Journal articles on the topic 'Aristotle Aristotle. English literature English literature English literature'

Aristotle very aptly remarks that music is the very food of soul. It is undoubtedly true when all pervasive effect of music is taken into account in all realms of life and of nature as well. Without music, we cannot imagine the very existence of Nature. In each and every aspect of nature, there is the invisible and invincible impact of music. In almost all cultures of the world, where music is an integral part of life, music has always held its dominant niche and imparted multiple dimensions and meanings to almost all aspects of life. Literature as one of the arts of expressions too cannot remain away from music as one of the elemental components.

This essay considers how some of Beckett's most important concerns are explored or expressed through his use of punctuation. Focusing on the English prose, the problems of starting and stopping, the representation of silence, and the individuation and disintegration of voices are considered. In particular it is argued that punctuation, by remembering the physical presence of absent speakers, is important to the way Beckett's writing situates itself ambiguously between the abstract and the bodily. Beckett's practice is examined through close readings, and set against a theoretical backdrop going back to Aristotle.

Abstract The Middle English ABC of Aristotle is an alliterative abecedary poem that survives in fifteen manuscript copies dating between the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The most eccentric copy, bearing the greatest number of unique textual variants, is in London, British Library, Additional 60577, a commonplace book and miscellany of verse and prose known today as the ‘Winchester Anthology’. The Winchester copy of the ABC of Aristotle is distinguished from all others by changes to vocabulary, idiom, and prosody. The result is a unique redaction, illustrating the kind of literary composition that could be expected to grow out of late medieval English grammar schools. The Winchester redaction also expresses a shift in prosodic allegiance. The traditional alliterative line is subtly reshaped into an accentual-syllabic form.

Abstract Neither in Antiquity nor in the Middle Ages could literary theory settle the debate about the primacy of inspiration or imitation, Plato or Aristotle. It was in the Renaissance that serious efforts were made to reconcile the two theories, and one of the best syntheses came from England. Philosophical and aesthetical syncretism between Plato and Aristotle makes Sidney’s Defense of Poesie a non-dogmatic and particularly inspiring foundation for English literary theory. Also, Philip Sidney’s notion of “speaking pictures” needs to be revisited, in view of the ontology and epistemology of art, as a ground-breaking model for understanding the multimediality of cultural representations. The first part of the following essay is devoted to this. Furthermore, it will be examined how Sidney’s visual poetics influenced and at the same time represented emblematic ways of seeing and thinking in Elizabethan culture. These are particularly conspicuous in the influence of emblem theory in England and in Renaissance literary practice related to that. In the final section I intend to show that Shakespeare’s intriguing, although implicit, poetics is a telling example of how Renaissance visual culture enabled a model that put equal stress on inspiration and imitation, and also on the part of the audience, whose imagination had (and still has) to work in cooperation with the author’s intention.

Frances Dolan has demonstrated that few Shakespeare comedies stage both the occurrence and intensity of physical violence to the degree that The Taming of the Shrew does. Analysis of this violence has usually focused on its effects rather than its source. Almost exclusively, anger is the cause. Admittedly it is sometimes feigned, as in Petruccio's case. But often it is not pretended but radical, as in the cases of not just Petruccio but Katherina and Grumio as well. The extremity and violence of their anger is remarkable, begging explanation. Anger is a complex phenomenon in The Shrew. In fact, Shakespeare, drawing upon Aristotle, Galen, Seneca, Bacon, and others, offers in this early comedy a veritable taxonomy of the affect. In particular, the English translation of Aristotle's Greek word for anger's mean adopted by several editors of the Nicomachean Ethics is also Shakespeare's word for anger's tempering in The Shrew. Nevertheless, the playwright ultimately begs the question of whether Katherina's and Petruccio's irascible behavior is finally or only temporarily resolved. Providing an answer proves important for whether the theater audience this couple can attain relative peace in their marriage.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how three young women of color responded with “outlaw emotions” to the novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz in a literature discussion group. This paper considers how readers respond with outlaw emotions and how responses showed emotions as sites of control and resistance. The aim of this paper is to help English language arts (ELA) teachers construct culturally sustaining literature classrooms through an encouragement of outlaw emotions. Design/methodology/approach To examine how youth responded with emotion to Aristotle and Dante, the author used humanizing and ethnographic research methodologies and conducted a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, journal entries from youth and researcher memos. Findings Analyses indicated that youth responded with outlaw emotions to Aristotle and Dante, and these responses showed how youth have both resisted and been controlled by structures of power. Youth responses of supposed “positive” or “negative” emotion were sites of control and resistance, particularly within their educational experiences. Youth engaged as a peer group to encourage and validate outlaw emotions and indirectly critiqued emotion as control. Originality/value Although many scholars have demonstrated the positive effects of out-of-school book clubs, there is scant research regarding how youth respond to culturally diverse literature with emotion, both outlaw and otherwise. Analyzing our own and characters’ outlaw emotions may help ELA educators and students deconstruct dominant ideologies about power, language and identity. This study, which demonstrates how youth responded with outlaw emotions and gave evidence of emotions as control and resistance, shows how ELA classrooms might encourage outlaw emotions as literary response. These findings suggest that ELA classrooms attempting culturally sustaining pedagogies might center youth emotion in responding to literature to critique power structures across the self, schools and society.

