Journal articles on the topic 'African poetry (French)'

Syntax and Meaning of Conative Speech in Francophone African Poetry For those with an interest in African poetry, particularly Francophone poetry, several distinctive features underlie its originality and authenticity. These encompass rhythm, symbolism, and poetic imagery, serving as fundamental markers of the dominant poetic function within poetic discourse. These elements are inevitable considerations in any analysis, be it poetic or stylistic, of literary texts. Poetry in Africa, and conceivably beyond, undoubtedly serves a pragmatic, or more precisely, pragma-enunciative function, often obscured and overshadowed by the omnipotent poetic function—the quintessential literary function. In practical terms, the pragma-enunciative function of a poetic text is revealed through its conative nature. Essentially, poetry is a form of discourse inherently directed towards otherness, intended for an audience. Even when masquerading as an introspective work originating from the soul, ostensibly focused inward to express emotions in a context of heightened lyricism, poetry is fundamentally a conative expression. This characteristic is intrinsic to African poetry, with conative speech representing an indispensable aspect that may even be considered the ultimate purpose of the unavoidable poetic function of language. It is undeniable that elements such as rhythm, symbol, and poetic imagery, along with other aesthetic devices in verbal creation, serve as means of captivating and elevating the discourse, enabling the poet to construct a message aimed at captivating and stirring the reader. Nearly every aspect of the poem contributes to transforming it into a communication from self to other, essentially constituting second-person poetry. Conative speech, in the context of poetry, also assumes an incantatory function, a concept championed by Roman Jakobson, involving the conversion of an absent or inanimate "third person" into the recipient of a conative message. In the realm of French-speaking African poetry, conative speech holds literary, pragmatic, communicative, psychological, and cultural significance, among other dimensions. It is an indispensable component of African poetry, enhancing its illocutionary or even perlocutionary nature. Consequently, a nuanced examination of the syntax of this speech, especially its unconventional or unexpected elements

AbstractThis article interrogates the South-South internationalism of two renowned US Latinx poets: Miguel Algarín’s abjection in Morocco in his poem “Tangiers” and Sandra María Esteves’s anti-apartheid poetry for the French Art contre/against apartheid project, which included the controversial participation of Jacques Derrida. Although these poems focus on different contexts of African liberation, both react to French coloniality. For Algarín, his Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a third world alliance fails. In Esteves’s work, her poetic solidarity draws on Frantz Fanon’s experience of French colonization in Algeria but also comes into crisis when Derrida’s foreword for Art contre/against apartheid is challenged as Eurocentric. Although both engagements with African self-determination exhibit residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term is a poetic Latin-African solidarity, their South-South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American, and by extension, Latinx identities have been sidelined.

Abstract Pierre Joris discusses his literary journey from Luxembourg to Bard College to Algeria to Paris and London and finally New York. Joris focuses on his translation of Paul Celan, his engagement with the poetry of the Maghreb (culminating in his coediting of The University of California Book of North African Literature, volume 4 of Poems for the Millennium), and the importance of French poet Edmond Jabès. He goes on to address his choice to write in his fourth language, English, and the formative readings of American poetry and his connection to some of the New American Poets of the generation older than him. In the course of the interview, Joris discusses his sense of a nomadic community—or perhaps better to say “negative” or “inoperable” community. Throughout, he comes back to his commitments to writing poetry and to translation as the core the practice of poetry.

The background and genesis of Hubert du Plessis’s German and French songs On 7 June 2002 the South African composer Hubert du Plessis turned 80. Among his 77 art songs there are (apart from songs in Afrikaans, Dutch and English) eleven on German texts and one on a French text. The aim of this article is to investigate the genesis of these German and French songs. Du Plessis was influenced by his second cousin, the Afrikaans poet Barend J. Toerien, who lived in the same residence as Du Plessis at the University of Stellenbosch where they studied in the early 1940s. Toerien introduced Du Plessis to the work of Rilke, of whose poetry Du Plessis later set to music “Herbst”. Du Plessis’s ten Morgenstern songs were inspired by a chance gift of a Morgenstern volume from Susanne Stark-Schwietering, a student in Grahamstown where Du Plessis taught at Rhodes University College (1944-1951). During his studies in London (1951-1954) Du Plessis also received a volume of Morgenstern poetry from Howard Ferguson in 1951. The choice of French verses from Solomon’s Song of Songs was influenced by the advice of Hilda de Wet (Stellenbosch, 1966). It is notable that Du Plessis’s main composition teachers, William Bell, Friedrich Hartmann and Alan Bush, had practically no influence on the choice of the texts of his German and French songs.

In his efforts to communicate his research on African “tradition”—more specifically oral texts—Hampâté Bâ was faced with a choice of languages and alphabets. Much of his work appeared only in French, the language of his main formal education and administrative training. In collaboration with several French colonial scholar-administrators (Henri Gaden, Colonel R. Figaret, and Gilbert Vieillard) Hampâté Bâ eventually developed a system for writing his native Fulfulde in Roman characters. However for his own Fulfulde religious poetry (“mes seules oeuvres de ‘creation’”), Hampâté Bâ used Ajami (Arabic letters representing non-Arabic languages), a writing system that he also promoted as a medium of wider Fulbe literacy.

As an alternative to a model of world literature complicit with global capitalism and its ecological destruction, critics have proposed the ‘planetary turn’ to name the emergence of a mode of thinking capable of accommodating both social and ecological diversity. Global relationality in this context is understood not only as connectivity between different cultures but also that between the human and the non-human, and emphasizes not only cultural differences and interactions but also our deep embeddedness in and reliance on the ecological environment. Planetary thinking champions the dynamic entanglement between manifold peoples and cultures at the same time as it insists on the connections between the human and the physical world. This article focuses on the ways in which francophone postcolonial North African poetry also betrays a peculiar attentiveness at once to cultural hybridization and to the riches of the ecological landscape. The Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi and the Tunisian Tahar Bekri are contemporary writers whose poetry has combined, over the last forty years or so, a passion for multilingualism and cultural exchange with a fascination with the singular plant life they discover at home and abroad. Both use both French and Arabic, though most of their work is in French, and write against the forces of oppression left by the legacies of colonialism in part by celebrating transculturality. Both also evoke a form of intimate communion with the ecological environment, and portray it as a force with agency in order to condemn the history of ecological destruction. Their ‘ecocosmopolitan’ poetry in this way proposes a salutary communality that responds in far-reaching ways to human mastery and oppression as it acts both on cultural difference and on the delicate ecology of planet.

The review Tropiques, founded in Martinique by Aimé Césaire and colleagues in 1941, was heavily influenced by French surrealism, both for its emphasis on political liberation and its investment in primitivism and the revalorization of non-European cultures. But Tropiques's attitude to primitivism was far more ambivalent and contradictory than is usually assumed. While the editors and contributors sometimes do indeed claim to have, as Martinican intellectuals, a close identificatory connection to primitivist sensibility (and are encouraged in this by French surrealists), elsewhere their attitude to such supposed examples of primitivism as African-American poetry and Caribbean folklore is extremely distanced and rather patronizing. Moreover, their claims to an ‘authentic’ relation to primitive culture, especially where this is defined as African, are complicated by the fact that they have to rely on European ethnographic sources in order to make these claims; and the writing in Tropiques shows them grappling with this contradiction.

