creating suspense and identity with storylines and characters. In early Disney films such as the 1937 version of Snow White, the queen becomes the witch who brings a poison apple to the princess; and in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty the ‘bad’ fairy Maleficent shapeshifts into a malevolent dragon. Whilst these ‘good to evil’ (and vice versa) tropes are easily recognised, there are additional transformations that are arguably more problematic than those of the increasingly terrifying monsters or villains. Disney has created what we have coined the ‘princess bubble’, where the physique and behaviour of the leading women in the tales has become a predictor of success and good fortune, and the impression is created of a link between their possession of beauty and the ‘happily-ever-after’ outcome received by the female character. The value, or worth, of a princess is shown within these stories to often increase according to her ability to attract men. For example, in Brave, Queen Elinor showcases the extreme measures taken to ‘present’ her daughter Merida to male suitors. Merida is preened, dressed, and shown how to behave to increase her value to her family, and whilst she manages to persuade them to set aside their patriarchal ideologies in the end, it is clear what is expected from Merida in order to gain male attention. Similarly, Cinderella, Aurora, and Snow White are found to be of high ‘worth’ by the princes on account of their beauty and form. We contend, therefore, that the impression often cast on audiences by Disney princesses emphasises that beauty = worth, no matter how transgressive Disney appears to be on the surface. These princesses are flawlessly beautiful, capable of winning the heart of the prince by triumphing over their less attractive rivals – who are often sisters or other family members. This creates the illusion among young audiences that physical attractiveness is enough to achieve success, and emphasises beauty as the priority above all else. Therefore, the Disney ‘princess bubble’ is highly problematic. It presents a narrow range of acceptability for female characters, offers a distorted view of gender, and serves to further engrain into popular culture a flawed stereotype on how to look and behave that negates a fuller representation of female characters. In addition, Armando Maggi argues that since fairy tales have been passed down through generations, they have become an intrinsic part of many people’s upbringing and are part of a kind of universal imaginary and repository of cultural values. This means that these iconic cultural stories are “unlikely to ever be discarded because they possess both a sentimental value and a moral ‘soundness’” (Rutherford 33), albeit that the lessons to be learnt are at times antiquated and exclusionary in contemporary society. The marketing and promotion of the Disney princess line has resulted in these characters becoming an extremely popular form of media and merchandise for young girls (Coyne et al. 2), and Disney has received great financial benefit from the success of its long history of popular films and merchandise. As a global corporation with influence across multiple entertainment platforms, from its streaming channel to merchandise and theme parks, the gender portrayals therefore impact on culture and, in particular, on how young audiences view gender representation. Therefore, it could be argued that Disney has a social responsibility to ensure that its messages and characters do not skew or become damaging to the psyche of its young audiences who are highly impressionable. When the representation of gender is examined, however, Disney tends to create highly gendered performances in both the early and modern iterations of fairy tales, and the princess characters remain within a narrow range of physical portrayals and agency. The Princess Bubble Although there are twelve official characters within the Disney princess umbrella, plus Elsa and Anna from the Disney Frozen franchise, this article examines the eleven characters who are either born or become royalty through marriage, and exhibit characteristics that could be argued to be the epitome of feminine representation in fairy tales. The characters within this ‘princess bubble’ are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Elsa, and Anna. The physical appearance of those in the princess bubble also connects to displays around the physical aspects of ethnicity. Nine out of eleven are white skinned, with Jasmine having lightened in skin tone over time, and Tiana now having a tanned look rather than the original dark African American complexion seen in 2009 (Brucculieri). This reinforces an ideology that being white is superior. Every princess in our sample has thick and healthy long hair, the predominant colour being blonde. Their eyes are mostly blue, with only three possessing a dark colour, a factor which reinforces the characteristics and representation of white ethnic groups. Their eyes are also big and bulbous in shape, with large irises and pupils, and extraordinarily long eyelashes that create an almost child-like look of innocence that matches their young age. These princesses have an average age of sixteen years and are always naïve, most without formal education or worldly experience, and they have additional distinctive traits which include poise, elegance and other desired feminine characteristics – like kindness and purity. Ehrenreich and Orenstein note that the physical attributes of the Disney princesses are so evident that the creators have drawn criticism for over-glamorising them, and for their general passiveness and