Abstract This paper offers an editio princeps, an English translation and a commentary of an interesting epigram on Porphyry, the commentator of Aristotle. The epigram was transcribed in Vat. Reg. 166 by Ioannes Malaxos (16th c.) and is ascribed to Petros Servilos, a poet unknown from other sources. The paper discusses the poem’s manuscript context, as well as its authorship, genre, content and function. Further, it attempts to shed light on the poem’s relation to Porphyry’s philosophy and his reception in Byzantine poetry.

This is the first English translation of a remarkable two-part lecture given by Cornelius Castoriadis at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in January 1992. The lecture features within a series on social transformation and the task of creative forms of labour. In this installment Castoriadis explores the significance of art through a creative reading of Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy in the Poetics. He rejects Aristotle's dependence on the mimetic tradition in search for a vision of art as the unveiling of the creative resources that lie within the human being. Yet he retains Aristotle's vivid depiction of art as a form of production that is at once cognitive, emotive and social. Art, for Castoriadis, affects a transformation on the level of imagination that opens us anew to the fundamental questions of human being and doing. Through his extensive knowledge of western forms of artistic production Castoriadis draws lucid connections between Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, Hegel, Greek sculpture, renaissance painting, modern literature and folk music to explore the work of art as a ‘window into chaos’, a creative production that gives form to what cannot be formed: the ground of creativity at the heart of the imagination.

I begin with a warm welcome for Evangelos Alexiou's Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century bc, a ‘revised and slightly abbreviated’ version of the modern Greek edition published in 2016 (ix). Though the volume's title points to a primary focus on the fourth century, sufficient attention is given to the late fifth and early third centuries to provide context. As ‘rhetoric’ in the title indicates, the book's scope is not limited to oratory: Chapter 1 outlines the development of a rhetorical culture; Chapter 2 introduces theoretical debates about rhetoric (Plato, Isocrates, Alcidamas); and Chapter 3 deals with rhetorical handbooks (Anaximenes, Aristotle, and the theoretical precepts embedded in Isocrates). Oratory comes to the fore in Chapter 4, which introduces the ‘canon’ of ten Attic orators: in keeping with the fourth-century focus, Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias receive no more than sporadic attention; conversely, extra-canonical fourth-century orators (Apollodorus, the author of Against Neaera, Hegesippus, and Demades) receive limited coverage. The remaining chapters deal with the seven major canonical orators: Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. Each chapter follows the same basic pattern: life, work, speeches, style, transmission of text and reception. Isocrates and Demosthenes have additional sections on research trends and on, respectively, Isocratean ideology and issues of authenticity in the Demosthenic corpus. In the case of Isaeus, there is a brief discussion of contract oratory; Lycurgus is introduced as ‘the relentless prosecutor’. Generous extracts from primary sources are provided, in Greek and in English translation; small-type sections signal a level of detail that some readers may wish to pass over. The footnotes provide extensive references to older as well as more recent scholarship. The thirty-page bibliography is organized by chapter (a helpful arrangement in a book of this kind, despite the resulting repetition); the footnotes supply some additional references. Bibliographical supplements to the original edition have been supplied ‘only in isolated cases’ (ix). In short, this volume is a thorough, well-conceived, and organized synthesis that will be recognized, without doubt, as a landmark contribution. There are, inevitably, potential points of contention. The volume's subtitle, ‘the elixir of democracy and individuality’, ties rhetoric more closely to democracy and to Athens than is warranted: the precarious balancing act which acknowledges that rhetoric ‘has never been divorced from human activity’ while insisting that ‘its vital political space was the democracy of city-states’ (ix–x) seems to me untenable. Alexiou acknowledges that ‘the gift of speaking well, natural eloquence, was considered a virtue already by Homer's era’ (ix), and that ‘the natural gift of speaking well was considered a virtue’ (1). But the repeated insistence on natural eloquence is perplexing. Phoenix, in the embassy scene in Iliad 9, makes it clear that his remit included the teaching of eloquence (Il. 9.442, διδασκέμεναι): Alexiou only quotes the following line, which he mistakenly assigns to Book 10. (The only other typo that I noticed was ‘Aritsotle’ [97]. I, too, have a tendency to mistype the Stagirite's name, though my own automatic transposition is, alas, embarrassingly scatological.) Alexiou provides examples of later Greek assessments of fourth-century orators, including (for example) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Hermogenes, and the author of On Sublimity (the reluctance to commit to the ‘pseudo’ prefix is my, not Alexiou's, reservation). He observes cryptically that ‘we are aware of Didymus’ commentary’ (245); but the extensive late ancient scholia, which contain material from Menander's Demosthenic commentaries, disappointingly evoke no sign of awareness.

Abstract Since Aristotle, scholars have regarded similes and metaphors as equivalent figures of speech sharing very similar comprehension, interpretation and usage patterns. By analysing the use of similes in real discourse, the aim of this study is to show that these two analogical figures reflect different cognitive processes, as well as different discursive functions, using as a framework cognitive models. To this end, this work presents, first, the main differentiating features of the two figures existing in the literature. And, second, it analyses 100 natural-occurring similes in English opinion discourse (news, interviews and commentary sections) in order to explain the conceptual-semantic and formal-syntactic factors which explain why similes and metaphors are not interchangeable in the discourse type under study; that is, why metaphors can usually be transformed into similes by adding like, whereas the opposite process seems to depend on specific conditions of structure, use and interpretation.