This paper sets out to examine the translatability of Fulani oral poetry from Northern Cameroon, especially the mbooku genre, in a literary perspective. The corpus is gathered from selected oral poems that were transcribed and translated into German, English and French by different translators. The study reveals that it is possible to translate Fulani poems into European languages so that the target texts perform the same literary functions as the source texts, in spite of linguistic and cultural difficulties that occur during the transfer process. Thus, the author proposes a retranslation in which the content meets the form, taking into account some patterns of European modern poetry. He therefore advocates for retranslations of these poems from a purely literary perspective and would like to see translation studies focus more on the primary source of African orality.

Many Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands have a common history of French and British colonization, where a Creole language developed from the contact of different colonial and African/ Indian languages. In the process, African languages died, making place for a language which retained close lexical links to the colonizer’s tongue. This paper presents the case of Mauritian Creole, a language that emerged out of a colonial context and which is now the mother tongue of 70% of Mauritians, across different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. It pinpoints the residual colonial ideologies in the language and looks at some creative practices, focusing on its oral and scribal aspects, to formulate a ‘decolonial aesthetics’ (Mignolo, 2009). In stressing the séga angazé (protest songs) and poetry in Mauritian Creole in the history of resistance to colonization, it argues that the language is, potentially, a carrier of decolonial knowledges.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a state of being in-between in Klara du Plessis’s debut poetry collection, Ekke (2018). This in-between state has implications for how identity, place and visual art feature in the collection. Ekke contains fragments of German and French, but consists mainly of English interspersed with Afrikaans. The creation of meaning through this linguistic slippage reflects the idea of identity as always in-process that comes to the fore throughout the collection. Ekke also represents an intervention in South African urban literature, as Bloemfontein, a city not much featured in literature, is represented in several poems. In these poems, the poet/speaker struggles to situate Bloemfontein and its surrounding areas’ histories and symbolism in the transnational networks that she is a part of. The conception of identity and language being constantly in-progress is also conveyed in the collection’s poems about visual art. In these poems, meaning is created through the interaction of language with visual art, a process the poet calls ‘intervisuality’. Keywords: transnationalism, transnational identity, translingualism, multilingual poetry, Klara du Plessis, Bloemfontein in literature, ekphrasis.

The study aims to present a comprehensive analysis of the North African Judeo-Arabic dialects in their internal diversity and in their communal use in daily interaction as well as in specialized genres of oral and written discourse. Internal diversity pertains to the various daily and elaborated genres of discourse and types of texts that developed in Jewish communities from the sixteenth century, generating different lects, polylects, and archilects in poetry, in journalism, and in daily interaction; combinations of lects constitute the repertories of three distinct communal sociolects: rabbinic, males,’ and females’ sociolects. Internal diversity also includes the changing linguistic Arabic matrix and the external components it integrated and which hybridized the dialects: Hebrew-Aramaic, Berber, Turkish, and Romance (Castilian, Portuguese, Italian, French). Three oral texts illustrating various Judeo-Arabic lects are presented and discussed.

Abstract The aim of this article is to examine the narrative elements of the manuscript commentary, in Castilian and Latin script, on the work of one of the few Morisco poets in exile whose name is known to us. Ibrahim de Bolfad, who was living in Algiers at the time, was the author of quintils on the foundations of Islam, the life of the Prophet, the divine attributes, and the major tenets of Islamic theology. Preserved in the National Library of Spain (BNE : 9653), the manuscript in which the commentary on his poetry was written is thought to be the work of a Morisco exiled in Tunis. This study explores the narrative dimension of the two texts, in order to highlight the construction of a metanarrative around Morisco identity in North African exile. As part of this research, we are particularly interested in the way in which this narrative activity was conducted in Castilian in seventeenth-century Algeria. Finally, we propose a French translation of the 114 quintils, collected here as a single text.

The article presents the information about the documents on the history of Russia stored at the Humanities Research Center at Texas State University at Austin (USA). The Harry Ransom Center for humanitarian studies owns an extensive collection of the documents received from individuals (free of charge or on a reimbursable basis) in the form of collections, funds, scattered documents, books, art objects from across Europe and America. The archive accepts for keeping not only the documents, but also the works of fund-makers. Visitors to the archive have an opportunity to conduct research in various fields of humanitarian knowledge: from the English dramatic poetry of the 17th century to the works of modern African novelists, from the modern French musical compositions to the Italian poetry of the 13th century. The Humanities Research Center has also collected a set of documents on Russian history, literature, music, and painting. The information on the history of Russia is contained in the diaries, letters, memoirs of Russian emigrants and American citizens. The most extensive part of the collection consists of the letters discussing the organization of political movements in the emigration environment, the issues of everyday life, the matters connected with moving from Europe to the United States. The documentary complex also includes the sketches of theatrical costumes and scenery, music score manuscripts, the photographs of the Russian artists, composers, actors who left Soviet Russia in 1918–1925. The chronological framework of the documentary complex covers the period from the First World War to the beginning of the Thaw period.

Translated Arabic Literature as a window to Foreign Mentalities: On the problem of the reception of foreign-cultural literature This article is concerned with the structure of hermeneutic understanding in order to "guarantee within cultural traditions a possible action-oriented self-understanding of individuals and groups and a reciprocal foreign understanding of other individuals and other groups through translated literary texts. Through this study, it can be stated that regional knowledge. i.e. knowledge of the historical, political, economic, and cultural peculiarities of a people cannot express the "spiritual body of a nation's inner history". In order to achieve this, i.e. to make the mentality of a foreign culture recognizable, in the sense of v. Eichendorff's poetry. in our case, the literature of a people in which ways of thinking and feelings, thought content, and emotional content are congealed in contemporary North African literature. To provide such guidance. At the same time, it opens the view for certain deficits of the recipient, which have to be compensated if one does not want to remain on the surface of the foreign culture. In oriental countries, this includes the necessary knowledge of the basics of Islam and knowledge of myths and rites, which have become the language of fairy tales in particular. because the religious and the folk and superstition are the forces that motivate the everyday life of oriental peoples, which cause their life motivation. Such active forces always flavor the literature of peoples However, contemporary North African literature is not just a literature of self-expression by its authors. an attempt to find oneself spiritually at home, it is also a window on literature in the sense of Karl Dedecius, the main addressee of which is not only the local reader but above all the Foreigners, the Europeans, the French or the Spaniards, who often even provided the authors with the language and in whose language area many of the North African authors also live. So they produce their literature not only with a view to their own memories and experiences with their homeland but also with a view to the foreign country in which they live. their own memories and experiences with their homeland, but also with a view to the foreign country in which they live

This is the first work of criticism to read Abdelwahab Meddeb as a poet. Selfconsciously indeterminate from philosophical and poetic perspectives, Meddeb's poetry is indebted to European, especially French, high poetic modernism; to the French literary turn to the United States; and to the author's desire to be read in the lineage of the major Sufi poets of classical Arabic literature. Turning his back on the hegemony of postcolonial literary prose with the 1987 chapbook Tombeau d'Ibn Arabi, Meddeb generates a new francophone lyric infused with the Sufi traditions of al-Andalus, North Africa, and the Near and Middle Easts. His new lyric rewrites itself as a Sufi consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state, and his tonguing of the new francophone lyric leads us to a long overdue analytical paradigm.

Correcting the early Manichean interpretation of the abundant Baudelairian image of the black, later criticism tends to downplay the realist slavery framework and put emphasis on the psychological and philosophical dimension of the relationship between the master and the slave. My historicized analysis of “A une dame créole” uncovers evocations of slavery, violence and revolution in the vocabulary and imagery of the poem. By inscribing into the Ronsardian tradition a former French slave colony whose ruling elite never embraced revolutionary ideas, I argue, the poem puts the colonial enterprise into the perspective of France’s nation building and problematizes both. The 1863 prose poem “La belle Dorothée” in which Baudelaire refers back again to his experience in the Mascarene Islands, exposes the crude nature of the French policy that pretended to give the slaves freedom while forced them to live in idleness, poverty or prostitution. If Baudelaire’s oft discussed exoticism manifests a rejection of the society of his time, his longing for Africa and the Indian Ocean should not be dismissed as escapism.