reliance on men for their happiness. Essentially, these women are created in the image of the ultimate male fantasy, where an increased value is placed on the virginal look, followed by a perfect tiny body and an ability to follow basic instructions. The slim bodies of these princesses are disproportionate, and include long necks, demure shoulders, medium- to large-sized perky breasts, with tiny waists, wrists, ankles and feet. Thus, it can be argued that the main theme for those within the princess bubble is their physical body and beauty, and the importance of being attractive to achieve success. The importance of the physical form is so valued that the first blessing given by the fairies to Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is the gift of physical beauty (Rutherford). Furthermore, Tanner et al. argue that the "images of love at first sight in the films encourage the belief that physical appearance is the most important thing", and these fairy tales often reflect a pattern that the prince cannot help but to instantly fall in love with these women because they are so striking. In some instances, like the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, these princesses have not uttered a single word to their prince before these men fall unconditionally and hopelessly in love. Cinderella need only to turn up at the ball as the best dressed (Parks), while Snow White must merely “wait prettily, because someday her prince will come" (Inge) to reestablish her as royalty. Disney emphasises that these princesses win their man solely on the basis that they are the most beautiful girls in the land. In Sleeping Beauty, the prince overhears Aurora’s singing and that sets his heart aflame to the point of refusing to wed the woman chosen for him at birth by the king. Fortunately, she is one and the same person, so the patriarchy survives, but this idea of beauty, and of 'love at first sight', continues to be a central part of Disney movies today, and shows that “Disney Films are vehicles of powerful gender ideologies” (Hairianto). These princesses within the bubble of perfection have priority placed on their physical and sexual beauty (Dietz), formulating a kind of ‘beauty contest motif’. Examples include Gaston, who does not love Belle in Beauty and the Beast, but simply wants her as his trophy wife because he deems her to be the most beautiful girl in the town. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, looks as if she "was modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie doll with thin waist and prominent bust. This representation portrays a dangerous model for young women" (Zarranz). The sexualisation of the characters continues as Jasmine has “a delicate nose and small mouth" (Lacroix), with a dress that can be considered as highly sexualised and unsuitable for a girl of sixteen (Lacroix). In Tangled, Rapunzel is held hostage in the tower by Mother Gothel because she is ‘as fragile as a flower’ and needs to be ‘kept safe’ from the harms in the world. But it is her beauty that scares the witch the most, because losing Rapunzel would leave the old woman without her magical anti-aging hair. She uses scare tactics to ensure that Rapunzel remains unseen to the world. These examples are all variations of the beauty theme, as the princesses all fall within narrow and predictable tropes of love at first sight where the woman is rescued and initiated into womanhood by being chosen by a man. Disney’s Progressive Representation? At times Disney’s portrayal of princesses appears illusively progressive, by introducing new and different variations of princesses into the fold – such as Merida in the 2012 film Brave. Unfortunately, this is merely an illusion as the ‘body-perfect’ image remains an all-important ideal to snare a prince. Merida, the young and spirited teenage princess, begins her tale determined not to conform to the desired standards set for a woman of her standing; however, when the time comes for her to be married, there is no negotiating with her mother, the queen, on dress compliance. Merida is clothed against her will to re-identify her in the manner which her parents deem appropriate. Her ability to express her identity and individuality removed, now replaced by a masked version, and thus with the true Merida lost in this transformation, her parents consider Merida to be of renewed merit and benefit to the family. This shows that Disney remains unchanged in its depiction of who may ‘fit’ within the princess bubble, because the rubric is unchanged on how to win the heart of the man. In fact, this film is possibly more troublesome than the rest because it clearly depicts her parents to deem her to be of more value only after her mother has altered her physical appearance. It is only after the total collapse of the royal family that King Fergus has a change of patriarchal heart, and in fact Disney does not portray this rumpled, ripped-sleeved version of the princess in its merchandising campaign. While the fantasy of fairy tales provides enthralling adventures that always end in happiness for the pretty princesses that encounter them, consideration must be given to all those women who have not met the standard and are left in their wake. If women do not conform to the standards of representation, they are presented as outcasts, and happiness eludes them. Cinderella, for example, has two ugly stepsisters, who, no matter how hard they might try, are unable to match her in attractiveness, kindness, or grace. Disney has embraced and not shunned Perrault’s original retelling of the tale, by ensuring that these stepsisters are ugly. They have not been blessed with