This paper is a comparative study between Ernst Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Beginning and the End, paralleled with the authors’ concepts of tragic vision; based on the development of the theory of tragedy from Aristotle to Hegel as well as the personal philosophy of life as tragedy of both authors. Based on the researcher knowledge, tragedy concept in the selected novels is rarely and insufficiently highlighted by few scholars and critics. Moreover, it is a comparison of novels from different cultures—Arabic literature and literature in English—in order to bridge the gap between them. The novels are stories where every day moral dilemmas often present profound paradoxes with which heroes and heroines must deal. Tragedy, in the same vein, is such a paradoxical story where we have to deal at any rate with our everyday moral dilemmas, where we are sometimes called upon to make difficult choices not between right and wrong, but between what we might define as two rights. Hegelian concept of tragedy focused on dissension and war of dichotomies between good and bad, as well as what is right and what is wrong. The tragic elements in the two novels make them Hegelian tragedies par excellence.

Introduction. The domestic and foreign research literature pays great attention to Alexandrian Neo-Platonists of the 4th–6th centuries such as Hypatia, Ammonius son of Hermias, John Philoponus, but at the same time Olympiodorus, David the Invincible, Elias, Horapollon are given insufficient attention. This is largely due to lack of any reliable information in modern science, which reveals the life and professional path of these eminent intellectuals, as well as the fact that the majority of the few preserved works of these authors have not yet been translated into Russian and English. The author of the article aims to study the “intellectual portrait” of Olympiodorus without reconstruction or refinement of his curriculum vitae based on source analysis. Methods and materials. The Intellectual History and the micro-historical approach were chosen as the main methodological basis of this article. The work is based on the system-wide analysis and historical-biographical approach. The source base of the article consists of the extant Olympiodorus works in the book series “Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca”. The historiography of the topic, for the most part, is represented by the works of Western European scientists: L. Westerink, S. Viano, N. Tarrant, etc., in particular. Russian Science almost did not study the personality of Olympiodorus: the only exceptions are small articles or just incorporation of information about him in the biographies of other well-known personalities. Analysis. The author argues for the thesis that Olympiodorus, contrary to the prevailing opinion in Russian science, was a smart executive and a good scientist who managed to preserve the traditions of the Neo-Platonic School of Alexandria by continuing to interpret classical works of Plato and Aristotle. Conclusion. Based on the analysis of Olympiodorus works, the author concludes that Olympiodorus of Alexandria has assumed the post of head of the Alexandrian Philosophical School of Neo-Platonism in the competition with John Philoponus, also he has been able to continue the activities in line with the tradition of Ammonius, son of Hermias while supporting political parity with the Church authorities and has furthermore become one of the first of Alexandrian intellectuals who used a classical scientific approach to interpret works of Plato and Aristotle without striving for their absolutization.

Eleftherios Venizelos loved books. He collected them, read them, andannotated them. With few exceptions, the most important being his translation of Thucydides into modern Greek, he did not write them. Books were an important part of his life, and he continued until the end to buy them. His collection of books is of historical and psychological interest. After his death in 1936, the books were transferred from his apartment in Paris and his wife’s house in Athens to the Venizelos family house in Halepa, near Chania in Crete. After many vicissitudes, especially during the German occupation of Crete, they came to rest in Chania Municipal Library, where they remain today. This paper explores Venizelos’ reading habits and preferences through this collection, showing that he used books both for professional information, for pleasure, and to improve his knowledge of foreign languages, in particular English. He was familiar with the great authors from Homer to Shakespeare; with philosophy from Aristotle to Bergson; with poetry, fiction, but especially with political thought, history and literature. It is good that the collection remains in the hands in the Municipal Library in the city where Venizelos lived and worked.

In examining the notion of entelechy – defined by Aristotle as the ‘final cause’ in drama – Zornitsa Dimitrova shows that depictions of ‘unsavoury’ content are only justified insofar as they are part of larger networks of aesthetic codification. The unsavoury cannot be an end in itself; neither can it function as an aesthetic category in its own right. Rather, it is a means related to pathos, or suffering, in Greek tragedy and bībhatsa, the ‘odious sentiment’ of the Sanskrit drama. Within such networks of codification, the purpose of the unsavoury is to carry forward the drama to an emotionally uplifting end: katharsis in the Poetics and ananda in Nāṭyaśāstra. This purposiveness – already visible in the entelechial nature of the dramatic plot – relates to a concept of mimesis implicitly understood as a term actional and interactionist in character. But only with the emergence of postdramatic theatre and the dissolution of plot does the unsavoury begin to function as an aesthetic category in its own right. Zornitsa Dimitrova is a doctoral graduate of Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and holds degrees in Indology, Philosophy, and English Literature from the Universities of Sofia and Freiburg. Her research interests include performance and ritual studies, dramatic theory, and mimesis.

William Shakespeare is known to the world as one of the greatest dramatist in the history of English Literature. It is unusual to attribute either Shakespeare or his works in the world of marketing, yet it is the fact that, even after 450 years, Shakespeare is still a recognizable and powerful brand in the world of today. Shakespearean festival was still being celebrated all over the world. Royal Society of Shakespeare still performs Shakespearean dramas every year, in more than twenty languages. It shows the brand image of Shakespeare, having in the world today. Aristotle, a Greek Philosopher, in his attempt to understand poetry and drama, expressed his view in his famous work Poetics that, both drama and poetry appeals to the emotions of a reader and spectators. The success of a drama, depends on the extent to which, a dramatist can able to capture the emotions of the audience. It is necessary for writers to have a unique brand personality to market their art. Every writer has their own set of target audience and follows various strategies to satisfy them. This paper deals with, how Shakespeare employed different strategies to create his own brand image, that helped him positioning his art among his target audience, thus ending up creating one of the greatest and powerful brand image in the History.