Among the writers of his generation, Alecsandri is the most comprehensive one, expressing not only the patriotic aspirations and desires, but also the discoveries from the universe of the private life and trying to make himself noticed in almost all the main literary genres and species. By different circumstances, Alecsandri gets to travel through Moldavia, Wallachia, Bucovina and Transylvania, to the European part of Turkey, to Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Great Britain, North of Africa, either for personal pleasure, to accompany Elena Negri, who was trying to find a more favourable climate for her fragile health, or for official business. All these travels and each of them separately are part of the development of his creation, leaving marks in his fiction and poetry and “it is printed on the screen of the human experience which defines his public and private personality”. In one of these travels, Alecsandri will discover the folk poetry, discovery which will profoundly mark his destiny as a writer and it will also have immeasurable consequences on the entire development of the Romanian literature from the last century, but also from the years to follow. As a result of the translations into French, German and English of the folk poems or of some of his original poems, Alecsandri becomes one of our first modern writers who became famous also abroad, being accessible to the foreign world.

Refracted Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry and George Seferis’ poem ‘Upon a Line of Foreign Verse’The term ‘refracted’ describes instances where Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry is mediated through one or more intertexts, like Italian-Latin or French-Latin. After treating briefly Dionysios Solomos’ poem ‘The Shade of Homer’ (1821-1822) the paper focuses on George Seferis’ ‘Reflections on a Foreign Line of Verse’ (1931). Each of the two poets claims the Homeric heritage for himself as a Greek poet through a poem that constitutes a refracted reception of Homer. The former opens a chain of three literary windows one after the other: first the appearance of Homer to the character Ennius in Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa; next Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’; and finally the appearance of Homer to the Latin poet Ennius, who in the proem of his Annals represented himself as a reincarnation of the Greek poet. In responding to Solomos about a hundred years later Seferis treated the subject of Homeric Odysseus’ sea wanderings by commenting on ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage’, the opening line of Joachim du Bellay’s famous sonnet XXXI of the collection Les regrets (1558). Most probably Bellay reached back to Homeric Odysseus through a passage of Ovid’s collection of elegies written in exile and entitled Ex ponto. Ovid conceived his banishment from Rome to a region of modern Romania as the analogue of Odysseus’ wanderings away from Ithaca and became a source of inspiration for Du Bellay and other poets.

Emergence of a Literary Genre: French-Language Sub-Saharan Poetry from The Aftermath of the Second World War to Independence ABSTRACT: Poetry emerged in the late 1940s in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar as a literary genre consecrated by anthologies highlighting the quality of authors and their works. If the figure of the Senegalese poet Leopold Sédar Senghor, one of the founders of the Negritude movement, was essential and decisive, pioneers of the genre, like the Senegalese Birago Diop, the Malagasy Rabearivelo, Rabemananjara and Rainovo, were able to fix culturalist and heritage inspirations. This inaugural poetry was not always attuned to reality, precisely to the colonial situation, sometimes marking a break with present history. A new generation arose in the 1950s, renewing poetic writing and its political orientation. The poetic itineraries and anti-colonial commitments of the Senegalese David Diop, the Cameroonian Ruben Um Nyobé and the Guinean Keita Fodéba introduce an evolution of the genre, both stylistically and thematically. RÉSUMÉ : La poésie émerge, vers la fin des années 1940, en Afrique subsaharienne et à Madagascar comme un genre littéraire consacré par des anthologies mettant en évidence la qualité des auteurs et de leurs œuvres. Si la figure du poète sénégalais Léopold Sédar Senghor, un des fondateurs du mouvement de la Négritude, fut essentielle et déterminante, des pionniers du genre, à l’instar du Sénégalais Birago Diop, des Malgaches Rabearivelo, Rabemananjara et Rainovo, ont pu en fixer des inspirations culturalistes et patrimoniales. Cette poésie inaugurale ne fut pas toujours accordée au réel, précisément à la situation coloniale, marquant parfois une rupture d’avec l’Histoire présente. Une nouvelle génération se lève dans les années 1950, renouvelant l’écriture poétique et son orientation politique. Les itinéraires poétiques et les engagements anticoloniaux du Sénégalais David Diop, du Camerounais Ruben Um Nyobé et du Guinéen Keita Fodéba introduisent une évolution du genre, autant stylistique que thématique.