any attributes whatsoever, and cannot sing, dance, or play music; nor can they sew, cook, clean, or behave respectably. These girls will never find a suitor, let alone a prince, no matter how eager they are to do so. On the physical comparison, Anastasia and Drizella have bodies that are far more rounded and voluptuous, with feet, for example, that are more than double the size of Cinderella’s magical slipper. These women clearly miss the parameters of our princess bubble, emphasising that Disney is continuing to promote dangerous narratives that could potentially harm young audience conceptions of femininity at an important period in their development. Therefore, despite the ‘progressive’ strides made by Disney in response to the vast criticism of their earlier films, the agency afforded to their new generation of princesses does not alter the fact that success comes to those who are beautiful. These beautiful people continue to win every time. Furthermore, Hairianto has found that it is not uncommon for the media to directly or indirectly promote “mental models of how a woman should look, speak and interact with others”, and that Disney uses its pervasive princess influence “to shape perceptions of female identity and desirability. Females are made to measure themselves against the set of values that are meted out by the films” (Hairianto). In the 2017 film Beauty and the Beast, those outside of the princess bubble are seen in the characters of the three maidens from the village who are always trying to look their very best in the hope of attracting Gaston (Rutherford). Gaston is not only disinterested but shows borderline contempt at their glances by permitting his horse to spray mud and dirt all over their fine clothing. They do not meet the beauty standard set, and instead of questioning his cruelty, the audience is left laughing at the horse’s antics. Interestingly, the earlier version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast portrays these maidens as blonde, slim, and sexy, closely fitting the model of beauty displayed in our princess bubble; however, none match the beauty of Belle, and are therefore deemed inferior. In this manner, Disney is being irresponsible, placing little interest in the psychological ‘safety’ or affect the messages have upon young girls who will never meet these expectations (Ehrenreich; Best and Lowney; Orenstein). Furthermore, bodies are shaped and created by culture. They are central to self-identity, becoming a projection of how we see ourselves. Grosz (xii) argues that our notions of our bodies begin in physicality but are forever shaped by our interactions with social realities and cultural norms. The media are constantly filled with images that “glorify and highlight some kinds of bodies (for example, the young, able-bodied and beautiful) while ignoring or condemning others” (Jones 193), and these influences on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and religion within popular culture therefore play a huge part in identity creation. In Disney films, the princess bubble constantly sings the same song, and “children view these stereotypical roles as the right and only way to behave” (Ewert). In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s friend Charlotte is so desperate to ‘catch’ a prince that "she humorously over-applies her makeup and adjusts her ball gown to emphasize her cleavage" (Breaux), but the point is not lost. Additionally, “making sure that girls become worthy of love seems central to Disney’s fairy tale films” (Rutherford 76), and because their fairy tales are so pervasive and popular, young viewers receive a consistent message that being beautiful and having a tiny doll-like body type is paramount. “This can be destructive for developing girls’ views and images of their own bodies, which are not proportioned the way that they see on screen” (Cordwell 21). “The strongly gendered messages present in the resolutions of the movies help to reinforce the desirability of traditional gender conformity” (England et al. 565). Conclusion The princess bubble is a phenomenon that has been seen in Disney’s representation of female characters for decades. Within this bubble there is a narrow range of representation permitted, and attempts to make the characters more progressive have instead resulted in narrow and restrictive constraints, reinforcing dangerous female stereotypes. Kilmer suggests that ultimately these representations fail to break away from “hegemonic assumptions about gender norms, class boundaries, and Caucasian privileging”. Ultimately this presents audiences with strong and persuasive messages about gender performance. Audiences conform their bodies to societal ‘rules’: “as to how we ‘wear’ and ‘use’ our bodies” (Richardson and Locks x), including for example how we should dress, what we should weigh, and how to become popular. In our global hypermediated society, viewers are constantly exposed to princesses and other appropriate bodies. These become internalised ideals and aid in positive and negative thoughts and self-identity, which in turn creates additional pressure on the female body in particular. The seemingly innocent stories with happy outcomes are therefore unrealistic and ultimately excluding of those who cannot or will not ‘fit into the princess bubble’. The princess bubble, we argue, is therefore predictable and restrictive, promoting female passiveness and a reliance of physical traits over intelligence. The dominance of beauty over all else remains the road to female success in the Disney fairy tale film. References Beauty and the Beast. Dirs. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney Productions, 1991. Film. Beauty and the Beast. Dir. Bill Condon. Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Film. Best, Joel, and Kathleen S. Lowney. “The Disadvantage of a Good Reputation: Disney as a Target for Social Problems Claims.” The Sociological Quarterly 50 (2009): 431–449. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01147.x. Brave. Dirs. Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. Walt Disney Pictures, 2012. Film. Breaux, Richard, M. “After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes in on Its Racist Past.” Journal of African American Studies 14 (2010): 398-416. Cinderella. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Film. Collins, Rebecca L. “Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Go?” Sex Roles 64 (2011): 290–298. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9929-5. Cordwell, Caila Leigh. The Shattered Slipper Project: The Impact of the Disney Princess Franchise on Girls Ages 6-12. Honours thesis, Southeastern University, 2016. Coyne, Sarah M., Jennifer Ruh Linder, Eric E. Rasmussen, David A. Nelson, and Victoria Birkbeck. “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in Children.” Child Development 87.6 (2016): 1–17. Dietz, Tracey, L. “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38 (1998): 425–442. doi:10.1023/a:1018709905920. England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. "Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses." Sex Roles 64 (2011): 555-567. Ewert, Jolene. “A Tale as Old as Time – an Analysis of Negative Stereotypes in Disney Princess Movies.” Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences 13 (2014). Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. London, Routledge, 1994. Inge, M. Thomas. “Art, Adaptation, and Ideology: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32.3 (2004): 132-142. Jones, Meredith. “The Body in Popular Culture.” Being Cultural. Ed. Bruce M.Z. Cohen. Auckland University, 2012. 193-210. Kilmer, Alyson. Moving Forward? Problematic Ideology in Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films. Central Washington University, 2015. Lacroix, Celeste. “Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Popular Communications 2.4 (2004): 213-229. Little Mermaid, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Film. Maggi, Armando. Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Parks, Kari. Mirror, Mirror: A Look at Self-Esteem & Disney Princesses. Honours thesis. Ball State University, 2012. Pinocchio. Dirs. Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Norm Ferguson, Bill Roberts, and T. Lee. Walt Disney Productions, 1940. Film. Princess and the Frog, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 2009. Film. Richardson, Niall, and Adam Locks. Body Studies: The Basics. Routledge, 2014. Rutherford, Amanda M. Happily Ever After? A Critical Examination of the Gothic in Disney Fairy Tale Films. Auckland University of Technology, 2020. Sleeping Beauty. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Les Clark. Walt Disney Productions, 1959. Film. Smith, Stacey L., Katherine M. Pieper, Amy Granados, and Mark Choueite. “Assessing Gender-Related Portrayals in Topgrossing G-Rated Films.” Sex Roles 62 (2010): 774–786. Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Dirs. David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell, Perce Pearce, and Larry Morey. Walt Disney Productions, 1937. Film. Tangled. Dirs. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010. Film. Tanner, Litsa RenÉe, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund. “Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31 (2003): 355-373. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. London: Oxford UP, 2002. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Polity Press, 2001. Wohlwend, Karen E. “Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts through Disney Princess Play.” Reading Research Quarterly 44.1 (2009): 57-83. Zarranaz, L. Garcia. “Diswomen Strike Back? The Evolution of Disney's Femmes in the 1990s.” Atenea 27.2 (2007) 55-65.

Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.

A slash manip is a photo remix that montages visual signs from popular media with those from gay pornography, creating a new cultural artefact. Slash (see Russ) is a fannish practice that homoeroticises the bonds between male media characters and personalities—female pairings are categorised separately as ‘femslash’. Slash has been defined almost exclusively as a female practice. While fandom is indeed “women-centred” (Bury 2), such definitions have a tendency to exclude male contributions. Remix has been well acknowledged in discussions on slash, most notably video remix in relation to slash vids (Kreisinger). Non-written slash forms such as slash vids (see Russo) and slash fanart (see Dennis) have received increased attention in recent years. This article continues the tradition of moving beyond fiction by considering the non-written form of slash manips, yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Speaking as a practitioner—my slash manips can be found here—I perform textual analysis from an aca–fan (academic and fan) position of two Merlin slash manips by male Tumblr artist wandsinhand. My textual analysis is influenced by Barthes’s use of image semiotics, which he applies to the advertising image. Barthes notes that “all images are polysemous”, that underlying their signifiers they imply “a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” (274). That said, the advertising image, he argues, constructs an “undoubtedly intentional […] signification”, making it ideally suited