Worcester Cathedral MS F.10 forms a random collection of Latin, English, and macaronic sermons which were gathered and copied by a fairly large number of scribes in the middle of the fifteenth century. These sermons, most of them anonymous, are for a variety of occasions and audiences and have been entered in no particular liturgical order, even if, as the presence of several sets of quire numbers indicates, the individual quires were reordered several times in the medieval period. The collection contains a number of pieces that were evidently preached to a university audience, as is shown by their addressing “magistri” and by internal references to a university milieu. Their locale was presumably Oxford. Besides such general university sermons, the collection also includes two that are labeled “Introitus Sententiarum” and three other pieces that agree with these in form — the scholastic sermon structure — and content — praise of theology or holy Scripture and Peter Lombard. These five pieces are introitus, academic speeches or sermons which, according to university statutes, bachelors as well as masters (or doctors) of theology were required to deliver as they began their courses on the Bible or on Peter Lombard's Sentences. In addition, the manuscript contains an item that is very similar to the introitus sermons in that it follows the scholastic sermon structure and praises its subject. The latter, however, is not theology but philosophy, and the thema on which the piece is based is not a biblical text but a quotation from Aristotle. A sermon on a secular text itself is a rarity in medieval sermon literature, certainly from England; and appearing as it does in a sermon collection, the piece seems to be a rarissima avis stuck in the wrong flock.

Abstract 2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the planting of Plymouth Colony. Although the literature about Plymouth is voluminous, the discussion about law and religion has been inappropriately superficial to date. This article addresses the Pilgrims’ conception of law on matters of religion and the new insights into the Pilgrims’ story that can be ascertained by focusing on law. “Law” has been defined in many different ways by many different people throughout history. Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and other proponents of natural law argued that law is the exercise of reason to deduce binding rules of moral behavior from nature’s or God’s creation. The renowned English positivist John Austin, in contrast, maintained that law is the command of the sovereign. To Karl von Savigny and other proponents of the so-called historical school, law is the unconscious embodiment of the common will of the people. To the philosophical school, law is the expression of idealized ethical custom. The dominant contemporary view seems to be that law is the reflection of social, political, and economic interests. For the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for exercising social control so as to effectuate that commitment. The Pilgrims, of course, used law to regulate the more mundane aspects of life as well. Indeed, quantitatively speaking, more laws were enacted by the Pilgrims that addressed the day-to-day activities of life in Plymouth Colony than memorialized the Pilgrims’ commitment to eternal glory in the afterlife, but the latter was unquestionably more important, qualitatively speaking, than the former. In the oft-quoted words of a young William Bradford, “to keep a good conscience, and walk in such a way as God has prescribed in his Word, is a thing which I must prefer before you all, and above life itself.”

Drawing on Aristotle's concepts of energeia, dunamis, and ergon, this article attempts to articulate a typology of the different works described in Édouard Levé’s Œuvres (2002 (French); 2014 (English)). This is carried out in the context of post-literary literature, i.e. following an aesthetics driven by the dismantling of ‘qualities’, understood as ‘accidents’, of literature's essence (literature's definition). It studies how Levé’s work, and particularly his opus magnum Œuvres (Works), displays a series of short descriptive texts that intend to remain in their potentiality, while, at the same time, actualising this very potentiality (a potentiality ‘in act’, by an operation triggered in the reader's imagination). The question is therefore less the nature of fiction or ‘what makes literature literature’ than ‘how does literature actualise its negation’.

Abstract Two remarkably similar depictions of spiders survive in Middle English and French sources from the middle of the thirteenth century. Both of these vernacular versions of the Physiologus deviate so wildly from their sources when it comes to describing these creatures that their editors have declared these passages to be entirely original. And yet, the spiders who survive in the Middle English Physiologus and the long version of the Bestiaire attributed to Pierre de Beauvais perform such similar work that their originality may be called into question. The Physiologus’ and Bestiaire’s descriptions of spiders’ violent hunting methods were likely informed by the burgeoning of natural history writing that accompanied the recovery of Aristotle’s History of Animals, but for these texts’ allegorical interpretations I argue that we should look to Odo of Cheriton’s Latin fables from earlier in the thirteenth century. There is an explicit link between Odo’s fables and the Middle English Physiologus and implicit connections with the French Bestiaire. Together, these analogues demonstrate a small but coherent tradition of emphasizing the diabolical violence of spiders in the multilingual environment of thirteenth-century England and France.

Abstract Since the 80’s of the last century a trend has emerged in the English language literature on Chinese thought that suggests reading early Confucian texts as a form of virtue ethics. However, Alasdair MacIntyre has presented early Confucian and Aristotle’s thoughts as incommensurable thought systems and doubted that notions and statements of one incommensurable thought system can be adequately expressed and addressed within the framework of another. This article discusses MacIntyre’s position and two strategies - employed by the proponents of virtue ethics interpretation of early Confucian texts - of meeting MacIntyre’s challenge. The article attempts to show that none of the responses were successful, thus leaving the quest for the most adequate philosophical framework to interpret early Confucian ethical thought open.