Background. Choral work of American composers of the second half of the XX century is characterized by new qualities that have appeared because of not only musical but also non-musical factors generated by the system of cultural, historical and social conditions. Despite of a serious amount of scientific literature on the history of American music, the choral layer of American music remains partially unexplored, especially, in Ukrainian musical science, that bespeaks the science and practical novelty of the research results. The purpose of this study is to discover and to analyze the peculiarities of the historical formation and identity of American choral art of the second half of the twentieth century using the the works of famous American artists as examples. The research methodology is based on theoretical, historical and analytical methods, generalization and specification. Results. The general picture of the development of American composers’ practice in the genre of choral music is characterized by genre and style diversity. In our research we present portraits of iconic figures of American choral music in the period under consideration. So, the choral works of William Dawson (1899–1990), one of the most famous African-American composers, are characterized by the richness of the choral texture, intense sonority and demonstration of his great understanding of the vocal potential of the choir. Dawson was remembered, especially, for the numerous arrangements of spirituals, which do not lose their popularity. Aaron Copland (1899–1990), which was called “the Dean of American Composers”, was one of the founder of American music “classical” style, whose name associated with the America image in music. Despite the fact that the composer tends to atonalism, impressionism, jazz, constantly uses in his choral opuses sharp dissonant sounds and timbre contrasts, his choral works associated with folk traditions, written in a style that the composer himself called “vernacular”, which is characterized by a clearer and more melodic language. Among Copland’s famous choral works are “At The River”, “Four Motets”, “In the Beginning”, “Lark”, “The Promise of Living”; “Stomp Your Foot” (from “The Tender Land”), “Simple Gifts”, “Zion’s Walls” and others. Dominick Argento’s (1927–2019) style is close to the style of an Italian composer G. C. Menotti. Argento’s musical style, first of all, distinguishes the dominance of melody, so he is a leading composer in the genre of lyrical opera. Argento’s choral works are distinguished by a variety of performers’ stuff: from a cappella choral pieces – “A Nation of Cowslips”, “Easter Day” for mixed choir – to large-scale works accompanied by various instruments: “Apollo in Cambridge”, “Odi et Amo”, “Jonah and the Whale”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Te Deum”, “Tria Carmina Paschalia”, “Walden Pond”. For the choir and percussion, Argento created “Odi et Amo” (“I Hate and I Love”), 1981, based on the texts of the ancient Roman poet Catullus, which testifies to the sophistication of the composer’s literary taste and his skill in reproducing complex psychological states. The most famous from Argento’s spiritual compositions is “Te Deum” (1988), where the Latin text is combined with medieval English folk poetry, was recorded and nominated for a Grammy Award. Among the works of Samuel Barber’s (1910–1981) vocal and choral music were dominating. His cantata “Prayers of Kierkegaard”, based on the lyrics of four prayers by this Danish philosopher and theologian, for solo soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra is an example of an eclectic trend. Chapter I “Thou Who art unchangeable” traces the imitation of a traditional Gregorian male choral singing a cappella. Chapter II “Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered all lifelong” for solo soprano accompanied by oboe solo is an example of minimalism. Chapter III “Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou” reflects the traditions of Russian choral writing. William Schumann (1910–1992) stands among the most honorable and prominent American composers. In 1943, he received the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for Cantata No 2 “A Free Song”, based on lyrics from the poems by Walt Whitman. In his choral works, Schumann emphasized the lyrics of American poetry. Norman Luboff (1917–1987), the founder and conductor of one of the leading American choirs in the 1950–1970s, is one of the great American musicians who dared to dedicate most of their lives to the popular media cultures of the time. Holiday albums of Christmas Songs with the Norman Luboff Choir have been bestselling for many years. In 1961, Norman Luboff Choir received the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus. Luboff’s productive work on folk song arrangements, which helped to preserve these popular melodies from generation to generation, is considered to be his main heritage. The choral work by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) – a great musician – composer, pianist, brilliant conductor – is represented by such works as “Chichester Psalms”, “Hashkiveinu”, “Kaddish” Symphony No 3)”,”The Lark (French & Latin Choruses)”, “Make Our Garden Grow (from Candide)”, “Mass”. “Chichester Psalms”, where the choir sings lyrics in Hebrew, became Bernstein’s most famous choral work and one of the most successfully performed choral masterpieces in America. An equally popular composition by Bernstein is “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”, which was dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, the stage drama written in the style of a musical about American youth in searching of the Lord. More than 200 singers, actors, dancers, musicians of two orchestras, three choirs are involved in the performance of “Mass”: a four-part mixed “street” choir, a four-part mixed academic choir and a two-part boys’ choir. The eclecticism of the music in the “Mass” shows the versatility of the composer’s work. The composer skillfully mixes Latin texts with English poetry, Broadway musical with rock, jazz and avant-garde music. Choral cycles by Conrad Susa (1935–2013), whose entire creative life was focused on vocal and dramatic music, are written along a story line or related thematically. Bright examples of his work are “Landscapes and Silly Songs” and “Hymns for the Amusement of Children”; the last cycle is an fascinating staging of Christopher Smart’s poetry (the18 century). The composer’s music is based on a synthesis of tonal basis, baroque counterpoint, polyphony and many modern techniques and idioms drawn from popular music. The cycle “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, created by a composer and a pianist William Bolcom (b. 1938) on the similar-titled poems by W. Blake, represents musical styles from romantic to modern, from country to rock. More than 200 vocalists take part in the performance of this work, in academic choruses (mixed, children’s choirs) and as soloists; as well as country, rock and folk singers, and the orchestral musicians. This composition successfully synthesizes an impressive range of musical styles: reggae, classical music, western, rock, opera and other styles. Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) was named “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts (2006). The musical language of Lauridsen’s compositions is very diverse: in his Latin sacred works, such as “Lux Aeterna” and “Motets”, he often refers to Gregorian chant, polyphonic techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and mixes them with modern sound. Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” is a striking example of the organic synthesis of the old and the new traditions, or more precisely, the presentation of the old in a new way. At the same time, his other compositions, such as “Madrigali” and “Cuatro Canciones”, are chromatic or atonal, addressing us to the technique of the Renaissance and the style of postmodernism. Conclusions. Analysis of the choral work of American composers proves the idea of moving the meaningful centers of professional choral music, the gradual disappearance of the contrast, which had previously existed between consumer audiences, the convergence of positions of “third direction” music and professional choral music. In the context of globalization of society and media culture, genre and stylistic content, spiritual meanings of choral works gradually tend to acquire new features such as interaction of ancient and modern musical systems, traditional and new, modified folklore and pop. There is a tendency to use pop instruments or some stylistic components of jazz, such as rhythm and intonation formula, in choral compositions. Innovative processes, metamorphosis and transformations in modern American choral music reveal its integration specificity, which is defined by meta-language, which is formed basing on interaction and dialogue of different types of thinking and musical systems, expansion of the musical sound environment, enrichment of acoustic possibilities of choral music, globalization intentions. Thus, the actualization of new cultural dominants and the synthesis of various stylistic origins determine the specificity of American choral music.

Stephen Greenblatt has shown that wonder was the central characteristic of the first European encounters with the New World and the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the face of radical difference (Greenblatt 1994:27). Wonder, says Greenblatt, appears to be a category immune to all denial and ideological co-optation, and it exerts an irresistible force. It occurs in a moment when meanings are lacking and is accompanied by the fragmentation of contextual understanding (Greenblatt 1994:33).Wonder was already an essential topic of discourses in philosophy and art even before the voyages of discovery (Matuschek 1991); thus, for Socrates, philosophy begins with astonishment and wonder, and the art of poetry intends the creation of the wondrous (Greenblatt 1994:33). Greenblatt argues that the frequency and intensity with which European discoverers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries referred to the experience of the wondrous provoked its conceptual elucidation (Greenlbatt 1994:34). The colonization of the wondrous began; and astonishment became a means of appropriation and subjugation (Greenblatt 1994:42).By the nineteenth century, the century of European journeys of discovery in Africa, wonder had been used up. English, French, and German travelers no longer wondered about anything. Their glance had achieved a confidence that allowed them to objectify and take possession of what was foreign to them. It was now the various Others, the objects of their glance, to whom they imputed the wonder they themselves were no longer capable of.