for analysis (270). By supplementing my analysis with excerpts from two interviews I conducted with wandsinhand in February and April 2013 (quoted here with permission), I support my readings with respect to the artist’s stated ‘intentional reading’. I then contextualise these readings with respect to canon (Merlin) representations and gay pornography—via the chosen sexual acts/positions, bukkake and doggystyle, of the pornographic base models, as selected by the artist. This approach allows me to examine the photo remix qualities of slash manips with respect to the artist’s intentions as well as how artistic choices of inclusion function to anchor meaning in the works. I describe these choices as the ‘semiotic significance of selection’. Together the readings and interviews in this article help illustrate the value of this form and the new avenues it opens for slash scholars, such as consideration of photo remix and male production, and the importance of gay pornography to slash. My interviews also reveal, via the artist’s own assessment of the ‘value’ of his practice, a tendency to devalue or overlook the significance of this particular slash form, affirming a real need for further critical engagement with this under-examined practice. Slash Photo Remix: Famous Faces, Porny Bodies Lessig defines remix culture as based on an activity of “rip, mix and burn” (12–5); while Navas describes it as a “practice of cut/copy and paste” (159)—the latter being more applicable to photo remix. Whereas Lessig is concerned primarily with issues of copyright, Navas is interested in remix’s role in aesthetics and the political economy. Within fan studies, slash vids—a form of video remix—has been a topic of considerable academic interest in recent years. Slash manips—a form of photo or image remix—however, has not attracted the same degree of interest. Stasi’s description of slash as “a non-hierarchical, rich layering of genres” points to the usefulness of slash manips as an embodiment of the process of slash; whereby artists combine, blend and mutate graphic layers from popular media with those from gay pornography. Aesthetics and the slash manip process are central concerns of this article’s consideration of slash photo remix. Slash manips, or slash photo montage, use image manipulation software (Adobe Photoshop being the community standard, see wandsinhand’s tutorial) to layer the heads of male fictional characters from stills or promotional images with scenes—static or moving—from gay pornography. Once an artist has selected pornographic ‘base models’ anatomically suited to canon characters, these models are often then repositioned into the canon universe, which in the case of Merlin means a medieval setting. (Works not repositioned and without added details from canon are generally categorised as ‘male celebrity fakes’ rather than ‘slash manips’.) Stedman contends that while many fan studies scholars are interested in remix, “studies commonly focus on examples of remixed objects rather than the compositional strategies used by remix composers themselves” (107). He advocates moving beyond an exclusive consideration of “text-centred approaches” to also consider “practice-” and “composer-centred” approaches. Such approaches offer insight into “the detailed choices composers actually make when composing” (107). He refers to recognition of the skills required by a remix composer as “remix literacy” (108). This article’s consideration of the various choices and skills that go into the composition of slash manips—what I term the ‘semiotic significance of selection’—is explored with respect to wandsinhand’s practice, coupling my reading—informed by my experience as a practitioner—with the interpretations of the artist himself. Jenkins defines slash as “reaction against” constructions of male sexuality in both popular media and pornography (189). By their very nature, slash manips also make clear the oft-overlooked connections between slash and gay pornography, and in turn the contributions of gay male participants, who are well represented by the form. This contrasts with a tendency within scholarship to compare slash with heterosexual female forms, such as the romance genre (Salmon and Symons). Gay pornography plays a visible role in slash manips—and slash vids, which often remix scenes from popular media with gay cinema and pornography. Slash as Romance, Slash as Pornography Early scholarship on slash (see Russ; Lamb and Veith) defines it as a form of erotica or pornography, by and for women; a reductive definition that fails to take into account men’s contribution, yet one that many researchers continue to adopt today. As stated above, there has also been a tendency within scholarship to align the practice with heterosexual female forms such as the romance genre. Such a tendency is by and large due to theorisation of slash as heterosexual female fantasy—and concerned primarily with romance and intimacy rather than sex (see Woledge). Weinstein describes slash as more a “fascination with” than a “representation of” homosexual relationships (615); while MacDonald makes the point that homosexuality is not a major political motivator for slash (28–9). There is no refuting that slash—along with most fannish practice—is female dominated, ethnographic work and fandom surveys reveal that is the case. However there is great need for research into male production of slash, particularly how such practices might challenge reigning definitions and assumptions of the practice. In similar Japanese practices, for example, gay male opposition to girls’ comics (shōjo) depicting love between ‘pretty boys’ (bishōunen) has been well