In contemporary Greek history we do not encounter the historical and social phenomena of colonialism or postcolonialism with the exception of cases where nations conquered Greek islands; the Dodecanese Islands and the Eptanisa (Seven Islands) were conquered by the English and the Italians, and Cyprus was conquered by the British in the Middle Ages and in contemporary times. These historical situations have been transferred into certain historical Greek fictions in adult literature and in the literature of children and young adult. The focus of this essay is on investigating and depicting colonialist attitudes and post-colonialist situations in science fiction for Greek Children. Initially, we attempt a brief introduction to the literature of children and young adults and mainly science fiction for children in Greece, and following this we outline the aims of our research. Then we define the terms “colonialism,” “postcolonialism” and the new suggested terms “historical colonialism” and “literary colonialism” and refer to their relationship with science fiction. This is due to the fact that the setting of these narratives “is dictated” by a group of events that the writers themselves have either brought about or believe will take place in the future. Afterwards we point out the criteria that are used to distinguish between five types of colonization in the texts and we investigate at greater length the role that children and adolescents play in the texts, as they participate actively as liberators and saviors, as protectors for peace and the environment or as characters that take on the roles of adults. The children and young adults remain passive spectators of a peaceful colonization or do not participate in the action since the heroes in the story are insects. In this case, they are limited to the role of reader. Through the study of these texts, we detect similarities to similar situations, both in antiquity and at a later date, or during contemporary times where similar policies in certain countries have been regarded. Finally, we realize that after the inversion of colonialism and the liberation of the colonized planets, these planets are governed democratically, according to Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas on politics.

If Medea has attracted more readers to the Argonautica than any other character – thereby also determining which parts of the poem have become generally familiar – she has also provided critics of the poem with their major (sometimes their sole) topic for discussion. The main charge, particularly among critics writing in English, is that the various aspects of Medea – awakening love, deadly magic, fratricide – form neither a consistent nor a credible whole. One quotation, from an article which explicitly aims to summarise recent criticism, may stand as representative: ‘[Medea′s passion] produced an inconsistency [Apollonius] either ignored deliberately in the confidence of his Medea in love, or, just possibly, may not have noticed. The same emotionally immature and helpless Medea is the competent, unfrightened servant of Hecate, the cool instructress of Jason in taming the bulls, the calm soother of the dragon…the behaviour of Medea later in the [fourth] Book is, against all reason, quite untouched by what we would think of as a shattering experience, at the very least destructive of any real trust between her and Jason….It is as if Apollonius has thrown in [Apsyrtus′ murder] without care or realisation of its consequence for the consistency of her character’. Behind criticism of this kind lies both an understandable desire to relate the characters of ancient literature, if not to our own experience, at least to what instinct tells us is possible, and the whole tradition of criticism which descends from the Poetics of Aristotle. In recent years other approaches have gained currency, but in this paper I shall explore the presentation of Medea as a whole (Part I) and particularly of her flight from Colchis (Part II) within a traditional framework in an attempt to clarify what seem to me to be critical misunderstandings.

IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.