1) Congreso/Congress: University of Rome "Roma Tre" (Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures). International Conference: Terms and Terminology in the European Context, 23-24 October 2014 (Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Via del Valco San Paolo, 19, Rome – ITALY). For queries regarding the congress please contact: ttec.roma3@gmail.com 2) Congreso/Congress: “XI Congreso Traducción, Texto e Interferencias” (UNIA, Baeza) Call for papers until 30 June 2014: http://www.uco.es/congresotraduccion/index.php?sec=home 3) Taller/Workshop: 4th International Workshop on Computational Terminology, CompuTerm 2014, COLING 2014 Workshop, 23rd or 24th August 2014, Dublin, Ireland, http://perso.limsi.fr/hamon/Computerm2014/ Submissions should follow the COLING 2014 instruction for authors (http://www.coling-2014.org/call-for-papers.php) and be formatted using the COLING 2014 stylefiles for latex, MS Word or LibreOffice (http://www.coling-2014.org/doc/coling2014.zip), with blind review and not exceeding 8 pages plus two extra pages for references. The PDF files will be submitted electronically at https://www.softconf.com/coling2014/WS-9/ 4) Congreso/Congress: 34th TRANSLATOR’S WEEK, 1st INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION SYMPOSIUM (SIT), São Paulo State University (Unesp), September 22-26, 2014, São José do Rio Preto (Brazil). The official languages of the event are Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian and French. Contact: Angélica (Comisión Organizadora), angelica@ibilce.unesp.br 5) Congreso/Congress: Cardiff University Postgraduate Conference, 27 May 14: “The Translator: Competence, Credentials, Creativity”. Keynote speaker: Professor Theo Hermans (UCL).The event is kindly supported by the University Graduate College and the European School of Languages, Politics and Translation. For queries, please contact the.translator.pg.conference@gmail.com. 6) Congreso/Congress: International Conference, 3rd T&R (Theories & Realities in Translation & wRiting) Forum. Organized by the University of Western Brittany, Brest (FRANCE), in collaboration with KU Leuven/Thomas More (Campus Antwerpen, BELGIUM), with the support of AFFUMT (Association française des formations universitaires aux métiers de la traduction) and the participation of Università Suor Orsola Benincasa (Naples, ITALY): “Traduire/écrire la science aujourd’hui - Translating/Writing Science Today” Please submit an abstract of approximately 300 words by 15 June 2014 to Jean-Yves Le Disez (jean-yves.ledisez@univ-brest.fr, Joanna Thornborrow joanna.thornborrow@univ-brest.fr and Winibert Segers (Winibert.Segers@kuleuven.be). For more information on previous events and the forthcoming conference : http://www.univ-brest.fr/TR, http://www.lessius.eu/TNR 7) Congreso/Congress: “The International Conference of Journals and Translation”, Jinan University, Guangzhou, CHINA, on 28-29 June 2014. The conference is hosted by the School of Foreign Studies, Jinan University, Guangzhou, CHINA. The official languages of the conference are English and Chinese. Contact information: Yan, Fangming（颜方明86-13751750040; Li, Zhiyu（李知宇86-13824451625. 8) Congreso/Conference: PACTE Group is organising two events on the subject of the didactics of translation. These events will be held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (SPAIN) in July 2014. SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH INTO THE DIDACTICS OF TRANSLATION (8-9 July 2014). SECOND SPECIALIST SEMINAR ON THE DIDACTICS OF TRANSLATION (7 July 2014). Further information about the conference and the seminar: http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/pacte/en/content/didtrad-2014 9) Simposio/Symposium: “Translation in Music” Symposium, held on 25-26 May 2014, and co-organized by the European School of Languages, Politics and Translation (Cardiff University). Please see the following website for details: www.cardiff.ac.uk/music/translationinmusic 10) Revistas/Journals: “The Journal of Intercultural Communication and Mediation”, “CULTUS Journal” www.cultusjournal.com Next Issue: Cultus7 : “Transcreation and the Professions” Call for papers (Issue 7, 2014): 9th June. Submission info at: www.cultusjournal.com Contact: David Katan, Interlinguistic Mediation/Translation and Interpretation Department of Humanities, University of the Salento (Lecce), via Taranto 35 - 73100 Lecce (ITALY), tel.+39 0832/294111. 11) Revistas/Journals: Invitation for Submissions (Vol. 3, 2014): Translation Spaces: A multidisciplinary, multimedia, and multilingual journal of translation, published annually by John Benjamins Publishing Company. Please consult our guidelines, and submit all manuscripts through the online submission and manuscript tracking site, indicating for which track and Board member the manuscript is to be addressed: (1) Translation, Globalization, and Communication Technology (Frank Austermühl); (2) Translation, Information, Culture, and Society (Gregory M. Shreve); (3) Translation, Government, Law and Policy (Michael Geist); (4) Translation, Computation, and Information (Sharon O’Brien); (5) Translation and Entertainment (Minako O’Hagan); (6) Translation, Commerce, and Economy (Keiran J. Dunne); and (7) Translation as an Object of Study (Ricardo Muñoz Martín). 12) Revistas/Journals: PR for Linguistica The editorial board of the peer reviewed journal Linguistica Antverpiensia NS-Themes in Translation Studies is happy to announce the launch of its new Open Journal format. LANS-TTS published 11 annual issues devoted to current themes in Translation Studies between 2002 and 2012, and will continue to publish annually on selected TS themes, but in open access, and can be downloaded from: ‪https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be Its first digital issue is entitled “Research models and methods in legal translation”. It has been guest edited by Łucja Biel (University of Warsaw, POLAND) & Jan Engberg (Aarhus University, DENMARK). 13) Revistas/Journals: CALL FOR PAPERS The Yearbook of Phraseology would like to invite you to submit papers on the relationship between phraseology and translation. The Yearbook of Phraseology is published by Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin, Boston) and has already been indexed by many scientific databases. It has recently been added to the MLA International Bibliography. Our editorial board includes reknown linguists such as Dmitrij Dobrovol’kij (Moscow), Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton), Sylviane Granger (Louvain), Wolfgang Mieder (Vermont), Alison Wray (Cardiff) and others. We have also been able to rely on international experts for reviewing our submissions: Igor Mel’cuk, Doug Biber, Uli Heid, Barbara Wotjak, etc. The web page of the journal is: http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/42771 For more information, please contact: Dr. Jean-Pierre Colson (Institut Marie Haps / Université catholique de Louvain), Yearbook of Phraseology / Editor. 14) Libros/Books: Peter Lang Oxford invites proposals for the book series: New Trends in Translation Studies (www.peterlang.com?newtrans). Series Editor: Jorge Díaz-Cintas (Director), Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS), University College London (UK). Advisory Board: Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick, UK Lynne Bowker, University of Ottawa, Canada Frederic Chaume, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain Aline Remael, Artesis University College Antwerp, Belgium This series is based at the Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS), University College London (www.ucl.ac.uk/centras). For more information, please contact Dr. Laurel Plapp, Commissioning Editor, Peter Lang Oxford, 52 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LU (UK). Email: l.plapp@peterlang.com. Tel: 01865 514160. 15) Libros/Books: New book: Transfiction. Research into the realities of translation fiction, edited by Klaus Kaindl & Karlhienz Spitzl, Series: Benjamins Translation Library (BTL 110), ISSN: 0929-7316 16) Libros/Books: New book on classical Chinese literature and translation: CHAN, KELLY K.Y.: Ambivalence in poetry: Zhu Shuzhen, a classical Chinese poetess? http://www.amazon.com/Ambivalence-poetry-Shuzhen-classical-Chinese/dp/3639700791 17) Libros/Books: Nueva publicación de TRAMA: MARTÍ FERRIOL, JOSÉ LUIS: El método de traducción: doblaje y subtitulación frente a frente www.tenda.uji.es/pls/www/!GCPPA00.GCPPR0002?lg=CA&isbn=978-84-8021-940-2 18) Libros/Books: Piotr de Bończa Bukowski & Magda Heydel (Eds.), Anthology of Polish Translation Studies, published in Kraków (POLAND). For further details : http://www.wuj.pl/page,produkt,prodid,2184,strona,Polska_mysl_przekladoznawcza,katid,126.html. 19) Libros/Books: Nuevo libro: Nicolas Froeliger: Les noces de l’analogique et du numérique, París: Les Belles Lettres, 2014. 20) Libros/Books: New book on the reception of Italian Literature in Spain: CAMPS, Assumpta (2014). Traducción y recepción de la literatura italiana en España. Barcelona: Edicions UB. 21) Libros/Books: New book on the reception of Italian Literature in Spain: CAMPS, Assumpta (2014). Italia en la prensa periódica durante el franquismo. Barcelona: Edicions UB. 22) Cursos de verano/Summer Courses: EMUNI Ibn Tibbon Translation Studies Summer School, June 2014. Application is now open for the Ibn Tibbon Translation Studies Doctoral and Teacher Training Summer School, organized by University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Boğaziçi University (Turkey), University of Turku and University of East Finland (Finland), University of Granada (Spain), and to be held at the University of Granada (Spain) in June 2014. The School is open to doctoral students, teachers of translation at the MA level, and other academics and professionals who are involved in research in Translation Studies. For more information, please visit: http://www.prevajalstvo.net/emuni-doctoral-summer-school http://tradinter.ugr.es/pages/emuni Or contact: emuni_summerschool@ugr.es 23) Cursos de verano/Summer Courses: Intensive Summer Course in Translation Technology, held by the Centre for Translation Studies at UCL, London (UK), in August 2014. This is open to professionals and teachers as well as students. Application deadline: 23rd May 2014 For more information, visit : www.ucl.ac.uk/centras/prof-courses/summer-translation/translation-tech-intensive To apply for a place, email Lindsay Bywood: lindsay.bywood.13@ucl.ac.uk 24) Cursos de verano/Summer Courses: The Nida School of Translation Studies 2014 Call for participants: The Nida School of Translation Studies ,2014 May 26 – June 6, 2014 San Pellegrino University Foundation Campus Misano Adriatico (Rimini), Italy “Translation as Interpretation” This year marks the Nida School’s eighth year of advancing research and providing specialized training in translation studies through a transdisciplinary approach that incorporates a focus on religious discourse. NSTS is seeking engaged scholars and qualified professionals looking to expand their skills, engage with peers, and explore the interface of practice and cutting edge theory. The NSTS 2014 Associate Application form may be found here: https://secure.jotform.us/mhemenway/nsts2014app. For more information on the 2014 session or to apply, go to http://nsts.fusp.it/nida-schools/nsts-2014, or contact Dr. Roy E. Ciampa at roy.ciampa@fusp.it. 25) Cursos de verano/Summer Courses: POSTCOLONIAL TRANSLATION STUDIES AND BEYOND: RESEARCHING TRANSLATION IN AFRICA - SUMMER SCHOOL FOR TRANSLATION STUDIES IN AFRICA The Departments of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State, Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of Stellenbosch and Literature and Language at the University of Zambia, in cooperation with IATIS, are presenting the Third Summer School for Translation Studies (SSTSA) in Africa from 18 to 22 August 2014. The hosts are the University of Zambia in Lusaka. SSTSA 2014 will be followed by a regional conference hosted by IATIS at the same venue on 23 and 24 August 2014. For participants to SSTSA 2014, entry to the conference is free, provided they read a paper. For detailed information and registration forms, visit the website of the Summer School at: http://www.ufs.ac.za/SSTSA.