documented (see Hori)—Men’s Love (or bara) is a subgenre of Boys’ Love (or shōnen’ai) predominately created by gay men seeking a greater connection with the lived reality of gay life (Lunsing). Dennis finds male slash fanart producers more committed to muscular representations and depiction of graphic male/male sex when compared with female-identifying artists (14, 16). He also observes that male fanart artists have a tendency of “valuing same-sex desire without a heterosexual default and placing it within the context of realistic gay relationships” (11). I have observed similar differences between male and female-identifying slash manip artists. Female-identifying Nicci Mac, for example, will often add trousers to her donor bodies, recoding them for a more romantic context. By contrast, male-identifying mythagowood is known for digitally enlarging the penises and rectums of his base models, exaggerating his work’s connection to the pornographic and the macabre. Consider, for example, mythagowood’s rationale for digitally enlarging and importing ‘lips’ for Sam’s (Supernatural) rectum in his work Ass-milk: 2012, which marks the third anniversary of the original: Originally I wasn’t going to give Sammy’s cunt any treatment (before I determined the theme) but when assmilk became the theme I had to go find a good set of lips to slap on him and I figured, it’s been three years, his hole is going to be MUCH bigger. (personal correspondence, used with permission) While mythagowood himself cautions against gendered romance/pornography slash arguments—“I find it annoying that people attribute certain specific aspects of my work to something ‘only a man’ would make.” (ibid.)—gay pornography occupies an important place in the lives of gay men as a means for entertainment, community engagement and identity-construction (see McKee). As one of the only cultural representations available to gay men, Fejes argues that gay pornography plays a crucial role in defining gay male desire and identity. This is confirmed by an Internet survey conducted by Duggan and McCreary that finds 98% of gay participants reporting exposure to pornographic material in the 30-day period prior to the survey. Further, the underground nature of gay pornographic film (see Dyer) aligns it with slash as a subcultural practice. I now analyse two Merlin slash manips with respect to the sexual positions of the pornographic base models, illustrating how gay pornography genres and ideologies referenced through these works enforce their intended meaning, as defined by the artist. A sexual act such as bukkake, as wandsinhand astutely notes, acts as a universal sign and “automatically generates a narrative for the image without anything really needing to be detailed”. Barthes argues that such a “relation between thing signified and image signifying in analogical representation” is unlike language, which has a much more ‘arbitrary’ relationship between signifier and signified (272). Bukkake and the Assertion of Masculine Power in Merlin Merlin (2008–12) is a BBC reimagining of the Arthurian legend that focuses on the coming-of-age of Arthur and his close bond with his manservant Merlin, who keeps his magical identity secret until Arthur’s final stand in the iconic Battle of Camlann. The homosexual potential of Merlin and Arthur’s story—and of magic as a metaphor for homosexuality—is something slash fans were quick to recognise. During question time at the first Merlin cast appearance at the London MCM Expo in October 2008—just one month after the show’s pilot first aired—a fan asked Morgan and James, who portray Merlin and Arthur, is Merlin “meant to be a love story between Arthur and Merlin?” James nods in jest. Wandsinhand, who is most active in the Teen Wolf (2011–present) fandom, has produced two Merlin slash manips to date, a 2013 Merlin/Arthur and a 2012 Arthur/Percival, both untitled. The Merlin/Arthur manip (see Figure 1) depicts Merlin bound and on his knees, Arthur ejaculating across his face and on his chest. Merlin is naked while Arthur is partially clothed in chainmail and armour. They are both bruised and dirty, Arthur’s injuries suggesting battle given his overall appearance, while Merlin’s suggesting abuse, given his subordinate position. The setting appears to be the royal stables, where we know Merlin spends much of his time mucking out Arthur’s horses. I am left to wonder if perhaps Merlin did not carry out this duty to Arthur’s satisfaction, and is now being punished for it; or if Arthur has returned from battle in need of sexual gratification and the endorsement of power that comes from debasing his manservant. Figure 1: wandsinhand, Untitled (Merlin/Arthur), 2013, photo montage. Courtesy the artist. Both readings are supported by Arthur’s ‘spent’ expression of disinterest or mild curiosity, while Merlin’s face emotes pain: crying and squinting through the semen obscuring his vision. The artist confirms this reading in our interview: “Arthur is using his pet Merlin to relieve some stress; Merlin of course not being too pleased about the aftermath, but obedient all the same.” The noun ‘pet’ evokes the sexual connotations of Merlin’s role as Arthur’s personal manservant, while also demoting Merlin even further than usual. He is, in Arthur’s eyes, less than human, a sexual plaything to use and abuse at will. The artist’s statement also confirms that Arthur is acting against Merlin’s will. Violence is certainly represented here, the base models having been ‘marked up’ to depict sexualisation of an already physically and emotionally abusive relationship, their relative positioning and the importation of semen heightening the