The word “prosthetic” has its origins as a mathematical term. According to scholar Brandon W. Hawk, Plato uses the words prosthesis and prostithenai in Phaedo to mean "addition, add to, to place", and Aristotle uses it in a similar, algebraic sense in the Metaphysics. Later, as the word appears in classical Latin, it is used as a grammatical and rhetorical term, in the sense of a letter or syllable that is added on to a word, usually the addition of a syllable to the beginning of a word, hence pro-thesis (Hawk). This is the sense of the word that was “inherited … by early modern humanists”, says Hawk, but when it appears in Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words: Or, a General Dictionary (1706), we can see how, with advances in technology, it changes from a grammatical/linguistic term into a medical term. What was once word is now made flesh:Prosthesis, a Grammatical Figure, when a Letter or Syllable is added to the beginning of a Word, as Gnatus for natus, tetuli for tuli, &c. In Surgery, Prosthesis is taken for that which fills up what is wanting, as is to beseen in fistulous and hollow Ulcers, filled up with Flesh by that Art: Also themaking of artificial Legs and Arms, when the natural ones are lost.Hawk also points to P. Dionis in Course Chirurg (a 1710 textbook detailing the art of chirurgy, or surgery, as it’s known now), who uses the word to denote one type of surgical operation; that is, prosthesis becomes not a word, but an act that “adds what is deficient”, an act that repairs loss, that “fills up what is wanting”, that fills up what is “hollow”, that “fills up with flesh”. R. Brookes, in his Introduction to Physic and Surgery (1754), is the first to define prosthesis as both an act and also as a separate, material object; it is “an operation by which some instrument is added to supply the Defect of a Part which is wanting, either naturally or accidentally”. It is not until the twentieth century (1900, to be exact), though, that the word begins to refer solely to a device or object that is added on to somehow “supply the defect”, or fill up what which is “wanting”. So etymologically we move from the writer creating a new literary device, to the scientist/doctor acting in order to fix something, then back to the device again, this time as tangible object that fills a gap where there is lack and loss (Hawk).This is how we most often see the word, and so we have the notion of prosthetic used in this medicalised sense, as an "instrument", in relation to people with missing or disfunctional limbs. Having a prosthetic arm or leg in an ableist society instantly marks one as "missing" something, or being "disabled". Wheelchairs and other prosthetic accoutrements also serve as a metonymic shorthand for disability (an example of this might be how, on reserved parking spots in North America, the image on the sign is that of a person in a wheelchair). In the case of deaf people, who are also thought of as "disabled", but whose supposed disability is invisible, hearing aids and cochlear implants (CIs) serve as this kind of visible marker.* Like artificial limbs and wheelchairs, these "instruments" (they are actually called “hearing instruments” by audiologists) are sometimes added on to the purportedly “lacking” body. They are objects that “restore function to” the disabled deaf ear. As such, these devices, like wheelchairs and bionic arms, also serve as a shorthand in American culture, especially in film and visual media, where this kind of obvious, material symbolism is very helpful in efficiently driving narrative along. David L. Mitchell and Sharon T. Snyder call this kind of disability shorthand "narrative prosthesis". In their 2001 book of the same name, they demonstrate that disability and the markers of disability, far from being neglected or omitted (as has been claimed by critics like Sarah Ruiz-Grossman), actually appear in literature and film to the point where they are astonishingly pervasive. Unlike other identities who are vastly underrepresented, Mitchell and Snyder note, images of disability are almost constantly circulated in print and visual media (this is clearly demonstrated in older film studies such as John Schuchman's Hollywood Speaks and Martin Norden's Cinema of Isolation, as well). The reason that this happens, Mitchell and Snyder say, is because almost all narrative is structured around the idea of a flaw in the natural order, the resolution of that flaw, and the restoration of order. This flaw, they show, is more often than not represented by a disabled character or symbol. Disability, then, is a "crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality and analytical insight" (49). And, in the end, all narrative is thus dependent upon some type of disability used as a prosthetic, which serves not only to “fill in” lack, but also to restore and reinforce normalcy. They also state that concepts of, and characters with, disability are therefore used in literature and film primarily as “opportunist metaphorical device(s)” (205). Hearing aids and CIs are great examples of "opportunist" devices used on television and in movies, mostly as props or “add-ons” in visual narratives. This "adding on" is done, more often than not, to the detriment of providing a well rounded narrative about the lived experience of deaf people who use such devices on a daily basis. There are countless examples of this in American television shows and films (in an upward trend since 2000), including many police and crime dramas where a cochlear implant device-as-clue stands in for the dead victim’s identity (Kincheloe "Do Androids"). We see it in movies, most notably in 2018’s A Quiet Place, in which a CI is weaponized and used to defeat the alien monster/Other (as opposed to the deaf heroine doing it by herself) (Kincheloe "Tired Tropes"). In 2019's Toy Story 4, there is a non-signing child who we know is deaf because they wear a CI. In the 2019 animated Netflix series, Undone, the main character wears a CI, and it serves as one of several markers (for her and the viewer) of her possible psychological breakdown.It seems fairly obvious that literal prostheses such as hearing aids and CI devices are used as a form of media shorthand to connote hearing ideas of “deafness”. It also might seem obvious that, as props that reinforce mainstream, ableist narratives, they are there to tell us that, in the end, despite the aesthetic nervousness that disability produces, "things will be okay". It's "fixable". These are prosthetics that are easily identified and easily discussed, debated, and questioned.What is perhaps not so obvious, however, is that American Sign Language (ASL), is also used in media as a narrative prosthetic. Lennard Davis' discussion of Erving Goffman’s idea of “stigma” in Enforcing Normalcy supports the notion that sign language, like hearing aids, is a marker. When seen by the hearing, non-signing observer, sign language "stigmatizes" the signing deaf person (48). In this sense, ASL is, like a hearing aid, a tangible "sign" of deaf identity. I would then argue that ASL is, like hearing aids and CIs, used as a "narrative prosthesis" signifying deafness and disability; its insertion allows ableist narratives to be satisfyingly resolved. Even though ASL is not a static physical device, but a living language and an integral part of deaf lived experience, it is casually employed almost everywhere in media today as a cheap prop, and as such, serves narrative purposes that