Africa literature in French-speaking especially in the field of poetry is represented by a famous and influential figure in his native country, Senegal. He was Léopold Sédar Senghor, African statesman and poet who led Senegal to independence in 1960 and became the country's first president. Senghor invites readers to experience an almost mystical and supersensory world in Africa.The research method used in Poème à Mon Frère Blanc poetry analysis by Léopold Sédar Senghor is a qualitative descriptive method. According to Moleong (2017: 6) qualitative research is used to understand the phenomenon of what is experienced by the research subject (author) in the form of behavior, perception, motivation, actions and others holistically by means of descriptions in the form of words and languages, a special natural context and utilizing various natural methods.The poem 'Poème à Mon Frère Blanc' by Léopold Sédar Senghor raises the theme about racism, namely the difference between 'black people' and 'white people' which are poured in every lyrics and words that are so enticing and critical of what has been afflicting African people who are referred to as 'colored people' in the sense of 'degrading' by white people

Abstract This article examines the literary and spiritual initiatives undertaken by Henri Bosco and his collaborators, notably Captain Léopold Justinard, in interwar colonial Morocco. Focusing on the Revue Aguedal, inaugurated by Bosco in Rabat in 1935, I highlight the revue's primary role as a cultural conduit between French and indigenous Amazigh and Arab intellectuals. Bosco's concept of a “poetic church,” championed by contributors such as René Guénon and Ahmed Sefriou, sought to document, safeguard, and translate Amazigh and North African literature. Although the Aguedal literary project experienced interruptions during World War II, it accentuated indigenous perspectives through sections like “Propos du Chleuh,” overseen by Justinard. I also underscore Bosco's simultaneous advocacy for French culture, challenging stereotypical colonial narratives while amplifying Amazigh voices within them. Despite financial challenges leading to the revue's demise after the war, the literary circle fostered enduring literary relationships and left an indelible mark on the nexus of colonial scholarship, literature, and spirituality.

Und die Hunde schwiegen is the German version of Aimé Césaire’s first play, Et les chiens se taisaient, first published in the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses. Césaire reworked the text several times, especially through his collaboration with Janheinz Jahn, a German translator who played a fundamental role in the reception of Francophone African and Caribbean literature in post-war Germany. In this article, the collaboration between Césaire and his translator, which resulted in a parallel version of the text in German, will be analysed. The paths of writing and rewriting of the tragedy between French and German, thus, give us the opportunity to study the collaboration between Césaire and Jahn, as well as the proximity between rewriting and translation.

Und die Hunde schwiegen is the German version of Aimé Césaire’s first play, Et les chiens se taisaient, first published in the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses. Césaire reworked the text several times, especially through his collaboration with Janheinz Jahn, a German translator who played a fundamental role in the reception of Francophone African and Caribbean literature in post-war Germany. In this article, the collaboration between Césaire and his translator, which resulted in a parallel version of the text in German, will be analysed. The paths of writing and rewriting of the tragedy between French and German, thus, give us the opportunity to study the collaboration between Césaire and Jahn, as well as the proximity between rewriting and translation.

Abstract In 1932, Basil Bunting was lodging with the Pounds in Genoa when he first encountered a French manuscript translation of Abul-Qasem Firdausi’s classical Persian epic the Shahnameh (1010). Upon realizing that the manuscript was incomplete, Bunting decided there was ‘nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so I undertook that’. By 1942 his knowledge of Persian was good enough for the Ministry of Information to send him to Iran with the Royal Airforce, at which point he toured the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of Africa. Through these travels, and in particular his time in Iran, he discovered renewed possibilities for his personal and poetic life. His engagement with classical Persian literature over the 1940s was extensive and allowed him to eventually compose masterful translations of canonical classical Persian poets. I argue that his later translations, especially those written from 1947, demonstrate how translating Persian poetry refined Bunting’s Poundian poetics of condensation. I show that this synthesis produced formally and generically pluralistic poems that straddle multiple cultures, such as Odes 35 (1947) and 36 (1948). Through an analysis of The Spoils (1951), I explore the way in which Bunting’s own poetry was inflected by the Arabo-Persian ‘bait’ such that its literary traditions were made resonant with Anglophone ones. I then conclude by illustrating how the translations, the later odes, and The Spoils enabled him to write his irreducibly multiple magnum opus Briggflatts (1965).

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IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. 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Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