humiliation. Wandsinhand’s work engages characters in sadomasochistic play, with semen and urine frequently employed to degrade and arouse—“peen wolf”, a reference to watersports, is used within his Teen Wolf practice. The two wandsinhand works analysed in this present article come without words, thus lacking a “linguistic message” (Barthes 273–6). However even so, the artist’s statement and Arthur’s stance over “his pet Merlin” mean we are still able to “skim off” (270) the meanings the image contains. The base models, for example, invite comparison with the ‘gay bukkake’ genre of gay pornography—admittedly with a single dominant male rather than a group. Gay bukkake has become a popular niche in North American gay pornography—it originated in Japan as a male–female act in the 1980s. It describes a ritualistic sexual act where a group of dominant men—often identifying as heterosexual—fuck and debase a homosexual, submissive male, commonly bareback (Durkin et al. 600). The aggression on display in this act—much like the homosocial insistency of men who partake in a ‘circle jerk’ (Mosher 318)—enables the participating men to affirm their masculinity and dominance by degrading the gay male, who is there to service (often on his knees) and receive—in any orifice of the group’s choosing—the men’s semen, and often urine as well. The equivalencies I have made here are based on the ‘performance’ of the bukkake fantasy in gay niche hazing and gay-for-pay pornography genres. These genres are fuelled by antigay sentiment, aggression and debasement of effeminate males (see Kendall). I wish here to resist the temptation of labelling the acts described above as deviant. As is a common problem with anti-pornography arguments, to attempt to fix a practice such as bukkake as deviant and abject—by, for example, equating it to rape (Franklin 24)—is to negate a much more complex consideration of distinctions and ambiguities between force and consent; lived and fantasy; where pleasure is, where it is performed and where it is taken. I extend this desire not to label the manip in question, which by exploiting the masculine posturing of Arthur effectively sexualises canon debasement. This began with the pilot when Arthur says: “Tell me Merlin, do you know how to walk on your knees?” Of the imported imagery—semen, bruising, perspiration—the key signifier is Arthur’s armour which, while torn in places, still ensures the encoding of particular signifieds: masculinity, strength and power. Doggystyle and the Subversion of Arthur’s ‘Armoured Self’ Since the romanticism and chivalric tradition of the knight in shining armour (see Huizinga) men as armoured selves have become a stoic symbol of masculine power and the benchmark for aspirational masculinity. For the medieval knight, armour reflects in its shiny surface the mettle of the man enclosed, imparting a state of ‘bodilessness’ by containing any softness beneath its shielded exterior (Burns 140). Wandsinhand’s Arthur/Percival manip (see Figure 2) subverts Arthur and the symbolism of armour with the help of arguably the only man who can: Arthur’s largest knight Percival. While a minor character among the knights, Percival’s physical presence in the series looms large, and has endeared him to slash manip artists, particularly those with only a casual interest in the series, such as wandsinhand: Why Arthur and Percival were specifically chosen had really little to do with the show’s plot, and in point of fact, I don’t really follow Merlin that closely nor am I an avid fan. […] Choosing Arthur/Percival really was just a matter of taste rather than being contextually based on their characterisations in the television show. Figure 2: wandsinhand, Untitled (Arthur/Percival), 2012, photo montage. Courtesy the artist. Concerning motivation, the artist explains: “Sometimes one’s penis decides to pick the tv show Merlin, and specifically Arthur and Percival.” The popularity of Percival among manip artists illustrates the power of physicality as a visual sign, and the valorisation of size and muscle within the gay community (see Sánchez et al.). Having his armour modified to display his muscles, the implication is that Percival does not need armour, for his body is already hard, impenetrable. He is already suited up, simultaneously man and armoured. Wandsinhand uses the physicality of this character to strip Arthur of his symbolic, masculine power. The work depicts Arthur with a dishevelled expression, his armoured chest pressed against the ground, his chainmail hitched up at the back to expose his arse, Percival threading his unsheathed cock inside him, staring expressionless at the ‘viewer’. The artist explains he “was trying to show a shift of power”: I was also hinting at some sign of struggle, which is somewhat evident on Arthur’s face too. […] I think the expressions work in concert to suggest […] a power reversal that leaves Arthur on the bottom, a position he’s not entirely comfortable accepting. There is pleasure to be had in seeing the “cocky” Arthur forcefully penetrated, “cut down to size by a bigger man” (wandsinhand). The two assume the ‘doggystyle’ position, an impersonal sexual position, without eye contact and where the penetrator sets the rhythm and intensity of each thrust. Scholars have argued that the position is degrading to the passive party, who is dehumanised by the act, a ‘dog’ (Dworkin 27); and rapper Snoop ‘Doggy’ Dogg exploits the misogynistic connotations of the position on his record Doggystyle (see Armstrong). Wandsinhand is clear in his intent to depict forceful domination of Arthur. Struggle is signified through the addition of perspiration, a