are not in the best interest of realistic deaf representation. Consider this example: On 13 April 2012, Sir Paul McCartney arranged for a special event at his daughter Stella McCartney’s ivy-covered store in West Hollywood. Stars and friends like Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, Quincy Jones, and Reese Witherspoon sipped cucumber margaritas and nibbled on a spread of vegetarian Mexican appetizers. Afterwards, McCartney took them all to a tent set up on the patio out back, where he proudly introduced a new video, directed by himself. This was the world premiere of the video for "My Valentine", a song from his latest (some might say oddly titled) album, Kisses from the Bottom, a song he had originally written for and sung to new wife Nancy Shevell, at their 2011 wedding.The video is very simply shot in black and white, against a plain grey backdrop. As it begins, the camera fades in on actor Natalie Portman, who is seated, wearing a black dress. She stares at the viewer intently, but with no expression. As McCartney’s voiced-over vocal begins, “What if it rained/We didn’t care…”, she suddenly starts to mouth the words, and using sign language. The lens backs up to a medium shot of her, then closes back in on a tight close up of just her hands signing “my valentine” on her chest. There is then a quick cut to actor Johnny Depp, who is sitting in a similar position, in front of a grey backdrop, staring directly at the camera, also with no expression. There is a fade back to Portman’s face, then to her body, a close up of her signing the word “appear”, and then a cut back to Depp. Now he starts signing. Unlike Portman, he does not mouth the words, but stares ahead, with no facial movement. There is then a series of jump cuts, back and forth, between shots of the two actors’ faces, eyes, mouths, hands. For the solo bridge, there is a closeup on Depp’s hands playing guitar – a cut to Portman’s face, looking down – then to her face with eyes closed as she listens. here is some more signing, we see Depp’s impassive face staring at us again, and then, at the end, the video fades out on Portman’s still figure, still gazing at us as well.McCartney told reporters that Stella had been the one to come up with the idea for using sign language in the video. According to the ASL sign language coach on the shoot, Bill Pugin, the choice to include it wasn’t that far-fetched: “Paul always has an interpreter on a riser with a spot for his concerts and Stella loves sign language, apparently” ("The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp"). Perhaps she made the suggestion because the second stanza contains the words “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…” Regardless, McCartney advised her father to “ring Natalie up and just ask her if she will sign to your song”. Later realizing he wanted another person signing in the video, Paul McCartney asked Johnny Depp to join in, which he did. When asked why he chose those two actors, McCartney said, “Well, they’re just nice people, some friends from way back and they were just very kind to do it”. A week later, they all got together with cinematographer Wally Pfister, who filmed Inception and The Dark Knight, behind the camera. According to the official press release about the video, posted on McCartney’s website, the two actors then "translate[d] the lyrics of the song into sign language – each giving distinctly different performances, making ... compelling viewing" ("Paul McCartney Directs His Own"). The response to the video was quite positive; it immediately went viral on YouTube (the original posting of it got over 15 million views). The album made it to number five on the Billboard charts, with the single reaching number twenty. The album won a 2013 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal album, and the video Best Music Film (“Live Kisses”). McCartney chose to sing that particular song from the album on the award show itself, and four years later, he featured both the song and video as part of his 31 city tour, the 2017 One on One concert, in which he made four million dollars a city. All told the video has served McCartney quite well.But…For whom the sign language? And why? The video is not meant for deaf eyes. When viewed through a deaf lens, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “compelling”; it isn’t even comprehensible. It is so bad, in fact, that the video, though signed, is also captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. To the untrained, “hearing” eye, the signing seems to be providing a “deaf translation” of what is being sung. But it is in fact a pantomime. The actors are quite literally “going through the motions”. One egregious example of this is how, at the end of the video, when Depp thinks he’s signing “valentine”. it looks like he's saying “fuck-heart” (several media sources politely reported that he’d signed “enemy”). Whatever he did, it’s not a sign. In response to criticism of his signing, Depp said nonchalantly, “Apparently, instead of ‘love' I might have said, ‘murder'” ("Johnny Depp Says"). That wasn’t the only point of confusion, though: the way Portman signs “then she appears” was misunderstood by some viewers to be the sign for “tampon”. She actually signed it correctly, but media sources from MTV.com, to the Washington Post, “signsplained” that she had just gotten a bit confused between ASL and BSL signs (even though the BSL for “appears” bears no resemblance to what she did, and the ASL for tampon, while using the same classifier, is also signed quite differently). Part of the problem, according to sign coach Pugin, was that he and Depp “had about fifteen minutes to work on the song. I signed the song for hours sitting on an apple box under the camera for Johnny to be able to peripherally see me for each take. I was his “human cue card”. Johnny’s signing turned out to be more theatrical and ‘abbreviated’ because of the time issue” ("The Guy Who Taught").Portman, perhaps taking more time to rehearse, does a better job, but “theatrical and abbreviated” indeed; the signing was just not good, despite Pugin's coaching. But to hearing eyes, it looks fine; it looks beautiful, it looks poignant and somehow mysterious. It looks the way sign language is “supposed” to look.Remember, the McCartney website claimed that the actors were “translating” the lyrics. Technically speaking, “translation” would mean that the sense of the words to the song were being rendered, fluently, from one language (English) into another (SL), for an audience receptive to the second language. In order to “translate”, the translator needs to be fluent in both of the languages involved. To be clear, what Depp and Portman were doing was not translation. They are hearing people, not fluent in sign language, acting like signers (something that happens with dismaying regularity in the entertainment industry). Depp, to his credit, knew he wasn’t “translating”, in fact, he said "I was only copying what the guy showed me”. “But”, he says, "it was a gas – sign language is apparently very interpretive. It's all kind of different" (italics mine) ("Johnny Depp Passes the Buck"). Other than maybe being an embellishment on that one line, “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…”, the sentiments of McCartney’s song have absolutely nothing to do with ASL or deaf people. And he didn’t purposefully place sign language in his video as a way to get his lyrics across to a deaf audience. He’s