Phillip Noyce is one of Australia’s most prominent film makers—a successful feature film director with both iconic Australian narratives and many a Hollywood blockbuster under his belt. Still, his beginnings were quite humble and far from his role today when he grew up in the midst of the counterculture of the late sixties. Millions of young people his age joined the various ‘movements’ of the day after experiences that changed their lives—mostly music but also drugs or fashion. The counterculture was a turbulent time in Sydney artistic circles as elsewhere. Everything looked possible, you simply had to “Do It!”—and Noyce did. He dived head-on into these times and with a voracious appetite for its many aspects—film, theatre, rallies, music, art and politics in general. In fact he often was the driving force behind such activities. Noyce described his personal epiphany occurring in 1968: A few months before I was due to graduate from high school, […] I saw a poster on a telegraph pole advertising American 'underground' movies. There was a mesmerising, beautiful blue-coloured drawing on the poster that I later discovered had been designed by an Australian filmmaker called David Perry. The word 'underground' conjured up all sorts of delights to an eighteen-year-old in the late Sixties: in an era of censorship it promised erotica, perhaps; in an era of drug-taking it promised some clandestine place where marijuana, or even something stronger, might be consumed; in an era of confrontation between conservative parents and their affluent post-war baby-boomer children, it promised a place where one could get together with other like-minded youth and plan to undermine the establishment, which at that time seemed to be the aim of just about everyone aged under 30. (Petzke 8) What the poster referred to was a new, highly different type of film. In the US these films were usually called “underground”. This term originates from film critic Manny Farber who used it in his 1957 essay Underground Films. Farber used the label for films whose directors today would be associated with independent and art house feature films. More directly, film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to experimental films when he used the words “film which for most of its life has led an underground existence” (8). The term is used interchangeably with New American Cinema. It was based on a New York group—the Film-Makers’ Co-operative—that started in 1960 with mostly low-budget filmmakers under the guidance of Jonas Mekas. When in 1962 the group was formally organised as a means for new, improved ways of distributing their works, experimental filmmakers were the dominant faction. They were filmmakers working in a more artistic vein, slightly influenced by the European Avant-garde of the 1920s and by attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In film history, this era is also known as the Third Avant-garde. In their First Statement of the New American Cinema Group, the group drew connections to both the British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague. They also claimed that contemporary cinema was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring” (80). An all-encompassing definition of Underground Film never was available. Sheldon Renan lists some of the problems: There are underground films in which there is no movement and films in which there is nothing but movement. There are films about people and films about light. There are short, short underground films and long, long underground films. There are some that have been banned, and there is one that was nominated for an Academy Award. There are sexy films and sexless films, political films and poetical films, film epigrams and film epics … underground film is nothing less than an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions. (Renan 17) No wonder that propelled by frequent serious articles in the press—notably Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice—and regular screenings at other venues like the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque and the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, these films proved increasingly popular in the United States and almost immediately spread like bush fires around the world. So in early September 1968 Noyce joined a sold-out crowd at the Union Theatre in Sydney, watching 17 shorts assembled by Ubu Films, the premier experimental and underground film collective in 1960s Australia (Milesago). And on that night his whole attitude to art, his whole attitude to movies—in fact, his whole life—changed. He remembered: I left the cinema that night thinking, "I’m gonna make movies like that. I can do it." Here was a style of cinema that seemed to speak to me. It was immediate, it was direct, it was personal, and it wasn’t industrial. It was executed for personal expression, not for profit; it was individual as opposed to corporate, it was stylistically free; it seemed to require very little expenditure, innovation being the key note. It was a completely un-Hollywood-like aesthetic; it was operating on a visceral level that was often non-linear and was akin to the psychedelic images that were in vogue at the time—whether it was in music, in art or just in the patterns on your multi-coloured shirt. These movies spoke to me. (Petzke 9) Generally speaking, therefore, these films were the equivalent of counterculture in the area of film. Theodore Roszak railed against “technocracy” and underground films were just the opposite, often almost do-it-yourself in production and distribution. They were objecting to middle-class culture and values. And like counterculture they aimed at doing away with repression and to depict a utopian lifestyle feeling at ease with each imaginable form of liberality (Doggett 469). Underground films transgressed any Hollywood rule and convention in content, form and technique. Mobile hand-held cameras, narrow-gauge or outright home movies, shaky and wobbly, rapid cutting, out of focus, non-narrative, disparate continuity—you name it. This type of experimental film was used to express the individual consciousness of the “maker”—no longer calling themselves directors—a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Just as in modern visual art, both the material and the process of making became part of these artworks. Music often was a dominant factor, particularly Eastern influences or the new Beat Music that was virtually non-existent in feature films. Drug experiences were reflected in imagery and structure. Some of the first comings-out of gay men can be found as well as films that were shown at the appropriately named “Wet Dreams Festival” in Amsterdam. Noyce commented: I worked out that the leading lights in this Ubu Films seemed to be three guys — Aggy Read, Albie Thoms and David Perry […They] all had beards and […] seemed to come from the basement of a terrace house in Redfern. Watching those movies that night, picking up all this information, I was immediately seized by three great ambitions. First of all, I wanted to grow a beard; secondly, I wanted to live in a terrace house in the inner city; and thirdly, I wanted to be a filmmaker. (Ubu Films) Noyce soon discovered there were a lot of people like him who wanted to make short films for personal expression, but also as a form of nationalism. They wanted to make Australian movies. Noyce remembered: “Aggy, Albie and David encouraged everyone to go and make a film for themselves” (Petzke 11). This was easy enough to do as these films—not only in Australia—were often made for next to nothing and did not require any prior education or training. And the target audience group existed in a subculture of people willing to pay money even for extreme entertainment as long as it was advertised in an appealing way—which meant: in the way of the rampaging Zeitgeist. Noyce—smitten by the virus—would from then on regularly attend the weekly meetings organised by the young filmmakers. And in line with Jerry Rubin’s contemporary adage “Do it!” he would immediately embark on a string of films with enthusiasm and determination—qualities soon to become his trademark. All his films were experimental in nature, shot on 16mm and were so well received that Albie Thoms was convinced that Noyce had a great career ahead of him as an experimental filmmaker. Truly alternative was Noyce’s way to finally finance Better to Reign in Hell, his first film, made at age 18 and with a total budget of $600. Noyce said on reflection: I had approached some friends and told them that if they invested in my film, they could have an acting role. Unfortunately, the guy whose dad had the most money — he was a doctor’s son — was also maybe the worst actor that was ever put in front of a camera. But he had invested four hundred dollars, so I had to give him the lead. (Petzke 13) The title was taken from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). It was a film very much inspired by the images, montage and narrative techniques of the underground movies watched at Ubu. Essentially the film is about a young man’s obsession with a woman he sees repeatedly in advertising and the hallucinogenic dreams he has about her. Despite its later reputation, the film was relatively mundane. Being shot in black and white, it lacks the typical psychedelic ingredients of the time and is more reminiscent of the surrealistic precursors to underground film. Some contempt for the prevailing consumer society is thrown in for good measure. In the film, “A youth is persecuted by the haunting reappearance of a girl’s image in various commercial outlets. He finds escape from this commercial brainwashing only in his own confused sexual hallucinations” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). But despite this advertising, so convincingly capturing the “hint! hint!” mood of the time, Noyce’s first film isn’t really outstanding even in terms of experimental film. Noyce continued to make short experimental films. There was not even the pretence of a story in any of them. He was just experimenting with his gear and finding his own way to use the techniques of the underground cinema. Megan was made at Sydney University Law School to be projected as part of the law students’ revue. It was a three-minute silent film that featured a woman called Megan, who he had a crush on. Intersection was 2 minutes 44 seconds in length and shot in the middle of a five-way or four-way intersection in North Sydney. The camera was walked into the intersection and spun around in a continuous circle from the beginning of the roll of film to the end. It was an experiment with disorientation and possibly a comment about urban development. Memories was a seven-minute short in colour about childhood and the bush, accompanied by a smell-track created in the cinema by burning eucalyptus leaves. Sun lasted 90 seconds in colour and examined the pulsating winter sun by way of 100 single frame shots. And finally, Home was a one-and-a-half-minute single frame camera exploration of