trademark device used by this artist to symbolise struggle. Domination in a sexual act involves the erasure of the wishes of the dominated partner (see Cowan and Dunn). To attune oneself to the pleasures of a sexual partner is to regard them as a subject. To ignore such pleasures is to degrade the other person. The artist’s choice of pairing embraces the physicality of the male/male bond and illustrates a tendency among manip producers to privilege conventional masculine identifiers—such as size and muscle—above symbolic, nonphysical identifiers, such as status and rank. It is worth noting that muscle is more readily available in the pornographic source material used in slash manips—muscularity being a recurrent component of gay pornography (see Duggan and McCreary). In my interview with manip artist simontheduck, he describes the difficulty he had sourcing a base image “that complimented the physicality of the [Merlin] characters. […] The actor that plays Merlin is fairly thin while Arthur is pretty built, it was difficult to find one. I even had to edit Merlin’s body down further in the end.” (personal correspondence, used with permission) As wandsinhand explains, “you’re basically limited by what’s available on the internet, and even then, only what you’re prepared to sift through or screencap yourself”. Wandsinhand’s Arthur/Percival pairing selection works in tandem with other artistic decisions and inclusions—sexual position, setting, expressions, effects (perspiration, lighting)—to ensure the intended reading of the work. Antithetical size and rank positions play out in the penetration/submission act of wandsinhand’s work, in which only the stronger of the two may come out ‘on top’. Percival subverts the symbolic power structures of prince/knight, asserting his physical, sexual dominance over the physically inferior Arthur. That such a construction of Percival is incongruent with the polite, impeded-by-my-size-and-muscle-density Percival of the series speaks to the circumstances of manip production, much of which is on a taste basis, as previously noted. There are of course exceptions to this, the Teen Wolf ‘Sterek’ (Stiles/Derek) pairing being wandsinhand’s, but even in this case, size tends to couple with penetration. Slash manips often privilege physicality of the characters in question—as well as the base models selected—above any particular canon-supported slash reading. (Of course, the ‘queering’ nature of slash practice means at times there is also a desire to see such identifiers subverted, however in this example, raw masculine power prevails.) This final point is in no way representative—my practice, for example, combines manips with ficlets to offer a clearer connection with canon, while LJ’s zdae69 integrates manips, fiction and comics. However, common across slash manip artists driven by taste—and requests—rather than connection with canon—the best known being LJ’s tw-31988, demon48180 and Tumblr’s lwoodsmalestarsfakes, all of whom work across many fandoms—is interest in the ‘aesthetics of canon’, the blue hues of Teen Wolf or the fluorescent greens of Arrow (2012–present), displayed in glossy magazine format using services such as ISSUU. In short, ‘the look’ of the work often takes precedent over canonical implications of any artistic decisions. “Nothing Too Serious”: Slash Manips as Objects Worth Studying It had long been believed that the popular was the transient, that of entertainment rather than enlightenment; that which is manufactured, “an appendage of the machinery”, consumed by the duped masses and a product not of culture but of a ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Rabinbach 12). Scholars such as Radway, Ang pioneered a shift in scholarly practice, advancing the cultural studies project by challenging elitism and finding meaning in traditionally devalued cultural texts and practices. The most surprising outcome of my interviews with wandsinhand was hearing how he conceived of his practice, and the study of slash: If I knew I could get a PhD by writing a dissertation on Slash, I would probably drop out of my physics papers! […] I don’t really think too highly of faking/manip-making. I mean, it’s not like it’s high art, is it? … or is it? I guess if Duchamp’s toilet can be a masterpiece, then so can anything. But I mainly just do it to pass the time, materialise fantasies, and disperse my fantasies unto others. Nothing too serious. Wandsinhand erects various binaries—academic/fan, important/trivial, science/arts, high art/low art, profession/hobby, reality/fantasy, serious/frivolous—as justification to devalue his own artistic practice. Yet embracing the amateur, personal nature of his practice frees him to “materialise fantasies” that would perhaps not be possible without self-imposed, underground production. This is certainly supported by his body of work, which plays with taboos of the unseen, of bodily fluids and sadomasochism. My intention with this article is not to contravene views such as wandsinhand’s. Rather, it is to promote slash manips as a form of remix culture that encourages new perspectives on how slash has been defined, its connection with male producers and its symbiotic relationship with gay pornography. I have examined the ‘semiotic significance of selection’ that creates meaning in two contrary slash manips; how these works actualise and resist canon dominance, as it relates to the physical and the symbolic. This examination also offers insight into this form’s connection to and negotiation with certain ideologies of gay pornography, such as the valorisation of size and muscle. 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