a musician; it is fairly certain that the thought of appealing to a deaf audience never entered his or his daughter’s mind. It is much more likely that he made the decision to use sign language because of its cool factor; its emo “novelty”. In other words, McCartney used sign language as a prop – as a way to make his song “different”, more “touching”, more emotionally appealing. Sign adds a je ne sais quoi, a little “something”, to the song. The video is a hearing person’s fantasy of what a signing person looks like, what sign language is, and what it does. McCartney used that fantasy, and the sentimentality that it evokes, to sell the song. And it worked. This attitude toward sign language, demonstrated by the careless editing of the video, Depp’s flippant remarks, and the overall attitude that if it’s wrong it’s no big deal, is one that is pervasive throughout the entertainment and advertising industries and indeed throughout American culture in the U.S. That is, there is this notion that sign language is “a gas”. It’s just a “different” thing. Not only is it “different”, but it is also a “thing”, a prop, a little exotic spice you throw into the pot. It is, in other words, a "narrative prosthesis", an "add-on". Once you see this, it becomes glaringly apparent that ASL is not viewed in mainstream American culture as the language of a group of people, but instead is widely used and commodified as a product. The most obvious form of commodification is in the thousands of ASL products, from Precious Moment figurines, to Baby Signing videos, to the ubiquitous “I LOVE YOU” sign seen on everything from coffee mugs to tee shirts, to Nike posters with “Just Do It” in fingerspelling. But the area in which the language is most often commodified (and perhaps most insidiously so) is in the entertainment industry, in visual media, where it is used by writers, directors and actors, not to present an accurate portrait of lived deaf experience and language, but to do what Paul McCartney did, that is, to insert it just to create a “different”, unique, mysterious, exotic, heartwarming spectacle. Far too often, this commodification of the language results in weirdly distorted representations of what deaf people and their language actually are. You can see this everywhere: ASL is a prominent narrative add-on in blockbuster films like the aforementioned A Quiet Place; it is used in the Oscar winning The Shape of Water, and in Wonderstruck, and Baby Driver as well; it is used in the indie horror film Hush; it is used in a lot of films with apes (the Planet of the Apes series and Rampage are two examples); it is displayed on television, mostly in police dramas, in various CSI programs, and in series like The Walking Dead and Castle Rock; it is used in commercials to hawk everything from Pepsi to hotel chains to jewelry to Hormel lunchmeat to fast food (Burger King, Chik Fil A); it is used and commented on in interpreted concerts and music videos and football halftime shows; it is used (often misused) in PSAs for hurricanes and police stops; it is used in social media, from vlogs to cochlear implant activation videos. You can find ASL seemingly everywhere; it is being inserted more and more into the cultural mainstream, but is not appearing as a language. It is used, nine times out of ten, as a decorative ornament, a narrative prop. When Davis discusses the hearing perception of ASL as a marker or visible stigma, he points out that the usual hearing response to observing such stigma is a combination of a Freudian attraction/repulsion (the dominant response being negative). Many times this repulsion results from the appeal to pathos, as in the commercials that show the poor isolated deaf person with the nice hearing person who is signing to them so that they can now be part of the world. The hearing viewer might think to themselves "oh, thank God I'm not deaf!"Davis notes that, in the end, it is not the signer who is the disabled one in this scenario (aside from the fact that many times a signing person is not in fact deaf). The hearing, non signing observer is actually the one “disabled” by their own reaction to the signing “other”. Not only that, but the rhetorical situation itself becomes “disabled”: there is discomfort – wariness of language – laughter – compulsive nervous talking – awkwardness – a desire to get rid of the object. This is a learned response. People habituated, Davis says, do not respond this way (12-13). While people might think that the hearing audience is becoming more and more habituated because ASL is everywhere, the problem is that people are being incorrectly habituated. More often than not, sign language, when enfolded into narratives about hearing people in hearing situations, is put into service as a prop that can mitigate such awkward moments of possible tension and conflict; it is a prosthetic that "fills the gap", allowing an interaction between hearing and deaf people that almost always allows for a positive, "happy" resolution, a return to "normalcy", the very purpose of the "narrative prosthetic" as posited by Mitchell and Snyder. Once we see how ASL is being employed in media mostly as a narrative prosthesis, we can, as Mitchell and Snyder suggest we do (what I hope this essay begins to do), and that is, to begin to “undo the quick repair of disability in mainstream representations and beliefs; to try to make the prosthesis show; to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion” (8). In other words, if we can scrutinize the shorthand, and dig deeper, seeing the prosthetic for what it is, all of this seemingly exploitative commodification of ASL will be a good thing. Maybe, in “habituating” people correctly, in widening both hearing people’s exposure to ASL and their understanding of its actual role in deaf lived experience, signing will become less of a prosthetic, an object of fetishistic fascination. Maybe hearing people, as they become used to seeing signing people in real signing situations, will be less likely to walk up to deaf people they don’t know and say things like: “Oh, your language is SO beautiful”, or say, “I know sign!” (then fingerspelling the alphabet with agonising slowness and inaccuracy while the deaf person nods politely). However, if the use of ASL as a prosthetic in popular culture and visual media continues to go on unexamined and unquestioned, it will just continue to trivialise a living, breathing language. This trivialisation can in turn continue to reduce the lived experiences of deaf people to a sort of caricature, further reinforcing the negative representations of deaf people in America that are already in place, stereotypes that we have been trying to escape for over 200 years. Note* The word "deaf" is used in this article to denote the entire range of individuals with various hearing losses and language preferences, including Deaf persons and hard of hearing persons, etc. For more on these distinctions please refer to the website entry on this published by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD).ReferencesDavis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy. New York: Verso, 1995."The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman Sign Language." Intimate Excellent: The Fountain Theater Blog. 18 Mar. 2012. <https://intimateexcellent.com/2012/04/18/the-guy-who-taught-johnny-depp-and-natalie-portman-sign-language-in-mccartney-video/>.Fitzgerald, Roisin. 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