the filmmaker’s home, inside and out, including its inhabitants and pets. As a true experimental filmmaker, Noyce had a deep interest in technical aspects. It was recommended that Sun “be projected through a special five image lens”, Memories and Intersection with “an anamorphic lens” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). The double projection for Better to Reign in Hell and the two screens required for Good Afternoon, as well as the addition of the smell of burning leaves in Memories, were inroads into the subgenre of so-called Expanded Cinema. As filmmaking in those days was not an isolated enterprise but an integral part of the all-encompassing Counterculture, Noyce followed suit and became more and more involved and politiced. He started becoming a driving force of the movement. Besides selling Ubu News, he organised film screenings. He also wrote film articles for both Honi Soit and National U, the Sydney University and Canberra University newspapers—articles more opinionated than sophisticated. He was also involved in Ubu’s Underground Festival held in August and in other activities of the time, particularly anti-war protests. When Ubu Films went out of business after the lack of audience interest in Thoms’s long Marinetti film in 1969, Aggy Read suggested that Ubu be reinvented as a co-operative for tax reasons and because they might benefit from their stock of 250 Australian and foreign films. On 28 May 1970 the reinvention began at the first general meeting of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative where Noyce volunteered and was elected their part-time manager. He transferred the 250 prints to his parents’ home in Wahroonga where he was still living he said he “used to sit there day after day just screening those movies for myself” (Petzke 18). The Sydney University Film Society screened feature films to students at lunchtime. Noyce soon discovered they had money nobody was spending and equipment no one was using, which seemed to be made especially for him. In the university cinema he would often screen his own and other shorts from the Co-op’s library. The entry fee was 50 cents. He remembered: “If I handed out the leaflets in the morning, particularly concentrating on the fact that these films were uncensored and a little risqué, then usually there would be 600 people in the cinema […] One or two screenings per semester would usually give me all the pocket money I needed to live” (Petzke 19). Libertine and risqué films were obviously popular as they were hard to come by. Noyce said: We suffered the worst censorship of almost any Western country in the world, even worse than South Africa. Books would be seized by customs officers at the airports and when ships docked. Customs would be looking for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were very censored in literature and films and plays, and my film [Better to Reign in Hell] was banned from export. I tried to send it to a film festival in Holland and it was denied an export permit, but because it had been shot in Australia, until someone in the audience complained it could still be screened locally. (Castaway's Choice) No wonder clashes with the law happened frequently and were worn like medals of honour in those days of fighting the system, proving that one was fighting in the front line against the conservative values of law and order. Noyce encountered three brushes with the law. The first occurred when selling Ubu Films’ alternative culture newspaper Ubu News, Australia’s first underground newspaper (Milesago). One of the issues contained an advertisement—a small drawing—for Levi’s jeans, showing a guy trying to put his Levis on his head, so that his penis was showing. That was judged by the police to be obscene. Noyce was found guilty and given a suspended sentence for publishing an indecent publication. There had been another incident including Phil’s Pill, his own publication of six or eight issues. After one day reprinting some erotic poems from The Penguin Collection of Erotic Poetry he was found guilty and released on a good behaviour bond without a conviction being recorded. For the sake of historical truth it should be remembered, though, that provocation was a genuine part of the game. How else could one seriously advertise Better to Reign in Hell as “a sex-fantasy film which includes a daring rape scene”—and be surprised when the police came in after screening this “pornographic film” (Stratton 202) at the Newcastle Law Students Ball? The Newcastle incident also throws light on the fact that Noyce organised screenings wherever possible, constantly driving prints and projectors around in his Mini Minor. Likewise, he is remembered as having been extremely helpful in trying to encourage other people with their own ideas—anyone could make films and could make them about anything they liked. He helped Jan Chapman, a fellow student who became his (first) wife in December 1971, to shoot and edit Just a Little Note, a documentary about a moratorium march and a guerrilla theatre group run by their friend George Shevtsov. Noyce also helped on I Happened to Be a Girl, a documentary about four women, friends of Chapman. There is no denying that being a filmmaker was a hobby, a full-time job and an obsessive religion for Noyce. He was on the organising committee of the First Australian Filmmakers’ Festival in August 1971. He performed in the agit-prop acting troupe run by George Shevtsov (later depicted in Renegades) that featured prominently at one of Sydney’s rock festival that year. In the latter part of 1971 and early 1972 he worked on Good Afternoon, a documentary about the Combined Universities’ Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, which arguably was the first major manifestation of counterculture in Australia. For this the Aquarius Foundation—the cultural arm of the Australian Union of Students—had contracted him. This became a two-screen movie à la Woodstock. Together with Thoms, Read and Ian Stocks, in 1972 he participated in cataloguing the complete set of films in distribution by the Co-op (see Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative). As can be seen, Noyce was at home in many manifestations of the Sydney counterculture. His own films had slowly become more politicised and bent towards documentary. He even started a newsreel that he used to screen at the Filmmakers’ Cooperative Cinema with a live commentary. One in 1971, Springboks Protest, was about the demonstrations at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the South African rugby tour. There were more but Noyce doesn’t remember them and no prints seem to have survived. Renegades was a diary film; a combination of poetic images and reportage on the street demonstrations. Noyce’s experimental films had been met with interest in the—limited—audience and among publications. His more political films and particularly Good Afternoon, however, reached out to a much wider audience, now including even the undogmatic left and hard-core documentarists of the times. In exchange, and for the first time, there were opposing reactions—but as always a great discussion at the Filmmakers’ Cinema, the main venue for independent productions. This cinema began with those initial screenings at Sydney University in the union room next to the Union Theatre. But once the Experimental Film Fund started operating in 1970, more and more films were submitted for the screenings and consequently a new venue was needed. Albie Thoms started a forum in the Yellow House in Kings Cross in May 1970. Next came—at least briefly—a restaurant in Glebe before the Co-op took over a space on the top floor of the socialist Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street that was a firetrap. Bob Gould, the owner, was convinced that by first passing through his bookshop the audience would buy his books on the way upstairs. Sundays for him were otherwise dead from a commercial point of view. Noyce recollected that: The audience at this Filmmakers’ Cinema were mightily enthusiastic about seeing themselves up on the screen. And there was always a great discussion. So, generally the screenings were a huge success, with many full houses. The screenings grew from once a week, to three times on Sunday, to all weekend, and then seven days a week at several locations. One program could play in three different illegal cinemas around the city. (Petzke 26) A filmmakers’ cinema also started in Melbourne and the groups of filmmakers would visit each other and screen their respective films. But especially after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 there was a shift in interest from risqué underground films to the concept of Australian Cinema. The audience started coming now for a dose of Australian culture. Funding of all kind was soon freely available and with such a fund the film co-op was able to set up a really good licensed cinema in St. Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, running seven days a week. But, Noyce said, “the move to St. Peters Lane was sort of the end of an era, because initially the cinema was self-funded, but once it became government sponsored everything changed” (Petzke 29). With money now readily available, egotism set in and the prevailing “we”-feeling rather quickly dissipated. But by the time of this move and the resulting developments, everything for Noyce had already changed again. He had been accepted into the first intake of the Interim Australian Film & TV School, another one of the nation-awareness-building projects of the Whitlam government. He was on his “long march through the institutions”—as this was frequently called throughout Europe—that would bring him to documentaries, TV and eventually even Hollywood (and return). Noyce didn’t linger once the alternative scene started fading away. Everything those few, wild years in the counterculture had taught him also put him right on track to become one of the major players in Hollywood. He never looked back—but he remembers fondly…References Castaway’s Choice. Radio broadcast by KCRW. 1990. Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Farber, Manny. “Underground Films.” Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. Ed. Manny Farber. New York: Da Capo, 1998. 12–24. Jacobs, Lewis. “Morning for the Experimental Film”. Film Culture 19 (1959): 6–9. Milesago. “Ubu Films”. n.d. 26 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.milesago.com/visual/ubu.htm›. New American Cinema Group. “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 73–75. Petzke, Ingo. Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood. Sydney: Pan McMillan, 2004. Renan, Sheldon. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Stratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. Film Catalogue. Sydney: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, 1972. Ubu Films. Unreleased five-minute video for the promotion of Mudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. 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